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 […]
People in mindfulness circles love to quote Portia Nelson’s “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters.” It’s a little work of wisdom about the patterns we habitually bring to the challenges in our lives. We’re all familiar with helplessness, victimhood, and denial of the unpleasant. One of these may be our fallback. That’s why I appreciate this […]
In my work with social justice advocates across the world, I’ve noticed that those who are most passionate and committed approach challenges with a heart of compassion. Which is why I loved writing about Maggie Doyne for Huffington Post this week. Maggie is a 27-year-old woman from NJ who first set off to see the […]
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 […]
I longed to be grounded once again in the reality of my everyday life. The familiar messiness. These very piles of paper. My work. The cacophony of street noises on my New York block. The personalities that drive me to distraction.
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?