Mindful

One thing about spiritual journeys is that they are not sexy. They are not brilliant. I did not become peaceful.

Like everything, humans included, technology resolves itself in contradiction. And yet, we must be mindful of what we are doing with technology, particularly when in the company of our children. Our emotional presence is the greatest gift we can offer our children.

Everything you do actively creates your experience, in the past, now and in the future. Practicing mindfulness in your everyday living and adopting a mindset of sustainability allows you to live in harmony with yourself and the world around you.

Meditation can change your life and your very sense of who you are. There is a reason it has been around for thousands of years and practiced by people from all walks of life and on all parts of the globe.

True friendship is about meeting in the place of truth, and loving and supporting each other there. Anything else is just a paler shade of polite.

To be strong is not to outrun sadness, but rather to learn to embrace it when it is here, to take good care of it so that it can heal. This is a warrior's strength, a wise parent's strength.

I had a lightbulb moment recently: I was feeling stressed about all the stuff I had to do (you probably know the feeling). After this went on for a while, I stepped back and kind of watched my mind and could see that I was thinking of these various tasks as things.

The Internet boom is creating a technological language around what used to just be part of basic human interaction and relatedness. Will we soon need to be advised to say hello when greeting another person, to hug our child when she cries?

What is unfolding when nothing much of anything is going on with you? I encourage you to check out for yourself what is going on at such times. For most of us, usually it is thinking. Thinking is going on. It takes lots of different forms.

Technology is encouraging our belief that open time, or free play as it used to be called in pre-school, means boredom. What happened to our delight in not knowing what might unfold? Where has our interest and faith in creating something out of nothing gone?

I suppose that I too am guilty (if that's the right word) of avoiding contact, or taking the easy way out. And so I asked myself, what are we all so afraid of? The easy way out of what?

Stop letting your harsh inner critic get the best of you. Negative thoughts about your body diverts your attention away from more important things.

My current favorite word is "mindful." Like many profound life skills, being mindful is profoundly easy. It is simply a matter of turning off the autopilot that we all run on.

Our sports and television habits have made us vicarious, virtual livers. Celebrity reality isn't the reality most of us live. By focusing on the reality of others, we neglect our own and wonder why we're unhappy.

When we become alert to our own judgments and thinking, we can slow down our thinking and talk back with a different voice, a voice that has the ability to argue and dispute.

Neither mind nor heart are bound to any particular place--they seem to be with us where ever we go. So by extension, home must always be with us too.

Forget brushing up on politics, if you want to make a hit at a cocktail party these days, you need to get with the yogi program. By "cocktail party," I mean an early-evening gathering of slender, well-muscled women.