Making the most of summer break: Taking stock, enjoying and resetting resilience

Happy summer. Enjoy. Let go wherever you are able of excessive thinking and ongoing planning and any striving. Come back to whatever feels best for your family. Relax, recharge, and reset your priorities. As parents, letting go does not have to mean ignoring reality. We can use these times of relative relaxation to reconnect with our own common-sense wisdom. Under…

A Matter of Time

What were you doing 11 years ago? Do you remember? I remember very well what I was doing in spring of 2008—looking for a new job. I was looking for a new job because it had become clear to me then that the job I had would be gone by the end of the year. As it turned out, many…

The Great Silence Amid the Roar: A Meditation Coming Out of Holy Week 2019

On Being, Becoming Like the rings on a tree, once again, Holy Week came upon us, marking another cycle of remembrance and entering into the Life that culminated in the mysterious events that shook the world 2000 years ago in a small, out-of-way province of the Roman empire. The reverberations continue to be felt down to and, doubtless, way beyond…

Our Pristine Mind: Cruising Altitude

Excerpted From Our Pristine Mind: A Practical Guide to Unconditional Happiness by Orgyen Chowang © 2016 by Orgyen Chowang. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. Cruising Altitude When we transcend mental events by practicing Pristine Mind meditation, it is like reaching cruising altitude in an airplane. There is no turbulence whatsoever in our mind. We are free…

Is Mindfulness Inherently Contextualizing?

Vishvapani Blomfield has taught meditation, in secular and Buddhist contexts, for over eighteen years. He also writes and broadcasts on mindfulness, meditation and Buddhism, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’. Dan Nixon: Vishvapani, we’re here to talk about the wide range of contexts that we find ourselves in as human beings – and…

Lead by Example: Cultivating Wellness in the Workplace

A workplace flourishes when its leaders prioritize the health and well-being of their most valuable asset: people. Organizations are powered by the teams behind them: the employees who keep the operation moving, growing and evolving. An investment in their health and well-being is an investment in the health of the business. Many organizations are taking strides toward ensuring their teams…

The Mythic Imagination and Contemplative Practice

When I was a small child, I inhabited, as most children do, a vivid imaginal world. But the products of my imagination weren’t created from inside my head: my imagination took flight as a result of my interactions with the physical and sensory world around me. The pitchfork-shaped, steam-spewing industrial structures which I could see across the river from where…

How Children Thrive: Prioritizing What Matters Most

Excerpted from HOW CHILDREN THRIVE: The Practical Science of Raising Independent, Resilient, and Happy Kids, by Mark Bertin, MD. Sounds True, May 2018. Reprinted with permission. The day ends and you pull into your driveway. You open the mailbox and, groaning, take out a two-inch pile of mail, 90 percent junk, but needing to be sorted. Riffling through it as…