“Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure than he is inflated by success.“ – Mathieu Ricard, “A Way of Being” (Tricycle, Summer 2006)
Tag Archives: emotions
The Science of Meditation
The Shambhala Mountain Center is convening top researchers and meditation teachers this week (Oct. 19-23) for a free, online summit on The Science of Meditation. Follow the link to learn more and register. Remember, it’s online and free!
Update: I just registered (takes 2 sec) and learned that some (maybe all?) of the materials will be available after the ‘live’ sessions so you don’t have to worry about being in the right time zone, or work-summit conflicts.
The Practice of Mindfulness
I think it was a spring day in San Francisco. My wife was attending a chemistry workshop downtown and I was out for a stroll. I dropped down into the basement of City Lights Books (why had I waited so long?), and a small book, one that wouldn’t weigh me down, called out, “Take me home. I have something to tell you.” The book was The Miracle of Mindfulness by author, Zen master, peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. The book was small, but the heart that wrote it was as big as the universe. This is where my practice began.
Thich Nhat Hanh turns 90 this month and Lion’s Roar has republished three of his essays. Enjoy them. May they help you in your life.
Opening Creativity’s Door
My 5th grade teacher would periodically say, “Alan, you aren’t creative.” Before you jump to any conclusions, let me add that this talented, committed woman was the most important teacher I had in elementary school and she devoted herself to tapping all of the potential – intellectual, musical, artistic – that my classmates and I had locked up inside ourselves. Still, it was more than a little surprising to hear about my apparent lack of creativity.
Her comment made creativity seem very mysterious to me. Why was I missing out on this basic human capability? Continue reading
Emotional knowledge
What am I feeling right now? Why am I feeling that way? What is this in response to? Our lives are filled with emotions, weak and strong, and yet we often fail to detect them because we are caught up in a physical sensation (“Why am I crying?”) or a mental story (“What an awful thing to say to me. Well, here’s an email that will pin his ears back.”)
Psychologists have categorized emotional states, identifying basic emotions, what triggers them, the forms they take as they change in intensity, and the combinations of emotions that often arise together. Psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman, who is known for his work on the connection between emotional states and facial expressions, and who also served as a technical adviser for the Pixar movie, Inside Out, has created a visually intriguing Atlas of Emotions that is worth a look. Let me know what you think about it.
Connecting with your inner refuge
What happens when we sit quietly in meditation? Try to answer this before you read on. Realize that your answers might be coming from several points of view: experience, expectation, or hope. Also consider that, while there may be no single right answer that applies to every person, let alone to every meditation session, there is nothing wrong if some aspects of your meditation experience begin to seem familiar over time.
Practicing Patience
In honor of Father’s Day I am reposting a portion of Norman Fischer‘s excellent advice piece “Life is Tough: Six Ways to Deal With It” (Lion’s Roar, 15 June 2016)
Turn All Mishaps Into the Path
‘Turn all mishaps into the path,’ sounds at first blush completely impossible. How would you do that? …
We do that by practicing patience, my all-time favorite spiritual quality. Patience is the capacity to welcome difficulty when it comes, with a spirit of strength, endurance, forbearance, and dignity rather than fear, anxiety, and avoidance. None of us likes to be oppressed or defeated, yet if we can endure oppression and defeat with strength, without whining, we are ennobled by it. Patience makes this possible.
Continue reading
Bend to my will
I can never help laughing, shaking my head in disbelief, at Danae (Non Sequitur, 16 May 2016). Her rage at the unbending world is so pure. Her commitment to 24/7 warfare is so unquenchable. What a child.
Of course, I have more than a little Danae in me – that’s what makes her so familiar and so funny. I want the world to go my way. And, like Danae, rather than accept things as they are, I’ll retreat into a fantasy land where I can try to hide from the world’s problems.
It isn’t unusual for meditators to seek out silence as a hiding place. How many times have I evaluated a meditation session and said, ‘it didn’t work for me’? But how could it ever be broken? Does reality ever fail to happen? Like it or not, this is my life.
Facing Academic Fears
Students may believe that they have a personal monopoly when it comes to fear of academic failure, but there is plenty of fear to be found in almost any classroom. Not only is fear of failure widespread among students, it is also found in faculty.
A team of Norwegian researchers has just published an exploratory study that asks whether Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) can help students deal better with their fear of academic failure: Hjeltnes, A. et al., “Facing the fear of failure: An explorative qualitative study of client experiences in a mindfulness-based stress reduction program for university students with academic evaluation anxiety”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, DOI 10.3402/qhw.v10.27990.
Is Mindfulness Useful? Dec ’15 Updates
The American Mindfulness Research Association (AMRA) publishes a monthly newsletter called the Mindfulness Research Monthly that lists recent research publications and studies. Quite a few of these research investigations bear on issues that might be interesting to members of the Reed community so I will start publishing short lists of my top picks from the newsletter.
What follows is a list of articles mentioned in the December ’15 issue that describe how mindfulness interventions affect academic performance, working memory, emotional resilience, and more. (Note: only a few articles are ever available through our library’s subscriptions so be prepared to file interlibrary loan requests.)
Continue reading