Even though the word "holiday" is supposed to evoke images of carefree fun and frolic, we all know the truth: The holiday season is one of the most stressful times of the year. Amidst all the travel, parties, family gatherings and potential overindulgence in food -- or the pointed lack...

Recently I read about a new movie about a person with polio. "Wow. I'm really lucky not to have gotten polio," I thought, for the first time ever. A tingly wave of gratitude washed over me for functioning limbs that can run, dance and kick a football.

Come to think...

It happens all the time: There you are at a cocktail party holding forth, eliciting appreciative smiles and nods. Life is good. Then someone asks out of the blue, "So what is this whole Tao thing about?"

Aw man. Not that again.

Happens all the time, but it doesn't have...

The solo show of Banksy protege Mr Brainwash, aka Thierry Guetta, opened on Sunday in the cavernous space of the Old Sorting Office of London's West End. Thousands of fans had queued up in anticipation of the 2pm opening of the free show and the promise of 250 limited-edition prints...

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a yoga festival conveniently located right down the street from me in Santa Monica. On the first day of this Tadasana Festival, the co-founder (and yoga instructor) Tommy Rosen was conducting a provocatively titled class -- "Getting High: Yoga and the Infinite...

With Valentine's Day approaching, here's an interesting letter I got recently, applying to both men and women:

Hi Dr. Ali,

I just bought and read your book on my Kindle this weekend and as a 28-year-old Persian girl born in America, was wondering how you think your principles would...

When I first wrote The Tao of Dating for Women, its subtitle was How to Embrace Your Inner Goddess and Find the Fulfillment You Deserve. Aside from not rolling trippingly off the tongue, I found that many women took issue with the word goddess. Whether it set an impossible...

Meet my friend Michelle -- a beautiful, sophisticated and exceptionally intelligent 30-year-old woman in New York City. Men are falling all over her left and right, but not too many of them can go toe-to-toe with her. Every once in a while, though, a keeper comes along. That's when she...

For 8 years now, I've been running HUGS for THUGS / Enter to Grow in Wisdom, a sendoff event for rising Harvard freshmen. One of the biggest pieces of advice that I dispense to them is to take language classes. Universities generally do a fantastic job of teaching...

I believe that smart, fabulous, successful, attractive women like yourself deserve fulfilling, deliriously happy love lives. Sometimes, though, unintentional behaviors ruin one's chances in courtship.

In compiling this list, I'm speaking as an author who's been on the receiving end of hundreds of guys' letters on their dating woes --...

In the last installment of this article, we covered the first three items on the checklist. To recap, they were:

1) Do not say yes if you're deeply in love.
2) Do not marry a man you've known less than 18 months.
3) Get a prenuptial...

On my birthday, I had a strangely pertinent thought: what's the probability of being born?

In a recent talk at TEDx San Francisco, Mel Robbins, a riotously funny self-help author, mentioned that scientists estimate the probability of your being born at about one in 400 trillion.

I'm happy to report that I'm riled up again. This is a good thing, because it makes me do useful stuff, like finishing books and writing this here article.

It's not a good thing because usually what gets me riled up is a good woman stuck in a bad spot.

He's been an employee, he's been a boss, he's been a consultant to some of the biggest companies in the world, and he's seen it all. In his new book Workarounds that Work: How to Conquer Anything that Stands in Your Way at Work, Russell Bishop provides something...

People often ask me about what I'm really good at. And I don't blame them -- when you're this talented, it's hard to cite just one thing. Mastery of French and Szechuan cuisine, speaking 37 languages, raising award-winning yaks, climbing every major peak on Earth and Mars, creating bunnies out...

Russell Bishop shares an inspiring story from his new book "Workarounds that Work: How to Conquer Anything that Stands in Your Way at Work." A young aerospace engineer is caught in a dilemma: whether to listen to the world's leading expert, who tells him his prototype is unworkable,...

A little while ago I caught up with Prof Gary Small of UCLA to get a story or two from his new book The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist's Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases which he co-wrote with his wife Gigi Vorgan. He...

Last year, three undergraduates from Cornell committed suicide. Another from Yale leapt from the top of the Empire State Building. Yet another from Bard College and five high-schoolers from elite Palo Alto high schools also took their own lives.

It seems tragic that these bright, promising students, after having dodged...

For the past seven years, I've been running an event for the local Harvard Club where recent graduates of Harvard College give their best advice to freshmen about to leave for school -- on academics, extracurriculars, social life and career planning. We just held it last weekend --...

There have been a number of excellent books on happiness published in the past few years, and I have been consuming them avidly. Not only do I use their principles to help my students and hypnotherapy clients lead happier lives, but I also enjoy applying the principles to my own...