August 15, 2006 – 11:55 am
I spent last week in Estes Park, Colorado with my husband, three kids, and a rotating complement of family and friends. We rented a vacation home near the YMCA of the Rockies and experienced the beauty of Rocky Mountain National Park. On Sunday, we took a leisurely half-mile walk around Bear Lake with the whole […]
In Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns proposes that satisfaction lies not in simple hedonism, but in feeding our brains with challenging, novel experiences. Last week, I was exploring how to maintain enduring passion when you’re a serial enthusiast. I concluded that keeping things new was the secret. In […]
Les Orchard confesses he’s a serial enthusiast, flitting from nanoproject to nanoproject. He enjoys the process more than the results. How very mindful. He says:
So what’s my point in all of this? Mostly just writing to think this notion through. I’m sure this isn’t a terribly original self-discovery, but it’s one that I wanted to […]
When I talk about mindfulness, I mean more than just noticing what’s happening at a given moment. When I seek mindfulness, I’m seeking the following qualities of attention:
Present moment focus
Sensory awareness
Nonjudgment
Process orientation
Acceptance
Here is a real-life example of mindfulness in action. I suffer from migraines. Every few weeks, I feel a stirring inside my head. I […]
Don’t count on mindless consumerism these days. We consumers have so many ways of figuring out what we need and getting it at a good price. When I want to buy some new gadget, I check reviews on CNET and ZDNet. Long before that, I’ve been made aware of the whole landscape of possibilities by […]
Is there something you wish you were expert at? Tennis or golf? Web design? Coding with Ruby or Ajax, perhaps Java? Writing, fiction or non? Parenting, maybe? The most exciting news I’ve read recently says that if you want to be an expert and you put in the time and effort, you can do it. […]
Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has been exploring mindfulness and recently read Ellen Langer’s book on that subject. Though Langer takes a nondenominational approach in her book, many of her ideas overlap significantly with Buddhist principles, such as her perspective on categories, described here by Merlin:
The topic of “categories” is critical in this book, with […]
