Taking Mindful Breaks From Working
One of the ways meditation can most help in our daily life is when we take small, regular, refreshing breaks from what we have been doing to sit, check in, and deeply listen to ourselves and the world around us.
How Meditation Can Help With Being Sober from Addictions
There are various ways that meditation practice can help us to have fewer addictive urges, and to resist them when they do arise.
Mindfulness For The Office Workday
Not only is “mindfulness” a popular trend that’s sweeping the nation, but “mindfulness in the workplace” specifically is too. This post will give you some suggestions for helpful techniques for staying spacious and open when working an office job.
How A Meditation Practice And Physically Working Out Are Similar
One way to understand meditation practice is to see it as similar to the habit of physical exercise and working out, which is something that more people are more familiar with and able to understand.
Psychotherapy, Life Coaching, and Spiritual Work (Past, Future, and Present)
I once heard someone say that, “Psychotherapy is about the past, life coaching is about the future, and spiritual work is about the present moment”.
I felt a power to that model when I first heard it. In the years since, I’ve often thought about and examined it. This is what I think.
What is “Mindful Coaching”?
Isn’t all coaching supposed to be mindful? What’s unique about coaching via mindfulness-informed sensibilities? How does appreciating and having a personal relationship with mindfulness affect coaching work? What’s your experience with coaching, mindfulness, and mindful coaching?
How To Deliver A “Hard Truth” To Someone
A hard truth is when one person is unusually authentic and honest in giving another person feedback, in the form of giving a challenge, penetrating them with a different perspective that they may or may not enjoy hearing, and suggesting difficult changes that the speaker feels may help listener to be more mature, happy, and healthy.
The Pomodoro Technique for Centered Productivity
I’ve recently been having great results in being productive by using the pomodoro technique. The basic idea is to work for twenty-five minutes, then take a break for five minutes, and then repeat.
Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness
There are five domains of social experience that your brain treats the same as survival issues: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness,
Two Writing Practices That Can Help Stop Addictions
In this post I will describe two writing practices that I have found helpful in quitting addictions. I recommend them for working with any behavior that you have attachment to, that has major negative consequences, and that at least part of you would like to quit.
Two Types Of Growth
One way to make a big impact on our life for the better is instantaneous, emotional, intense, and invokes making a courageous and bold big change. The other is slow, steady, regular time put in moving towards a goal
Lessons I’ve Learned From Rock Climbing
I’ve noticed that it feels unmistakably more fun and satisfying to challenge myself, to get out and go climbing, to get on some routes that are edgy and difficult for me, and then to be skillful, brave, and persevering, and do what it takes to get all the way to the top. This is, of course, similar to many other areas of life: we don’t have to take on challenges, and we don’t have to succeed at them – but it sure does seem to feel better to win than not to play.
Structure Of Making Formal Interpersonal Commitments
There have been many times in my personal growth career when I have made an interpersonal behavioral commitment to another person, and many more times that I have accepted them from others. I have most often participated in making commitments during men’s teams work and in the coaching training that I took. Making structured formal interpersonal commitments has, at times, been a powerful tool for helping me to help my life to be more powerful, intentional, healthy, and clear.
Being Clear About Boundaries
One thing that I think helps with clear communication is to be conscious of the on the fact that boundaries are not always bilateral or reciprocal. That is to say, I think that “Heyyyy! You just asked me to not do x, and now you’re doing that exact same thing!” is usually an unproductive thing to say.
“If”, by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
Looking For Patterns Of Happiness And Unhappiness
Recently I did some thinking and writing about the texture of the time that I have been an adult, the ebb and flow of happiness in the twenty-five years since I graduated high school. I started listing, what were all the months and years of greatest growth, expansion, opening, and generally good things; in other words, what activities, experiences, and factors seemed to correlate with my life coming more alive. What I came up with were:
Scheduling Groups of People
I have found that instead by far the best way to set a date, for groups of say six or smaller, is for the person with the tightest schedule to send out a comprehensive list of all the dates that they are available during the possible time span, someone else in the group to edit that list down to just the dates that they are also free and reposts, and so on, until, when the last person posts, and you are left with a comprehensive winnowed-down list of date that all people are free.
Book Review: “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, by Stephen Covey
“Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People” is a deceptively basic-seeming book that will actually will reward the reader with as much depth as they are willing to seek from it. Some themes in the book are developing a sense of purpose and intentionality in life, cultivating self-discipline and ethical behavior, and ways to create social networks that work (which, in the end, comes down to love). A big theme in the book is taking on practices and self-cultivations in the service of self-improvement.
Recommending The Arete Workshop
Some of the main intentions of the course, in my words, are to get to the deepest heart of who we are, to have that be seen and celebrated in a community setting, to be aware of what stands between us and being connected to people and to help melt that, and to clear ourselves for getting on with whatever it is that we most want in life.
Choosing Your Problems
The healthy person, the healthy in body and spirit, is a person faced with many difficulties. He has a lot of problems, many of which he has deliberately chosen with the sure knowledge that in working toward their solution, he will become more the person he would like to be.
Communication Skills
Try to deeply understand the other person is saying, to have a feeling of how the world looks to them, and have them know that they are understood, whether we agreed with and enjoyed what they said, or not.