From Path to Peace With Todd Perelmuter NewsletterI won’t lie. Sometimes, life sucks. When I went hiking in Nepal’s Himalayan Mountains, there were many very hard climbs, followed by very easy descents. This is the nature of any journey: there will be constant ups and downs. The more we understand this, the more we can enjoy the journey. Here’s the secret to facing good news and bad news without getting…
Nearly all of human behaviour is conditioned, sometimes by society, sometimes by our families, and sometimes by our own unique experiences. These behaviors are conditioned through rewards and punishments. How a behavior makes us feel determines whether we continue that behavior. And while a lot of conditioning is well-intentioned, sometimes, especially when there's been trauma, we learn to internalize stress even though we are perfectly safe. But, we can unlearn…
Q 1: Dear Todd, how do I accept that life has no meaning? Don't we have to have a purpose in life?Q 2: Dear Todd, I find myself depressed because of the realization that is no true meaning or purpose to our lives. Everything is neutral until we assign it meaning. Therefore everything is pointless, without purpose, including suffering and pain, including love and joy. Can you help me reframe…
1. The key to becoming spiritual isn't that we do anything, it’s the opposite — we have to undo everything. 2. We are not merely a tiny, insignificant part of this universe, not just some mistake, or random chance, we are the universe. 3. When you're blessed, you pass it on to someone else because you know you are only blessed because someone helped show you the way. This is…
We will all feel all of the human emotions throughout our lives. That's part of life. But when we let ourselves get swept away by those emotions, then we can act unmindfully and in ways that can hurt our reputation and relationships. When our emotions carry us away, we lose ourselves and we feel the emotions with great intensity as if they are happening to us. When we are present,…
We live on a planet that is trying to juggle the wants and needs of 8 billion people. It's not easy, and that means that things can not always go our way. Sometimes there will be setbacks, obstacles and stumbling blocks on the path of life. We can either see these temporary setbacks as the opportunities for growth that they are, or we can let them define us failures.In this…
I know it, and you know it. Terrible things happen to wonderful people and wonderful things happen to people who've done tremendous harm. If even a great man like Gandhi was assassinated, what chance do the rest of us have at a peaceful and good life?! So how can we understand the seeming unfairness in our world? How should we exist in, and respond to, an unfair world? Should we…
To be alive is to be on a lifelong mission of learning. That means that we will have regrets, mistakes, failures, setbacks and difficult challenges in our lives. While we think our past determines our present, it's actually how we relate to our past that matters. In this podcast, I talk about how we can change our relationship with a difficult past. I share ways we can reframe our pain,…
If we were to put all of our focus on one little ant, that ant would take up all of our attention and awareness. Similarly, even though there’s always so much happening within us and around us, if we put all of our focus on our thoughts, those thoughts will become the only things that exist to us. Similarly, when we become triggered because of traumatic events in our past, we…
In Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, we learn how Holocaust prisoners were more likely to survive if they felt there was some meaning to their senseless circumstances. In this evil place and time where life had no meaning, to survive meant finding and creating meaning wherever they could. For many, becoming hopeless meant certain death. Meaning and hope are like oxygen for the soul. So how do we…
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