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Posts tagged with “Mindfulness”

Rituals for Renewal: 7 Steps to Lower Your Stress

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“Every day brings a choice: to practice stress or to practice peace.” ~Joan Borysenko

Every day I meet with people who are stressed and want things to be different. I also encounter people who are so distressed they’ve accepted suffering’s dominion over their life. Almost all, however, are interested in the concept of change.

Still, taking small, conscious steps toward a healthier emotional, mental, and physical life can sometimes seem overwhelming. More people have told me “I’m so busy—I can’t fit one more thing into my day!” than not. But what’s the alternative? It’s being just happy enough to be …

Finding Peace: Take Power Away from Your Thoughts and Emotions

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“Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.” ~John De Paola

My almost three year old, Willow, is obsessed with playing doctor.

She lies on the couch, hands down at her sides. She hands me a small flashlight and a toy frying pan (which I’m told to pretend is a stethoscope) and orders, “Check me out, Doctor Mommy!”

She methodically points out every scratch, scrape, bruise, and freckle on her body. She tells me how much snot she feels in her nose and how many times she coughed, sneezed, and hiccupped that day so that …

Active Contentment: 5 Tips to Have Both Peace and Ambition

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“Peace is not merely a distant goal we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.” ~Martin Luther King Jr.

Stress equals success.

I wholeheartedly believed this for many years. Who had led me so astray? I have only myself to blame.

The concept of peace had no practical application in my life. Peace was something that was necessary in war-torn countries, not in my mind.

This toxic belief began in college. The library often felt like a boxing ring where my fellow students and I competed to be the most stressed out.

Who had the most …

The Illusion of Waiting for the Future to Be Happy

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“The future is always beginning now.” ~Mark Strand

Do you ever feel like there’s something missing in your life? It feels like you’re always waiting for something to arrive. You want the future to come, because it’s better there.

But that’s all wrong.

The future is an illusion. It’s just a concept in your head. This is what I’ve realized in the past few months.

I’ve suddenly become acutely aware of what’s going on. I’ve entered the present moment more powerfully than ever before.

If you go and read my previous articles here at Tiny Buddha, I talk about how …

7 Tips To Help You Slow Down and Enjoy Your Life As It Is

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“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” ~Gandhi

I have always been a person who wants to be one step ahead. I think my parents would say that I liked to push the boundaries. I wanted to experience many things, and I wanted to experience them quickly.

When my brother went to sleep-away camp, I had to go the next year despite being three years younger than him.

At age thirteen I had to ski with the older kids, racing faster and harder than I was ready for.

When I was fifteen I pushed to take a trip …

The Zen of Writing: 7 Lessons About Living Wisely

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“Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” ~Albert Einstein

I feel grateful to be a writer not only because I love to write, but also because writing has been one of my greatest spiritual teachers. Challenges I face as a writer teach me important life lessons, just as life teaches me lessons I can apply to my writing.

Here are seven spiritual lessons I’ve learned—some the hard way—that can apply to writing and to life in general.

1. Be mindful.

Showing up—really showing up with all your attention—is the first and most important …

5 Tips to Help You Embrace Extreme Change

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“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance” ~Alan Watts

My obsession at an early age became to follow my heart—a life’s search for meaning, adventure, and enlightenment.

This search has been remarkable, a journey that has brought me to fascinating places for extended stays (Japan, the UK, Australia, you name the place) and has led me to relationships with some of the most interesting, loving people from around the globe.

As exhilarating the feeling of following your heart can be, it’s not always the yellow brick …

Death and Grieving: Breathing Through the Feeling of Loss

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“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” ~Dr. Seuss

The color brown has special significance to me; it’s the color of the robes that my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastics wear. It’s the color of my children’s eyes. It’s the color of the soil I like to dig in and plant things. It’s the color of my dog, Jake’s, paws and eyes and eyebrows

My husband came home today with a chocolaty brown gift bag. I could practically smell chocolate just looking at it. I find the color brown to be so comforting, so…grounding—and sometimes so …

The Zen of Dogs: On Mindfulness, Compassion, and Connection

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“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.” ~Karl Barth

We were lying in bed. I said, “We can’t do it.” She said, “I don’t see what else we can do.” We lay there in silence, trying to figure it out.

It was the third big decision of our relationship. The first was when I asked Nicole to marry me. The second was when she said yes. And the third—the one we couldn’t figure out—was what to do about Ralph.

She’d had Ralph—a female German Shepherd—for a little over a year. Nicole had been waiting for years to get a dog, …

Happiness is the Value of Every Moment

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“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” ~Norman Cousins

“What is happiness?” What a completely dense and loaded question this is.

During my studies in psychology, one of the main principles we learned about writing a manuscript is the importance of defining what you are discussing. If I were to write a paper about happiness, I would then need to operationally define happiness in terms that allowed everyone to understand what I was referring to.

