to other women who are in a process of that, taking a stand in their own Sophia power. What are the breakthroughs you have to be willing to take this or that on inside yourself? LT: Oh, wow. Gosh, Tami. Well, I just finished a book called Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger than Yourself. That’s my path. Maybe it’s not for everybody, but it’s my path. So many people do such beautiful inner work as Buddhists, or their meditation practice is something they love so much. I didn’t start there. I started with making a difference with my life, really, and committing myself to ending world hunger, which, when we ma... posted on Mar 12 2022 (2,991 reads)

quality of the practice.“ AR Yoga in the medical guidelines At this point, I decided to deepen my knowledge and experience in this specific aspect of yoga. The practice of yoga, as a complementary support therapy during cancer treatments, was on the rise, as were the cases of women being diagnosed. In 2017, the Society for Integrative Oncology stated in their international clinical practice guidelines for the holistic therapies for supporting breast cancer patients: Yoga and meditation are explicitly recommended for  reducing anxiety/fear states and depression, as well as improving the general quality of life of breast cancer sufferers. (CA Cancer J Clin. 2017).... posted on Mar 16 2022 (3,657 reads)

sleeping well, eating right, and breathing deeply, but you still feel anxious? Vora calls the anxiety that remains “true anxiety.” “When our lives don’t align with our values or capabilities, we can feel anxious,” she writes. “When you listen closely, this anxiety can point you in the direction of actions you need to take as well as the unique contribution you are here to make.” True anxiety is not meant to be quelled with yoga or soothed with meditation. In this case, “instead of asking, How can I stop feeling so anxious?, we should be asking, What is my anxiety telling me?” she writes. “Anxiety is not what&rsqu... posted on Apr 7 2022 (8,744 reads)

where you are at the center of the story (and not just a casualty), can help diminish the link between heartbreak and later psychological problems—perhaps because it decreases rumination and gives us a sense of agency. Reduce stress As Williams discovered, heartbreak puts you in a hyper-alert state, which wreaks havoc with your brain and body, especially if it becomes chronic. To counteract that, you need to find ways to reduce stress, whether that means trying meditation (which Williams found less than helpful) or taking regular walks in the woods (more up her alley). 
One reason it’s good to reduce stress is that it can open you up to other av... posted on Apr 13 2022 (7,631 reads)

we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless meditation on living with presence. “Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s,” Seneca exhorted two millennia earlier as he offered the Stoic balance sheet for time spent, saved, and wasted, reminding us that “nothing is ours, except time.” Time is all we have because time is what we are — which is why the undoing of time, of time’s promise of itself, is the undoing of our very selves. In the dismorrowed undoing of 2020 — as Zadie Smith was calibrating... posted on May 17 2022 (6,592 reads)

being with our kids in awkward ways. TS: Bayo, what I’m noticing is, there’s a whole heck of a lot that I could talk to you about and that I long to talk to you about. I hope and trust we’ll have future opportunities. To end our conversation, I want to pick up on one thing that you said that opened a large space for me, which was talking about our excessiveness. What it opened for me was, I touched into times, maybe there’ve been times in deep stillness or meditation, a sense of really melting into space where I could feel that sense of spilling into everythingness, and excessive beyond excessive, unbounded. I wanted to understand from you what that exc... posted on Jun 16 2022 (2,472 reads)

I was growing up, my mama made up songs for everything.  Potty training? Sing about it.  Your heart’s deepest longing? In song.  I learned: like birds, we sing.  Simple plain,  because we’re alive.  For me Song is a protection mantle, a wise friend, a presence meditation, a comic relief.  Song anchors us in our breathing bodies, resonant chambers.  Song lives in the crosshairs of Right Here + Right Now. Turns out there’s an upwelling of folks who need to sing like we need to breathe.  We are finding each other and reclaiming our voices as a pathway to Belonging. We  bask in the pleasure of harmony and the power of ... posted on Sep 28 2022 (5,525 reads)

Now, what do you say to a group like that? And so I had to ask myself the question: What is it that I would find most difficult about this, apart from leaving loved ones? And what came up on my inner screen was, it’d be the loss of your autonomy, the loss of your freedom. You’re now a creature of the medical process, of the disease process. So we talked about ways in which one could remain psychologically, spiritually independent of those processes, working with dreams and meditation and active imagination and so forth. So no matter how dire the circumstance, there’s always a summons to some kind of task whereby we retain our core integrity and our core sense of p... posted on Oct 1 2022 (4,334 reads)

Mayuka felt lost.  Some years later, she found herself working at Harvard Business School (HBS) at a fortuitous time. HBS was trying to transform its education system and its new guiding principle was “Knowing, Doing, Being,” emphasizing the need to rebalance the head, hands, and heart. Mayuka realized that the heart, which ought to be her true inner compass, had been largely silenced by her focus on acquiring knowledge and skills. So she set about trying many things, from meditation practices to exploration circles with colleagues. What opened her heart the most was creating things — concrete things — like poems, stories, and paintings. This moved... posted on Jan 10 2023 (2,121 reads)

