My latest piece is a book review of Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. I met the author Dr. Dan Siegel a few weeks back and have been putting his “inside-out” tips for helping teens thrive into practice in our home. Dr. Siegel is an expert in the correlation between mindfulness practices […]
Fourteen years ago, just weeks after becoming a new mother, I wandered into a “Meditation 101” class at a Buddhist center in New York City. I was a wreck. My body was buzzing from sleep deprivation, and my mind was headed straight into an existential crisis over what was becoming of my life as I […]
We all have some form of magical thinking when it comes to dying. It’s how we attempt to gain control over our fears. My particular brand of magical thinking is that if you eat well, exercise and meditate, you will most likely have a long and healthy life. I know this is not entirely rational…
What I did not write about was the all-too-real end-of-life journey of my earliest childhood friend Marisa, who was courageously facing metastatic cancer while I went about my hypothetical journey.
Unbelievably, I’ve arrived at the end of the Year to Live project. I’ve learned from others that the “dissolution of the body” meditation which symbolically closes the class is a powerful one. Frankly, I’m scared of it. One person I know who experienced it said that this exercise is so visceral that he actually lost control of some, ah, bodily function when he did it.
Daniel Goleman says that we don’t have to be stuck running the same neural connections for the rest of our lives just because that’s what we’ve always done. It turns out that we can become better people by reprogramming ourselves — even when time crunch and life pressures have conditioned us to sometimes turn a blind eye.
There should be a rule against writing about meditation retreats immediately after they’re over. In those first hours and days post-retreat, it’s as if I’m experiencing the world through a fresh set of eyes. The cosmos have aligned. Nothing could be a problem. It also smacks of a certain smugness.
Fortunately for me, New York City is a very easy place to learn to meditate. In the midst of all the hustle, there are meditation centers of all stripes. I pretty much tried them all, finally alighting on the non-sectarian vipassana meditation as the one most in sync with my disposition. All these years later, what do I get out of meditation?