Dr. Vivek Murthy, 21st Surgeon General of the United States and a Yogi Bryan, a wild man meditator we recently discovered, share their quick meditations for regaining connection and calm. Similar practices, VERY different approaches.
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Dr. Vivek Murthy, 21st Surgeon General of the United States and a Yogi Bryan, a wild man meditator we recently discovered, share their quick meditations for regaining connection and calm. Similar practices, VERY different approaches.
Read MoreThe New York Times’ Ezra Klein’s conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield yielded many remarkable insights. But what dazzled us most was her reading of her poem A Cedary Fragrance, and the story behind her writing it, and its big lesson and challenge.
Read MoreImprovised Life’s vast archive is liberally peppered with posts about guerilla actions: small-scale actions that deploy subversive messages in unexpected ways. A recent one in the middle of a busy New York City crosswalk gets our admiration for its daring, power and simplicity.
Read MoreIn addition to some interesting music, we found a fat nugget in “Shocking the Consciousness”, Amanda Petrushich’s piece on 80-year-old radical/New Age composer Laraaji in The New Yorker: His online laughter meditations designed to help you generate your own medicinal sound.
Read MorePsychologist, yogi, spiritual teacher Ram Dass’ devised a simple method for softening judgments of the people around us.
Read MoreOver the years, we’ve come to to view illness as a path that can, if we are lucky or open to it, provide a lot of illumination and healing. When we mentioned this to our remarkable physical therapist Rachel Miller Williams she nodded and offered this surprising view.
Read MoreWe found many compelling ideas in this New York Times interview with Chloe Cooper Jones about her new book Easy Beauty and the disconnect between “our real self and the way that self is perceived”. We’ve been trying out the remarkable technique she learned that she found provides unexpected “agency and peace and power”.
Read MoreEvery birthday of late, wise man Kevin Kelly shares things he learned the hard way in, through living. The lists always offer big fat nuggets of wisdom and illumination, and many things to try. Our favorite addresses our frequent dilemma of not being able to decide between two distinct choices, usually when our linear brain is packed with logical arguments for each one that leave us boggled.
Read MoreJust a reminder how much can happen when you take the day off…
Read MoreBehavioral scientist Michelle Drouin thinks it’s fine to be dependent on your phone — it’s a useful and illuminating tool — and she doesn’t get with the idea of digital detox. If she feels her screen time is out of balance, she uses a simple practice to shift regain time doing things that mean more to her.
Read MoreEvery week, Suleika Jaouad, creator of The Isolation Journal newsletter “for people seeking to transform life’s interruptions into creative grist”, gives a prompt for readers to think or write about. This surprising prompt about love hit home.
Read MoreThe most helpful 50 minutes I’ve spent recently was listening to What’s Happening in Our Nervous Systems, a podcast from On Being with Krista Tippet. Clinical psychologist Christine Runyan discusses the physiological effects of the past years of pandemic and the profound changes its wrought in daily life. Knowing “what’s been happening on a creaturely level”, I’ve felt better, more grounded, despite the escalation of a new variant.
Read MoreWhat if the future of well-being is about “tipping the scales in the world away from fear and toward love”? asks On Being’s Krista Tippett in The Future of Well-Being. This simple premise feels like a guidepost for navigating the extraordinary elevation of fear the past years have brought, wrought by the pandemic, politics fueled by animosity, climate change. We were particularly struck by the idea of “microdosing of well-being”.
Read MoreArtist, composer John Cage was also a remarkably powerful writer. Over years of reading him we’ve found ourself transformed by even a sentence or two. This one landed in a similar way……We found that shifting the flow of words ever-so-slightly had a surprising effect.
Read MoreInstead of a mirror over the sink, this bathroom has a framed charcoal portrait. We wondered what it would be like to see an artwork and not dive right into our own image, as we all do first thing in the morning? So we tried it and found it to be a surprisingly potent guerrilla action…
Read MoreFrequent contributor Susan Dworski threw this compelling video over my transom, accompanied by her thoughts about the apps she’s been seeing lately selling all manner of salvation. She asks a big question and points to a surprising path…
Read MoreI rely on my tightly edited instagram feed to bring ideas and wonders right to me when I need them. Then a powerful quote from Saul Bellow sparked an essential question.
Read More“The pace we choose when we walk can be decisive for how we think”, writes explorer and philospher Erling Kagge in Walking One Step at a Time. Apply it more broadly and it becomes a startling life principle that can profoundly shift everyday experience…
Read More“Languishing” perfectly describes the unsettling emotional state so many of us find ourselves in a solid year into the pandemic. We looked deeper into its meaning, and found insight in art, music, poetry…
Read MoreAfter David Saltman described his remarkable experience seeing Alan Watts give a talk in the 1970s, we hunted down some video of the essential astonishing lesson. Which led to way more…
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