How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc? Well, yes, good question. Unfortunately, I only have three minutes left. So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us wh... posted on Feb 11 2023 (50,228 reads)

to have a 12 second attention span but we're now at 8 seconds! Our minds are full. Instead of being mindful, we’re totally overloaded. Today's New York Times has more content than we would encounter in our entire lifespan in 17th century England. What all that content does is over-stimulates our nervous system. That over-stimulation totally leaves us feeling exhausted and dissatisfied. There are many different ways in which we can build our attention capital, and mindfulness meditation is certainly one of them. Megan Cowan is a friend who decided to build this capacity in schools. She set up a curriculum and she’d go classroom to classroom doing various practices. H... posted on Apr 19 2016 (51,470 reads)

for health? Whole, real, unprocessed foods Wild regeneratively-raised or grass- or pasture-raised meats and eggs and fatty fish Fiber Phytonutrients Micronutrients (e.g., vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, B vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids) Optimal hormone levels (supported by healthy lifestyle or bio identical hormone replacement) Adequate and ideal light exposure at the right times of day Optimal hydration Clean air Exercise and movement Restorative practices (yoga, meditation, breath work) Sleep and health circadian rhythms Community, love, and belonging Meaning and purpose By adding the good stuff and removing the bad, you activate your body&rsqu... posted on Mar 2 2023 (4,379 reads)

the idea of kindness — loves thinking of themselves as a kind person — but somehow, the practice of it, the dailiness of it, has receded into the background in a culture rife with selfing and cynicism, a culture in which we have come to mistake the emotional porousness of kindness for a puncture in the armor of our hard individualism. And yet kindness remains our best antidote to the fundamental loneliness of being human. Gathered here are two millennia of meditations on kindness — its challenges, its nuances, and its rippling rewards — from a posy of vast minds and vast spirits who have risen above the common tide of their times to give us ... posted on Mar 18 2023 (4,528 reads)

more social rest, surround yourself with positive and supportive people. Even if your interactions have to occur virtually, you can choose to engage more fully in them by turning on your camera and focusing on who you’re speaking to. The final type of rest is spiritual rest, which is the ability to connect beyond the physical and mental and feel a deep sense of belonging, love, acceptance and purpose. To receive this, engage in something greater than yourself and add prayer, meditation or community involvement to your daily routine. As you can see, sleep alone can’t restore us to the point we feel rested. So it’s time for us to begin focusing on getting the... posted on Mar 21 2023 (14,763 reads)

Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus (2022) by Neil Douglas-Klotz. For a longer excerpt and more information, please see: www.revelationsofthearamaicjesus.com Why consider Jesus’ sayings in this language, much less use them in prayer or meditation? Language determines our way viewing the world. Languages have different words for the same thing, but also unique words that cannot be put into words in another language. In ancient languages, these unique expressions were all about the way people perceived their relationships to nature, other human beings, and Reality itself (a reality often translated “God”). Aramaic offers a way of looking at life as an inter... posted on Mar 22 2023 (3,735 reads)

I went by myself and I had a shaved head and this whole gnarly scar. It’s a nine-day pilgrimage. Toward the end, we were in thee big groups to visit Bahá’u’lláh’s prison cell. He was imprisoned for years. I was really excited, for whatever reason, to visit that cell, more than any other spot. We got there and it was a stormy day and I just had a really deep desire in my heart to be alone in this prison cell. We’d have time for prayer and meditation, and I was with this group, and these people, they would have these prayer-a-thons. They would be able to hunker down for an hour and a half or something. And I didn’t have that type ... posted on Apr 1 2023 (4,467 reads)

that fire together wire together.” Thus, the brain can learn to trigger the same neurons each time and gradually wire them together. Using this Hebbian theory, we can change the brain for the better by reveling in pleasant events a handful of times a day—pausing to listen to the sounds of birds chirping, relishing a bite of food or a good cup of coffee, smelling a flower, or enjoying a pleasant thought about a loved one.  “No drugs, nothing fancy, no exotic meditation technique needed,” says Hanson. “You begin to move from moments of gratitude to the trait of gratitude, moments of self-worth to the trait of self-worth, and this is a profoundl... posted on Apr 18 2023 (25,872 reads)

suspect our ability to ask the unanswerable questions that Hannah Arendt knew are the heartbeat of civilization is intimately related to our capacity for dwelling in a particular state of being beyond the realm of our compulsive doing. Bertrand Russell called it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips called it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman called it “loafing.” The Buddhist tradition describes it simply as presence. Whatever we may call it, amid a culture of filling the existential void with cultish productivity and an endless stream of dopamine-laced distractions, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and r... posted on Apr 20 2023 (4,931 reads)

I think I’d just like to end with a few more poems. Limón:Yeah. Tippett:Because I couldn’t decide which ones I wanted you to read. We haven’t read much from The Carrying, which is a wonderful book. Okay, I’m going to give you some choices. Why don’t you read “The Quiet Machine”? Actually, that’s in Bright Dead Things. This is like a self-care poem. I almost think that this poem could be used as a meditation. Limón:I think it’s definitely a writing prompt too, right? There’s a lot of different… People… Tippett:It’s page 13, sorry. Limón:Oh,... posted on Apr 22 2023 (3,258 reads)

bodily guidance or internal wisdom. By that, I mean the opposite of “move fast and break things.” I used to live a good chunk of my life right here (in my head) and to ignore the residue or the intelligence that was building up elsewhere in my whole being. In a world that is speeding up exponentially, it’s critical to slow down our external work long enough so as to feel the body and attune to the subtle energetic signs that something is out of whack – whether through meditation, movement, or simple silence. As we know, our bodies keep the score of internal misalignments. A few weeks ago, I was at this powerful talk by a renowned person who was speaking abou... posted on May 30 2023 (8,551 reads)