The Foundations of Conditioning Human Adaptability and Culture Human beings are the most remarkably adaptable species on Earth. We are blessed with the ability to adapt to any environment, location, and situation. A baby growing up in Spain will adapt to her culture and learn Spanish. A baby growing up in the Arctic will learn to icefish and speak Inuit. This adaptability gives us the variety of rich cultures and…
Some people have such a loud voice in their head that they are unaware they have a voice at all. It has become so noisy and constant that they lack the awareness to hear it because they are completely lost in their thoughts. Only when a person sits down to meditate and turns their attention inward do they discover the presence of this unrelenting voice. This voice is inside us,…
Mindful Insight Why Do We Get Hurt When People Say Mean Things? When someone says something mean to us, we are affected by it because we are identifying with the ego. We are reacting from a state of mind, which is unstable and easily perturbed by the words of others. When we are firmly rooted in the present moment, we realize that words are just vibrations in the air, and…
Boredom may feel like a natural emotion or viewpoint, but nothing could be further from the truth. Boredom is born out of a resistance to the present moment. It is not a natural state to be bored. Boredom does not naturally arise out of a beautifully still, silent moment. Has any wild animal ever been bored?Core Reflection"Boredom arises out of a comparative mindset conditioned by living in time. When we…
Core Reflection"Suppression and repression only feed negative thoughts more energy. Distraction and escape just keep them bubbling under the surface. To fully heal, we have to look at our pain, explore it, and shine an even brighter light."Usually what happens when we have those unwanted, intrusive, misery-inducing thoughts, is that we are trying to suppress something that is clearly there and trying to express itself. Suppression and repression only feed…
Hope is a funny thing. We like it, we crave it, and we feel we need it. But when things don’t go as we hoped, we suffer. Getting our hopes up and to have them crushed, over and over again, can be agonizing.The Paradox of HopingSo, what are we to do?The problem with hope is that wanting it causes our feelings of hopelessness. When we focus on what we want,…
Stop Outsourcing Your HappinessWhen we expect others to make us feel better, we become the outsourcer of our own happiness. And while it can be very healing to have close people in our lives who we can share our problems with, sharing can all too easily turn into dumping. When we dump all our problems onto others with the expectation of them making us feel better, we are not valuing the…
We live in a very left-brain-dominant world. We put so much focus on quantitative things instead of qualitative ones. We obsess over having the right amount of money, the right possessions, the right-sized family, the right-sized house, everything that society tells us we’re supposed to want. And we never focus on the really important part, which is the qualitative. How do we spend our money? How are our relationships, not…
Everyone Is Your Guru Over the last 10 years, I’ve had hundreds of gurus and mentors, shamans, tribal chiefs, who have imparted so much of their wisdom to me. Many monks and nuns in Buddhism and other religions have shared their knowledge with me. And the truth is, every single person I meet, every plant I see, every butterfly and ant, every rock, chair, table—everything—is my guru, my mentor, my…
We spend our whole lives trying to become somebody. Somebody important. Somebody respected. Somebody successful. But what if that pursuit is the very thing keeping us fragmented? We spend our whole lives trying to be somebody. We want to be somebody in business. We want to be somebody's husband or wife. We want to be someone's parent. We want to be somebody's great kid. We want to be somebody who's…
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