Posts

Mindfulness: An Upstream Approach

Mindfulness training can help us cultivate the fundamental skills needed for a paradigm shift that might reduce or eliminate the primary causes of human suffering.

Mindfulness of Values

Mindfulness can play a key role in connecting our actions with our values through practicing sustaining closer objective attention to what is actually happening in our lives, rather than relying on assumptions or wishes.

Mindfulness of Worthiness

What if we measured worthiness through prosocial qualities such as kindness, compassion, empathy, and respect for others, rather than extraordinary abilities or achievements? These qualities can create beneficial feedback loops, helping others feel worthy through our own embodiment of unconditional love and positive regard.

Is Mindfulness Working for Me?

How can mindfulness teachers and practitioners embrace trauma sensitivity and welcome the diverse spectrum of human needs, while avoiding being overprotective or inadvertently reinforcing a mainstream, culturally sanctioned "me first, right now" attitude?

Meeting Crossroads with Mindfulness

There are many times in our lives when we come to a crossroads and we’re presented with a choice about the path ahead. Times of crisis or turmoil, such as the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, offer opportunities to reconnect with our deepest truths and to remember who we really are, if we are open to it. Mindfulness can help us notice choice points as they arise, manage fear and uncertainty, see experiences clearly, connect with our values, and choose responses wisely.

Mindfulness of Social Communications

Mindfulness can help us make space to examine the intentions behind our social communications and align them with our highest values.

The Politics of Mindfulness

Do mindfulness and politics go together? Mindfulness can help us develop skills and qualities that deepen our connection with and understanding of our values and beliefs and this may in turn inform our political choices.

The Law of Cause and Effect

Do outcomes always justify our strategies? Often there are unintended longer term consequences when we fail to align our actions toward a goal with our highest values. Mindfulness can help us start where we are, make space to see the bigger picture, and allow us to respond with greater wisdom.

Cultivating a Mindfulness Practice

Cultivating a mindfulness practice strengthens beneficial qualities that mature into a more skillful way of being in the world. When we let go of attachment to outcome and direct our efforts to creating the best possible conditions, we find the courage to persevere.

Principled Mindfulness

Being a practitioner of mindfulness without a system of ethics may help one relax, become more focused, or be less reactive in difficult situations, but much deeper benefits are available to us and to those around us when we begin to practice from a principled foundation.

Our Best Chance is Mindfulness

Is mindfulness the best hope for humanity? If we were truly aware, the vast majority of us would likely be relating to ourselves and the world with greater compassion and wisdom. But, it's easier to to stay asleep...

The Power of Intention

Intention is the driver behind action and our ethics inform our intentions. Together these concepts are important because they orient us and point us in a certain direction. Aligning our mindfulness practice with our highest values helps us step out of the cycle of suffering and live with greater purpose.

Taking Offense: A Variation on Aversion

Can taking offense ever be helpful? When we are offended, it's because we find someone or something repugnant or we perceive that our values have been violated in some way. It's more than just feeling hurt or disappointed, although these emotions…

What Do You Stand For?

I rarely write about political matters for a number of reasons. Opinions are usually just opinions after all. Over the years, I’ve discovered that when I let things play out, I’m probably at least as often proven wrong as I am right…