I had this week’s post all planned out. It was going to address the dread uninvited guest who shows up at the holiday party, hangs around too long at the buffet table then follows you home. You know who I’m talking about… Food Poisoning. Given […]
All posts filed under: mindfulness
Glimmering through the day
That phrase, “Just getting through the day,” has always seemed like a lousy way to live, and yet that’s often my sense of how it’s done, how we talk about it, how I do it, using little stepping-stones of pleasure to keep me moving along. […]
Dialing it Down
In a culture that applauds giving your all, it almost seems against nature to sanction anything less, which is why I’m a tad leery to bring forward a concept that does exactly that: The 85% Rule actually proposes dialing back our effort to 85%. Yes, […]
Calling Time-Out
Pilots do it. Astronauts do it. Surgeons do it. Taking a two-minute timeout to run through a checklist before undertaking a critical endeavor is a proven way to minimize errors, including life or death ones. It’s why the Joint Commission instituted a universal protocol for […]
Slippery Perception
A man had a dream he was a butterfly. In the dream he felt with his whole heart that he was a butterfly. Then he woke up and realized he was a man. But then a thought occurred: why couldn’t he just as easily be […]
Living the Life We Never Had
“I have lived a long life and had many troubles, most of which never happened.” Mark Twain I know what you mean, Mr. Clemens (Mark Twain being his pen name). Just like the way I am sometimes seized with certainty that I am going to […]
Mona Lisa
I was once involved with a person who would receive bad news with a sort of half-smile. It’s hard to put into words what that expression seemed to mean. There was a knowing, wistful quality to it, as if he understood that life cannot always […]
Are you living a Short Distance from Your Body?
There’s a line from The Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, that gets batted around frequently, leading me to believe it touches a nerve: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” Never having read The Dubliners myself, I don’t […]
The Art of Peace
Spinning a story in our head about the scary thing that is going to happen is like painting a picture of a tiger then forgetting it’s not real. On Friday night I created such an exquisitely detailed painting of the bad health outcomes I anticipated […]
The Yang of Your Yin
Growing up, my sister and I were always “the girls.” We were a duo, a team, always in complementary consort, covering all the bases. Amy was science, I was art. Amy was reason-based, I was emotion. Amy was practical. I was extravagant. But together we […]
How the Light Gets In
A psychiatrist once told me that when people reach a breaking point with a mental health issue, they tend to deal with it in one of three ways: The religion part was the surprise punchline but after a few beats it made sense. If a […]
The Anatomy of a Panic Attack
This is a story about a panic attack that threw a top-level, high-performing, rock-solid leader for a loop. For decades she’d been the person — at work and home alike – everyone turned to for steadiness, for staying power, for perspective, for answers. I will […]
Be cool. 