Communication is the ultimate human connection. If you follow the "silverback tips" that I learned, you'll maximize your chances of successfully establishing rapport with others.

The people I admire are the ones who know how to ask me a good question. They know how to carry on a conversation by doing nothing more than asking something about, well, me. If you'd like to be a better questioner as a way of being a better connector, consider the following.

Listening and hearing are two very different things! If you ranked yourself on a scale where 10 is "I am fabulous at this" and 0 is "I am not sure ho...

What is it we really need when we are in pain? I believe that it is much simpler than we imagine. We need to be heard, understood and cared about. We need a friend to hold our pain with us, for a moment, without judgment, to hear and care about how we are, in truth.

While research indicates that training in forgiveness can actually bring about improvements in both well-being and health, actually forgiving can be easier said than done. If forgiveness is something you want to practice, try one of these strategies.

Both the play and the article made me wonder about the role of choice when it comes to seeing the glass as half full or half empty. Can we simply decide to be positive and then we'll feel better?

She didn't really know a thing about vipassana (or any form of meditation, for that matter), except the little I'd told her. She had no spiritual practice or exposure of any kind, no idea what she was in for. But it felt right, she said, something she had to do.

As we ignore our painful feelings or push them away, they impede our flowing aliveness and obscure the pure awareness that is our source. By not listening to our inner life, we cut ourselves off from reality. What remains is a diminished self, an unreal other.

We have, as a culture, grown increasingly deaf to our inner selves. With frenzied minds, surface attachments, and noise levels on the rise, we are moving ever farther from tuning in to the temples of our bodies.

This week's poem is about what we hear in the spaces between all the noise. All meditation practices and all beginnings of art start with such a listening.

Meditation is mobilizing attentiveness on purpose. What we pay attention to grows, like watering a newly-planted tree. As we use this capacity for awareness it grows stronger, a kind of meditative muscle.

When I do it right I experience listening as prayer. Listening brings me into the moment, into the stillness, for if I am really listening, I am not thinking.

Whether we using music as a source of joy and inspiration, a medicine for healing deep wounds, a therapy for physical rehabilitation, or a lifeline for surviving trauma and loss, music is undeniably one of mankind's greatest healing modalities.

I find playing music to be one of my strongest personal therapies, not only from the state of being I can achieve while playing, but also from the energetic balancing and mood-enhancing effect on my mind, body and spirit throughout the day.