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Mindfulness practices that really work

wellness

  • Mindfulness “Quickies” for the Super Busy: #2

    No time to meditate? No problem! Look, I’ll be honest – if you want to increase your capacities of concentration and mindfulness, you’ll have to, at some point, sit down and do some serious practice. Just as there’s no substitute for doing physical exercise for getting your body in shape, so there’s no substitute for Read more

  • Mindfulness “Quickies” for the super busy – #1

    For the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of my favourite mindfulness practices that can be done in 2 minutes or less. I recognize that many people are super busy – they can’t find even 10 minutes to do a seated meditation practice, no matter how hard they try. I’m not suggesting that Read more

  • Building a “psycho-scope”

    Who knew? I just looked up the word psychoscope (which my spell-checker insists is not a word!), and found that Webster’s defines it as “a means of observing mental processes”, and the Oxford writes “OED’s earliest evidence for psychoscope is from 1885, in the writing of Frederic W. H. Myers, psychical researcher and essayist”. Well, first of Read more

  • 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 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

  • 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