We read and discussed an article by Charlotte Lieberman on how self-criticism can take a toll on our minds and bodies. She writes:
Basically, beating yourself up for finishing only three of the five items on your to-do list is going to make you less likely to finish those last two items — and...
After our regular weekly meditation, we watched a discussion between Fleet Maul and Jack Kornfield on what it means to be awake and present in our relationships:
There you are in a conflict, you know, you're having a disagreement, a difficulty. You take a breath, you pause, and then you ask your...
After our regular weekly meditation, we watched a discussion between Fleet Maul and Jack Kornfield on what it means to be awake and present in our relationships:
There you are in a conflict, you know, you're having a disagreement, a difficulty. You take a breath, you pause, and then you ask your...
After sitting and walking meditation, we watched a video featuring Lama Tsultrim Allione. In it, she explores a very different way to work with difficult emotions, called Feeding Your Demons:
Anything that drains our energy and blocks us from being completely awake is a demon. The approach of...
We read part of an article by Norm Fischer, titled Life is Tough - Here are Six Ways to Deal With It. It examines ways we can train our mind to be more skillful with the difficulties in our lives:
While trying to avoid difficulty may be natural and understandable, it actually doesn’t work. We...
We mixed up our usual schedule up a bit this week, starting with a 15 minute meditation and then reading a short article on one of the four foundations of mindfulness: mindfulness of body. Here is part of what Shambhala founder Chogyam Trungpa wrote:
Mindfulness plays a very important role in th...
We watched a TED talk by Daniel Kahneman after meditation. The subject was the difference in the way we experience happiness, and the way we remember it. Here's a bit from that talk:
We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think...
This week, we used the VOICE (Voice Of Innate Clarity Exercise) technique to explore what it means to hold on and to let go. What are we holding on to? Why? What does it mean to let go?
What if the way we think about our emotions, what we normally believe about them, isn't true? Psychology researcher Lisa Feldman Barret has spent decades looking at the nature of human emotion, and has discovered a very different process at work:
And so the lesson here is that emotions which see...
This week we watched part of a video featuring Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the author of The Lost Art of Good Conversation, and head of the Shambhala organization. In this video, the Sakyong explores how conversations shape us and those we meet. He observes:
When I was driving here to Denver...th...