Mindfulness
My answer to this is, “Yes”. But this immediately leads to questions about what I mean. So . . . The Terminology I think there is a difference between our experience and our reflection on our experience and our talking about our experience. When people speak of “no-self” this is referring to an experience. Terminology [...]
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Today is blog action day. Once a year bloggers around the world write about one topic of social concern. This year it is water. This is a difficult issue to do anything meaningful about as an individual (it involves large utilities for those of us in the West). The best resource I know for water [...]
Our western culture emphasises linear rationality (such things as analysis, logic, sequence, prioritising and planning). So I’ll start our tour of the world of self-development here: it is a place that we are all familiar with – even if we don’t like it terribly much. The emphasis on linear rationality has lead to a reaction [...]
Continue reading about The Rough Guide to Self Development Part Two Our Experience and Our Thinking
Just a quick link to a post on mindfulness and pain management. It gives specific instances of the practices the author uses to manage pain and also mentions unhelpful advice (which lacks compassion). If you are managing chronic pain – or know someone who is – I think this is well worth reading. Would you [...]
A few days ago I reviewed Chris Edgar’s Inner Productivity in a post called How to Be Productive and Still be Kind to Yourself. I think it is a great book. Chris has taken mindfulness and applied it to productivity. Instead of “discipline, not procrastinating” and so on (which usually amount to being unkind to [...]
For me mindfulness is being attentive to what you are doing. Not scatty and not obsessive with a relative stable focus. It is ‘accepting’ of ‘what is’. A contrasting position is: Get out of your comfort zone! Don’t accept what is! Create what you want! This is what I explore in my guest post on [...]
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To my mind, the most key aspect of developing inner productivity is the attitude I ask you to bring to relating to your inner experience. I mean an attitude of accepting whatever thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, beliefs, or other inner experiences arise in your work, and of staying curious about what value they may have [...]
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It’s been quite a while since I did a round-up of good posts from the blogosphere – and lately there have been quite a few. First up, diving in deep. A couple of posts on dealing with our shadow. They both mention Debbie Ford’s The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. Dealing with the shadow [...]
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This is just a quick note to alert you to a very thought provoking post. Meditation is usually taken to be at worst harmless and usually very beneficial. In my experience meditation has been beneficial. This post is about the experience of a zen practitioner who found that meditation was (at least) not enough. His [...]
Image by auspices Edward de Bono has authored a small library of books demonstrating that our brain functions by spotting patterns. (He sets out the theoretical base in Mechanism of Mind.) One implication of this is that we tend to spot the same patterns – so we need, on occasion, to deliberately look for what [...]
Continue reading about Wellbeing from Mindlessness (in defence of categories and habits)
