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Watch a clock. Does your mind move faster than the second hand?
As family and friends begin to gather during the holidays at one point or another may have to face either ourselves or a loved one with addiction. There are really very few people who are not touched by addiction in one way or another. Addiction comes in the form of alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, eating, sugar, and other compulsive behaviors that are an avoidance strategy and eventually cause distress.
When caught up in the cycle of addictive behavior, there is an inability to accept whatever is being felt in the present moment and the mind is constantly wandering onto the next "fix." So it’s safe to conclude that addiction often builds a wall of disconnection and makes it difficult to actually be present for the holidays.
Read more »I recently had the honor of interviewing Susan Kaiser Greenland, who had the courage to leave a well-paying law career to embrace a calling to teach mindfulness meditation to children as young as four years old.
She is author of the upcoming book The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate. She also developed the website Mindfulness Together and the Inner Kids program, designed to teach young kids vital skills toward a more peaceful and compassionate world.
Susan will be speaking at the Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth Conference in San Diego on February 4 – 5, 2012.
Read more »Stress is a precursor to anxiety, and more than 19 million Americans are afflicted with some type of anxiety disorder today. Furthermore, disorders such as anxiety critically impact quality of life and well-being. Although current research is working towards discovering factors that influence well-being, there is still a pattern of sidestepping the qualities of sacred moments in reference to mental health and well-being. With the field's persistent emphasis on techniques toward mental health that do not explicitly involve the sacred and the transcendent, it seems critical to continue to tap this area for its value to our own lives.
To back this up the need for this in our society, an electronic search of Psychological Abstracts in psychology's last 100 years reveals a 14 to one ratio of psychological articles about negative emotions versus positive emotions. The imbalance in research of negative versus positive makes it ever more important to ask the question: what does it mean to live the good life? The good news: there is resurgence in the world of focusing on this very question!
Read more »A while back I wrote a post with the inquiry, “Is it Time to Unplug?” The question was rhetorical in a way saying that in our culture there are too many things to pay attention to and when we end up abusing all our options, we become overconnected and this feeds mental and physical dis-ease. But, what about when our work requires us to be plugged in, what can we do then?
Read more »Ok…I’m outing myself. I was driving the other day with my mind wandering off the road and onto an idea for a wonderful blog that really got to the heart of people nowadays being potentially over-connected to a point where there isn’t time for oneself or to just be still. Very little effort is made to unplug as Therese Borchard courageously experimented with. So there I was driving, only to look up and find that I was three exits past where I needed to get off. Talk about being on autopilot. Sound familiar?
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