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Real Happiness Challenge - Week 3: The Boozehound's Guide to Enlightenment
You've fallen off the cushion. The negative emotion garbage monster has proven too tough to ever defeat. You've tried your luck with "spiritual bypassing," but even that stopped working after a bit –...
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Real Happiness Challenge: Week 3: Mind at War
Me and my mind this week: Sometimes my thoughts are relentlessly demanding and negative. Often I'll react to them by ignoring them or trying to push them out of my mind by concentrating on something...
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Real Happiness Challenge:Week 3: Do We Hide Our Emotions Or Let It R.A.I.N.?
We all have our ways of running for cover during periods of emotional turbulence. Food, drink, drugs, Netflix, Facebook, Instagram…the list goes on and on. What we all have in common is that when...
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Real Happiness Meditation Challenge Week 3: Whether to Get Up
I am lying in bed, and I want to stay here. It's warm. I'm comfortable. I feel the weight of the comforter, the cat pressed against my leg. And yet I'm not happy. I think about people who greet the day...
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Real Happiness Challenge: Week 4: It's On!
The meditation which has been most beneficial to me, and both the easiest and most difficult to practice, is Lovingkindness or Metta meditation. Week Four of the Real Happiness Challenge is devoted to...
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Real Happiness Challenge: Week 4: This One Goes Out to the One I Love
This last week of the Real Happiness Challenge is about practicing Metta, or Lovingkindness meditation, which means meditating on wishes of goodwill toward a set of people or beings in a variety of...
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Real Happiness Challenge Week 4:LovingKindness Subway Walk: Embracing...
The New York City Subway is not exactly the first place that comes to mind when we hear the phrase “Lovingkindness.” Lovingkindness, or “Metta,” is a meditation practice that captures the expression of...
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Real Happiness Week 4: How Metta Changes the World
The first time I learned lovingkindness meditation, or metta, I was at a weekend retreat a couple of hours away from my house. As I drove home, I sent the standard wishes to the other drivers -- May...
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Infographic: 3 Levels of Meditation
What does meditation look like beyond mindfulness? I made this infographic to offer a quick overview of the three levels of meditation: Presence, Stillness, and Inquiry. Feel free to share. read more
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What is Mindfulness of Breath when You Can't Breathe?
Warning – I describe in some graphic detail the recuperation from a surgery.read more
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Emotional Rescue
Before we reach real understanding and wisdom about our emotions, we first need a clear idea of what they are and how they work. Emotions get their power from a simple but deep-seated source: our lack...
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Serenity Now! Is there really an app for that?
Meditation and mindfulness apps are all the rage these days. There are literally hundreds. I’m not particularly interested in debating the merits of these apps (if you are interested in this, I highly...
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The Unreliable Quilter
I can only speak for myself, and I am pretty good at doing that. Like many of us, I am quite accomplished at weaving my own narrative.The internet has broken down many - if not most - of our...
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MRI Meditation, And The Wisdom of Ducking
Last week I had my first MRI. I’ve been having back and neck pain since December and had tried a number of treatments to no significant avail, so this was the next course of action in finding out the...
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The Strikingly Optimistic Agency of the Doctrine of Buddha Nature
A modern koan -- Question: Do you have Buddha Nature? Answer: Well, duh.The concept of "Buddha Nature" is often difficult to understand, but it is a radically optimistic doctrine. It says that not...
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Right Speech Means Speaking Up
On the Buddha's Eightfold Path, right speech is followed by right action. So it's no surprise that the opposite happens -- that hate-filled speech is followed by hateful action. If words are used to...
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My Weekend Retreat with Venerable Pannavati
I have never been on a Buddhist meditation retreat before, and I had no idea what to expect from it. I was nervous at first because the longest I had ever meditated in one sitting was 25 minutes...
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Lady Gaga Meets HH Dalai Lama - China Bans Her Music
Lady Gaga and HH Dalai Lama met June 26 in Indiana, where the 30 year old singer interviewed His Holiness on the topic of kindness. They were both in the midwest to participate at the United States...
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You Can Always Come Back
Perhaps you've taken a day off from your meditation practice. Perhaps it became a week and stretched over months. Perhaps you've fallen off the cushion.You're allowed to forgive yourself. There is a...
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10 Tips for Your First Meditation Retreat
You’ve started meditating, you’re beginning to get the hang of it, and now you’re ready for your first retreat. Or you’ve never meditated, but you learn by jumping into the deep end of the pool, so...
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