Meditation is, for many people, synonymous with spirituality. It is inextricably connected with mysticism, often connected to Buddhism and supernatural beliefs about perception, energy and knowledge. But why is this? Is there anything about meditation that requires a belief in...read more...
Some things are too close for us to be able to see them. They’re too ordinary, too ever-present, too inseparable from our daily lives. Chief among them is happiness. Most of the time we imagine that happiness is out there...read more...
Children are great. They’re even better when they aren’t your responsibility or crying. But the upside of having to deal with their tantrums, and lack of toilet training, and their inexplicable fascination with putting things in their mouths, is that...continue reading on Medium...
In a talk on his excellent meditation app, Sam Harris points out that he would recommend that people meditate even if there were no scientific evidence that it was good for them. I’ll quote him directly here because that’s the...read more...
Procrastination is the bane of most of our existences. It’s not just about putting of the book we’ve been meaning to write or letting dishes pile up in the sink. Procrastination has material costs on our finances (I haven’t had...read more...
Stephen Guise on the trials and tribulations of sock donning: This is a true story. Today, I attempted to put on socks. As I sat on the bed, I brought the opening of the first sock to the toes on...read more...
Sure, you could get something done today. You could read, or go to the gym or learn a language. But equally, you could not. You could stay in bed all day and eat ice cream. You could indulge the temptation...continue reading on Medium...
We all have negative thoughts and self-doubt from time to time. We’d be disastrously over-confident if we didn’t. The problem comes when these negative thoughts overwhelm us, or worse, become our default way of thinking. The video above from Happily,...read more...
Why does work make us stressed? Think about it. Most of the work we need to do is well within our capabilities, we usually have enough time to do it (even if we do procrastinate until the last minute), doing...read more...
We spend most of our time sleepwalking through life. Which is a shame, because it’s short. Leo Babauta from Zen Habits brings us a great list of practices to help us be more present. My favourite was the very first...read more...