mindfulness
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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
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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
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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
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It’s so easy to over-complicate things. Esoecially for me! I love digging into a topic, learning about it, and coming up with new ideas and theories around it. Mindfulness and meditation are perfect examples. If you want to read about meditation and mindfulness, I could easily give you a list of my top 100 books Read more
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“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
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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
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Last week, I wrote about 3 reasons why I hate teaching meditation. This week, I want to share 3 reasons why I love teaching meditation. The first reason why I love teaching meditation is that there’s a method out there for everyone. For instance, my favourite app, called “Insight Timer” contains a library of over Read more
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I’ve taught meditation to many hundreds of people over 35 years, so why do I hate it? In this blog, I’ll explore this question, but first I want to clarify a few things: Given these 3 points, you would think that I would love teaching meditation, right? Not necessarily. Each of those points is true Read more
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I once read a simple line that said, “The mind is wild. Mindfulness tames it.” It brought home for me the notion that the mind has tremendous power, but we often never fully harness that power. That word “harness”, btw, suggests the difference between a wild horse or ox and one which is used to Read more
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One of the essential skills of paying attention is meta-awareness: the ability to notice where your attention tends to go. It can be quite surprising to see where your attention goes when you stop trying to control it in any way. I like to use the metaphor of letting a puppy off the leash and Read more
Leaders and Entrepreneurs Pay Attention 