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Mindfulness practices that really work

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  • Simplifying mindfulness

    I have an issue with most of the widely accepted definitions of mindfulness. They never resonated with me. They kind of don’t make total sense. Here’s what Wikipedia provides as a definition: “Mindfulness is the cognitive skill, usually developed through meditation, of sustaining meta-attentive awareness towards the contents of one’s own mind in the present moment.” Seriously?! Good luck selling Read more

  • My New Year’s Intention

    It’s not quite the same thing as a New Year’s resolution, but a New Year’s intention is more open,  more flexible,  more spacious than the word resolution has room for. I hope you’ll join me in trading your resolutions for intentions. An intention leaves more room for false starts, wrong turns, and screwups. An intention Read more

  • My pet peeve: people who say there’s no wrong way to meditate

    Maybe you’ve heard or read this: someone is trying to explain meditation, and at some point they insert the comment “there’s really no wrong way to meditate”. And immediately, I feel some anger arising in my gut. For me, that’s like saying “there’s really no wrong way to do bodybuilding” or “there’s really no wrong Read more

  • Practicing Mindfulness is Good Mental Hygiene

    When I started practicing mindfulness 50 years ago, I did so for a very different reason than the one I now give to folks who ask me why they might want to take up the practice. My first inspiration for starting a meditation practice came from a little book by Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung Read more

  • Good Times, Bad Times

    I don’t know anyone whose life has been one continuous high or one continuous low. Do you? Our brains are designed to compare and contrast. Light or dark. Friend or foe. Hot or cold. Big or small. These measures only makes sense in a comparative way. I know “heavy” by contrasting it with “light”. If Read more

  • Letting Come & Letting Go – Part 2

    Last week, I wrote about letting come and how that can sometimes be quite challenging for folks to do. This week, I’ll dive into letting go. When folks use the expression “let it go” in normal conversation, it generally means something like “this isn’t worth obsessing about so try not to think about any more Read more

  • Letting Come, Letting Go (part 1)

    I practice meditation in many different ways, most of which I completely made up. That’s right – I make up practices that I think will give my attention “muscles” a good workout, then I try those out for a while and see what happens. I tweak the practices, change things up a bit, until doing Read more

  • “You are here”

    Last week, I wrote about how, for some of us, waking up hurts. Waking up sometimes means seeing what a mess you’ve made of things (whatever your particular flavour of that is). This week, I want to write about the good side of waking up: Choices. Now, I won’t get into the philosophical debate about Read more

  • Waking up Hurts!

    Waking up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s often likened to waking up from a dream and realizing that you weren’t really flying over Niagara Falls but in fact you’ve been lying in bed the whole time. The inference there is that it’s better to be awake than asleep, because people who are Read more

  • How to not struggle with Thoughts

    “Thought is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.” I first heard that quote about 50 years ago, when I first started exploring meditation. (Yes, I was a pretty weird 15 year old, something my siblings reminded me of constantly!) I liked the quote’s pithiness and the insight it contained. After all, I had already Read more