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Mindfulness practices that really work

mental-health

  • Who says you can’t be present all the time?

    Over the years I’ve frequently come across various assertions to the effect that it’s impossible to be present all the time. The argument is that this would require a huge amount of brain power and the brain is designed to conserve energy. Far better, contend a lot of writers, to install habits that operate on 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 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

  • Three Steps Against Rumination

    It’s 2 o’clock in the morning. You wake up with a bit of a start. Maybe you had a dream in which you were highly emotional (angry or sad or afraid). No problem – it was just a dream. You’ll go back to sleep, right? Maybe not. Maybe you’ll spend the next 3 hours turning 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

  • Embrace the suck!

    I first heard the expression “Embrace the suck!” from an interview with David Goggins. It’s a phrase used a lot in military contexts but also in modern self-help contexts like Stoicism. It’s meaning is quite simple – when you find yourself in a situation that’s unpleasant or uncomfortable, don’t complain about it (which doesn’t change 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

  • A wandering Mind – Good or Bad?

    In 2010, an interesting headline appeared in hundreds of sources, including Scientific American and the National Institutes of Health: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. In 2018, very different headlines, including one on the same National Institutes of Health website, read: “Mind Wandering Boosts Creativity”. What gives? Is mind wandering good or bad? A Read more