Your daily shower is a perfect opportunity to practice mindfulness. Alone, quiet and away from the normal distractions of your life — even if only for a brief period — it can be a time to observe your habitual patterns of thinking. If you want to develop or deepen a meditation practice, the shower [...]
Expect nothing. It cannot be stressed too strongly or expressed too often. Expect nothing. If you can simply contemplate these two words and practice them day and night, there’s no need to say or do more. Expect nothing. Morning on the Hudson Something as simple and innocuous as waiting for a promised [...]
Indeed, we all have suffered frustration, and sometimes we let it carry us into a state of anxiety and depression. From experience, we know that that state of mind never relieves the frustration; it only aggravates it. Let’s take a moment to look at the most common source of frustration and then how we might [...]
FAILURE Failure is merely a matter of opinion, time, and attitude. Opinion: Failure is bad. Whenever something happens—especially if it doesn’t conform to what society and we think is the optimal scenario—we judge it as bad and look for someone to blame. The one who usually gets the brunt of it in the [...]
There is probably nothing that challenges us more than our relationships, since every aspect, every nuance of our life involves a relationship of some sort. Every waking and sleeping moment, we are engaged in a relationship with something or someone—with our spouse, boss, children, friends; with coworkers, store clerks, strangers; with our thoughts, dreams, [...]
The idea, or rather the reality, of an ego is paradoxical. On the one hand, it gives us a healthy supply of self-esteem, which in turn provides us with the necessary energy to face the world and its inherent storms. On the other hand, it can drive us so deep into self-consciousness that all we [...]
Just getting through a typical day without ending up exhausted or embittered can sometimes be so daunting that when faced with some of the larger challenges of life we seem to have no energy resources left for the fight. So we let the major events take control and toss us to and fro, all the [...]
