Swati Desai, Ph.D., LCSW

Since the time I wrote my blog on The Huffington Post, "The Importance of Being Unhappy," I have been thinking about the importance of the negative instincts leading to unhappiness: envy, cruelty, greed, intimidating anger, hunger for power, and narcissistic self-centeredness. I have been tormented by the renewed...

Shinzen Young, a well-known meditation teacher, uses a very apt metaphor for describing the difference between physical pain and suffering. Suffering is like the area of a rectangle, the base of the rectangle is the physical pain and the height of the rectangle is the resistance we create...

Steve Jobs was often criticized for his apparent lack of compassion. He was not known for making generous philanthropic donations to worthy causes. The 2006 article in Wired magazine expressed this feeling in the commentary titled "Jobs vs. Gates: Who's the Star?". Eyebrows were raised because for a...

We all have a secret life -- that includes you too!

You are like Gurov in Chekov's story "Lady with a Lap Dog", invested in a deeply secretive and adulterous love with Anna and unable to let go of it. "He had two lives: one, open, seen and...

I am a confused mother!

I am a mother who does not want to simply uphold the way I was raised, but I am not able to fully embrace the American way of raising children. I am a mother who does not have a strong conviction that there is one...

President Obama had a hugely successful trip to India, a country that shares several political and economic values with the U.S. Amongst other things, he had an impressive question-and-answer session with students in Mumbai who asked him tough questions. One student referred to the modern, materialistic frame of...

Lately, I have felt a lot of anger and aggression in the air -- no need to list the reasons, just think about financial insecurity and the middle class. This irritable mood (sometimes fueled by depression) reflects in people being on the edge even in their...

We are living in very confusing times. On one hand we are expected to be nonjudgmental (as in accepting, respectful, compassionate and not rejecting in demeaning way) in personal, social and politically correct settings. On the other hand, our increasingly diverse world implies that we are constantly bombarded with unfamiliar...

Lately, there is an explosion of research and writing on "how to be happy." Spiritualists such as the Dalai Lama, psychologists and academicians such as Martin Seligman, Jonathan Haidt, Sonja Lyubomirsky, the list goes on. Time magazine published a cover...