The problem with this, however, is that we then merely repeat the best …

6 Tips to Keep Becoming Who You’re Meant to Be

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“Life is a process of becoming. A combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” ~Anais Nin

Last October, in a whiplash-fast, three-hour labor, two and half weeks before my due date, I gave birth to my first baby, a boy, named Jackson.

While pregnancy hadn’t been a breeze—I was hospitalized twice with complications, and, you know, no sushi for nine months—the first few weeks of Jackson’s life left me feeling, at times, like a shattered shell of my …

Your Thoughts Create Your World: Patrol Your Mind

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“Since you alone are responsible for your thoughts, only you can change them.” ~Paramahansa Yogananda

In my second year of residency, I went through my internal medicine rotation. I had just been assigned to a particular patient and was responsible for his care during that part of his stay. His medical chart stated he had multiple systemic issues, including more than one terminal condition.

He had been admitted to the hospital numerous times, but this was our first encounter. As I entered his room, I wasn’t sure what to expect. After all, this was a man with a limited …

7 Important Questions to Ask Yourself Today

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“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.” ~Unknown

During the first week of July 2012, a storm left my little town and nearly one million other people in the Mid-Atlantic Region without electricity. The outage lasted eight days for Buffalo, Ohio, and we saw triple digits (F) each day.

I spent much of my free time in a hammock practicing my watching skills. I watched as I breathed in. I watched as I breathed out.

I watched thoughts pop up out of nowhere as I watched the leaves of two …

50 Amazing Gifts from Living In The Now

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“If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.” ~Thich Nhat Hahn

Recently something truly amazing happened. I was sitting at the beach feeling the warm winds, taking in the gleaming blue Pacific. It was the time of day when the sunlight turns the ocean into waves of sparkling radiance.

The beauty touched me deeply. In that appreciation of the moment, something shifted inside me. I became so present that my identity of self dissolved into the background.

I was not only in the universe, but the universe was now in me.

As I write …

When Thoughts Cause Stress: Steps on the Path to Mindfulness

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“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” ~Charles Swindoll

The notion that how we feel is directly caused by events around us, or directly involving us, is a scourge of our modern times. To believe that the external world and its perceived relationship to us is the major determinative factor in how we feel (“I can’t believe he/she said that to me—that’s so outrageous!”) is disempowering and self-destructive.

We impose our “shoulds” on what we perceive as “the world out there,” and then when it fails to live up to our arbitrary and …

The Beauty of Nothing: Reflections on Impermanence

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“Everything flows and nothing abides, everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” ~Heraclitus 

I’m reclining on a pebble beach, my bag tucked under my head, a can of Fanta to the right of me, above me, the sky and before me, the sea. It’s a few miles out.

I came here alone. Friends had no time for me today. I’ve been reading instead, the cast of Anna Karenina filling the places where friends should be, and eating rich Italian ice cream, fudge flavored, even though it’ll give me an upset stomach later.

The sun is scorching everything today, partner-in-crime with …

Simple Reminders to Focus on What Matters in Life

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“Before someone’s tomorrow has been taken away, cherish those you love, appreciate them today.” ~Michelle C. Ustaszeski

As tough as it sometimes feels, change and loss are woven into life. We cannot live a full life without them.

Although both can be painful, they push us into a greater understanding of what matters in life, and they can help us become clearer about who we are since they provide a platform for substantial growth.

Over the past couple of years I’ve experienced many changes as I’ve transitioned from one chapter to the next. The one constant through all of …

8 Reasons to Buy the Tiny Wisdom eBook Series (Available Now!)

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Since Tiny Buddha launched in 2009, I’ve written hundreds of “Tiny Wisdom” blog posts. In the beginning, I kept these short and peripheral.

Over time, I started putting more of myself into them and giving them a lot more love and attention. Suddenly, these posts became far more popular than I ever thought they’d be.

They aren’t lengthy how-to posts with lists of action steps. They’re short reflections on the little things that make a huge difference in our daily lives. They’re reminders of what matters and how to embrace it, right now, instead of focusing on all the things …

Living in the Now When It’s Stressful: 4 Mindfulness Tips

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“If you worry about what might be, and wonder what might have been, you will ignore what is.” ~Unknown

A few weeks ago, I learned that my beloved dog, Bella, had become ill with kidney disease—a condition that will most likely not allow her to live longer than a year. I was devastated when I heard this news.

At only eight years old, Bella didn’t seem old enough to be so sick, let alone be a year (or less) away from dying. Coping with her condition and the impending loss has been incredibly difficult—nearly impossible at times—but amid all of …

Eliminate Proxies for a More Authentic, Present Life

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On the web, there is something called a proxy server. It often sits in between a request (for example, let me watch YouTube!) and what is requested (in this case, the YouTube video file) and “passes” the request, and the result, back and forth between two computers.

In the early days of the Internet, it was created as a way to make easier and more efficient the incredible complexity of so much information and so many people wanting to access it. There are other benefits, too—security, speed, protecting identities and information. But, it’s still an intermediary between Thing A and …