February 26, 2015

Building Resiliency through Emotional Awareness

  Resiliency. The ability to spring back from and successfully adapt to adversity. A return to balance. Emotional Buoyancy. Flexibility. Are we what we feel? While that may be a rhetorical question, there is truth behind it.  Because advancing emotional understanding is a central theme in my work, these pages have often explored many facets of expanding emotional awareness.  First […]
February 25, 2015

The Neurobiology of Mindfulness – Reshaping Your Brain

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed it also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day.”   Sara Lazar, PhD, MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program There’s now significant research showing that in just eight weeks of daily meditation you can change the part of your brain […]
January 8, 2015

Start with 5 Minutes of Meditation a Day to Change the Way You Work

How about 5 minutes a day of deep rest? 10 minutes of peace? 15 minutes of renewal? 20 minutes of rejuvenation? Yes, you can. Meditation can change the way you work – and change the way you feel about life in the process. Knowledge about the benefits of meditation isn’t new. Pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn began to mainstream meditation into […]
January 3, 2015

Living in the 4 Rooms of Wellness

This post was inspired by the simple, enduring work by the late author, Rumer Godden whose work has touched many lives with its wisdom. More than ever we understand that life is more than the endless to-do lists and bucket lists we create and then relentlessly pursue to achieve “success.”  As the poet Yeats said, “Life is not a problem to be […]
October 6, 2014

Listening to Empathy

 “The existentialists have constantly reminded us that what is worth understanding and knowing is our existence, the human condition, and that engagement and involvement are superior to a detached stance. Our mirror neurons show that we are not alone, but are biologically wired and evolutionary designed to be deeply interconnected with one another.” Marco Iacaboni, Mirroring People: The Science of […]
August 11, 2014

Stop Driving Yourself to Distraction: Reclaiming Your Sanity

“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”   ~ R.D Laing The Scottish psychologist, R.D Laing wrote these prescient words in 1970.  In our work we see an alarming increase of the effects of overwork and overwhelm on our clients.  Many of the […]
October 4, 2012

Impatience and Frustration ~ From the Emotions Series

‘We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.’~ Voltaire  Pick an emotion – any emotion that characterizes how you feel during your workday. When you become aware of what you feel while you work, which emotion do you experience most often? Impatience.  Frustration.  That’s what most people I work with choose.  If you were able to select […]
December 30, 2010

Stepping Out of the Time Famine

    “Many of life’s puzzles can be resolved by simply understanding our own time perspectives and those of others.”       Philip Zimbardo, Social Psychologist   This is not a piece about time management. Or resolutions or more productivity. No lists here on ways to squeeze in more task time. Time scarcity isn’t the issue – after all what did you […]
December 30, 2009

Being Patient

Is there a more resourceful, useful and enabling emotion than patience? The act of being patient is most definitely behavioral – and it requires skill. But patience is also a feeling state – one with very specific (and beneficial) physiological markers. When we are patient, our mind is relatively clear. It is the opposite of a confused, jumbled state of thoughts. […]