Practices for Recovering Resilience
Cultivating Self-Compassion
Bring to mind a moment when it was relatively easy for you to “feel with” someone else’s heartache or sorrow. Your neighbor struggles to carry heavy bags of groceries up the driveway with a recently broken ankle. Your cousin lost his luggage two airports back before he arrived at your house for a weekend visit. […]
Breathing into Calm
Last week I had a temporary crown placed on a tooth that already had had a root canal. Officially, no nerve, no sensation in that tooth. But even with anesthetic to numb sensation in the neighboring teeth, I felt all kinds of poking and pulling and cold water and cold air. I didn’t want the […]
Hand on the Heart
(Having taught a workshop on The Neuroscience of Resilience and Renewal at Esalen last weekend, I can see how powerful the exercises offered in the e-newsletter are when people actually take the time to do them. Having turned in the book Bouncing Back to the publisher (to be published Spring 2013) I now have the […]
Self Compassion More Powerful than Self-Esteem
“People who are compassionate toward their failings and imperfections experience greater well-being that those who repeatedly judge themselves. The feelings of security and net worth provided by self-compassion are also highly stable, kicking in precisely when self-esteem falls down.” This is the intriguing premise – and promise – of Kristin Neff’s book on Self-Compassion, based […]
The How of Happiness
Resilience remains at the top of my list as a capacity essential to living a conscious and fulfilling life. Now that the manuscript for Bouncing Back is on the assembly line at the publisher, I’m catching up on so many other folks’ offerings of practices of healing and awakening that, research shows, also lead to […]
Positive Emotions Build Resilience
“Positive Emotions Build Resilience” is Chapter 14 in Bouncing Back. In researching the neuroscience of how and why, I came across the original research findings of Barbara Frederickson, a psychologist whose “broaden-and-build” theory has provided much of the scientific basis for the rapid growth of the positive psychology movement in recent years. Since turning in […]
Imagine: How Creativity Works
The book Imagine: How Creativity Works is Jonah Lehrer’s newest exploration of how creativity and innovation happen in our brains, in our interactions with others, in how we structure learning and productivity in the arts, in the classroom, in business. Discoveries: The most creative place in every office is not the boardroom or the lab […]
Compassionate Connection Deepens Resilience
Greetings! [a re-posting of the April 2008 e-newsletter. Thank you for your patience!] The morning I sent out last month’s e-newsletter, Shifting Perspectives Leads to Resilience, a close friend’s sister-in-law was having surgery for breast cancer, another friend was in the ER for a flare up of back pain, and a client’s house burned down. […]
Shifting Perspectives Leads to Resilience
Greetings! [A re-posting of the March 2008 e-newsletter on reslience. Next week a re-posting of the April 2008 e-newsletter on resilience. Many of the stories and exercises from way back then are finding their way into the book Bouncing Back. (The deadline is looming! Hence the re-posts.) May these offerings be timely and useful to […]
Reflections on Laughter
Greetings! BIG deadline coming up for Bouncing Back: Chapters One-Seven to the publisher by March 5, 2012. Hence, one new poetic offering, then a re-post appropriate to overcome disillusionment – the August 2009 newsletter on Laughter. Enjoy, and thank you for your patience! Prescription for the Disillusioned Come new to this day. Remove the rigid […]