Emotional self-mastery is not about never having certain emotions, it is about becoming very skillful with them. For example, in Buddhist psychology, there is an important difference between anger and indignation: anger arises out of powerlessness, while indignation arises out of power. Because of that difference, when you feel angry,...

An easy way to get an injection of self-confidence is to attend a "motivational speech" where some guy speaking perfect English without my funny accent shouts at you and tells you how great you are: "You can succeed, you are great, you can do it!" And everybody claps. And we...

Meditation requires a balance of effort and relaxation. Too much effort makes meditation tiring and unsustainable, while too little effort causes you to lose your grip on your attention. The classical analogy for this balance is having just the right tension on the strings of a sitar. If the strings...

Life is funny. The biggest joke in life is that, after all that has been done in the pursuit of happiness, it turns out that sustainable happiness is achievable simply by bringing attention to one's breath.

If you practice bringing a firm and gentle attention to your breath, after a...

Letting go is one of the most important skills a meditator picks up on her way to enlightenment. Letting go is so important it is one of the essential foundations of meditation practice. As usual, the Zen tradition has the funniest way of articulating this key insight. In the words...

One of the best analogies I have ever come across for meditation practice is a baby learning to walk.

I remember my daughter taking her first step when she was about nine months old. One beautiful step. But one step was all she could manage before she would fall, in...

My monsters.

Greed, hatred, envy, anger, agitation, egoistic pride, lust, etc.
They come in different forms, shapes, colors and sizes.

Over the years, I have learned to deal with them.
I do that by letting go.

First, I let go of my wish to control or...

Most meditation instructors I know tell their students to sit for 10 minutes a day. I tell my students to do that if they can, but if they can't, just commit to one single Mindful breath a day (see: Just One Breath a Day). A friend jokingly called...

As an instructor, I found it fairly easy to get people started on Mindfulness practice. I just need to show them the brain science, explain the benefits, introduce a short sitting, and viola, people get it. That's the good news.

The bad news is after the first few days, many...

Most evenings, before we sleep, my young daughter and I sit in Mindfulness together for two minutes. I like to joke that two minutes is optimal for us because that is the attention span of a child and an engineer. For two minutes a day, we quietly enjoy being alive...

Over the years, I've developed a 4-step plan to deal with my distress. I hope this would be helpful to you too.

My 4 steps are:
1. Know when you're not in pain.
2. Do not feel bad about feeling bad.
3. Do not feed the monsters.

A long time ago, I came across this joke:

Once, a disciple asked, "Master, is associating with people half the holy life?"

The Master replied, "No, associating with people is the whole of holy life".

This joke probably started as a misreading of the famous Upaddah Sutta in Buddhism, where...