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Posts tagged with “Mindfulness”

Finding Peace and Joy When Dealing with Pain and Loss

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“Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.” ~Richard Bach

There are times when nothing seems to move in the right direction. We either feel stuck or lost in chaos and confusion. Days follow nights as pages on the calendar turn into months, but you remain at the same place.

A few years back I suffered a miscarriage in the eighth month of pregnancy. I lost my baby and my dreams of motherhood. In the deep void I experienced both physical pain and mental agony.

At such times despite your efforts, the situation turns from bad to …

How Mindfulness Can Help You Discover What You Want to Do in Life

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“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.” ~Rodin

When I was in college, I knew what to do and everything clicked along.

But as graduation approached, I got nervous.

I’d always assumed that some “good job” would turn up when I got out of school. But now it was in my face that I had no idea where I was going.

I took a career workshop where we figured out our favorite interests and best skills. What the class didn’t provide was any follow-up to help me actually find the dream job.

I didn’t know …

How Are You Using Your 86,400 Seconds?

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“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” ~Theophrastus

Don’t we all wish we had more time? Time to spend with loved ones. Time to finish solving a problem. Time to eat, pray, love. Time to exercise more. Time to travel to all the continents on the globe.

Time to finish that project. Time to take that diving course, yoga class, or self-improvement seminar. Time to chat with our grandparents. Time to visit an old friend.

Time to aid the poor. Time to listen to the news. Time to challenge yourself. Time to meditate. Time to do volunteer …

Brushes with Mortality: 5 Lessons On Dealing with Hard Times

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“When we come close to those things that break us down, we touch those things that also break us open. And in that breaking open, we uncover our true nature.” ~Wayne Muller

As someone with a serious chronic medical condition, I have danced with mortality. Many times. It wasn’t until our most recent pas de deux, however, that I truly understood just how much this dance could impact me.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in my work as a hospice volunteer.

The mission of the San Francisco-based Zen Hospice Project—a Buddhist-inspired organization where I have volunteered for five …

You’ll Always Have This Day, No Matter Where It Leads

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“If you surrender completely to the moment as they pass, you live more richly those moments.” ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Last week on Valentine’s Day, my boyfriend Ehren and I had a meeting we’d both spent months working toward.

After writing and rewriting a romantic comedy screenplay for over a year, and consulting with a screenwriter friend to improve it, we’d finally secured a meeting with an agent—her agent. At one of the largest agencies in Hollywood. Presumably to represent us.

We couldn’t have been more thrilled to know our project might have a real future, and the timing …

3 Reasons to Stop Trying So Hard to Be Positive and Peaceful

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“Freedom is instantaneous the moment we accept things as they are.” ~Karen Maezen Miller

The world is filled with people who work hard at being positive, peaceful, and more spiritual and then feel bad when they don’t measure up. I know because I used to be one of them. And I still am from time to time.

That was before I realized something:

1 It doesn’t work.

2. Spirituality isn’t something you do; it’s something you are, and you are this right now. Just as beneath the chatter of your mind you are already positive and peaceful too.

3. You …

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 …