Radical Acceptance
Tara Brach author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha in the interview Becoming an Inner Peace Activist with Tricycle Magazine, Summer 2003: Radical Acceptance is a different way of framing the Buddhist teachings of mindfulness and compassion. It is the capacity to clearly recognize our inner experience and embrace […]
Prisoners of the Past
Jawaharlal Nehru writes in The Discovery of India, There is a stillness and everlastingness about the past; it changes not and has a touch of eternity, like a painted picture or a statue in bronze or marble. Unaffected by the storms and upheavals of the present, it maintains its dignity and repose and tempts the […]
The Perception of Love
Viktor E. Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning, Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can be fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits […]
Concentration and Wisdom
Leigh Brasington writes in Focus Comes First, Buddhist teachings can be divided into three parts: sila, samadhi, and pranjna: ethical conduct, concentration, and wisdom. Or to put it into the vernacular: clean up your act, concentrate your mind, and use your concentrated mind to investigate reality.
The Process of Creative Thinking
Several decades years ago, Professor of Psychology Sarnoff Mednick defined the process of creative thinking: The forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specific requirements or are in some way useful. The more mutually remote the elements of the new combination, the more creative the process or solution.
The Power to Choose Your Response
Bestselling American author Stephen Covey writes about Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in You’ve GOT to Read This Book!, a compilation by Gay Hendricks and Jack Canfield: I read Man’s Search for Meaning first, around 1962. The biggest understanding that I gained from Frankl was that you have the power to choose your response […]
Goals Should Be Few
From Peter Drucker’s The Five Most Imortant Questions – A Self Assessment Tool, If you have more than five goals, you have none. You’re simply spreading yourself too thin. Goals make it absolutely clear where you will concentrate resources for results-the mark of an organization serious about success. Goals flow from mission, aim the organization […]
Loving Communication
Thich Nhat Hanh in Creating True Peace: Ending Conflict in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community and The World: To have peace, we must first have understanding, and understanding is not possible without gentle, loving communication. Therefore, restoring communication is an essential practice for peace. Communication is the foundation, the flowering of our practice of nonviolence.
Challenging Lookism
The Australian author Robert Hoge, who describes himself as “the ugliest person you’ve never met,” speaks to the biased treatment toward physically unattractive people: I’m happy to concede the point … that some people look more aesthetically pleasing than others. Let’s grant that so we can move to the important point—so what? Some kids are […]
Volatility and Stock Prices
From Warren Buffett’s 50th annual shareholder letter for Berkshire Hathaway: Stock prices will always be far more volatile than cash-equivalent holdings. Over the long term, however, currency-denominated instruments are riskier investments—far riskier investments—than widely-diversified stock portfolios that are bought over time and that are owned in a manner invoking only token fees and commissions. That […]