When we fall for someone or something (face it, human beings are so easily lovestruck we can fall for a car, a cell phone, or a brand of body wash), we feel pulled in the direction of the love object. When it’s a person, we feel a little lightness in our head, and warmth in various parts of our body. We can literally become weak in the knees. We are pulled out of ourselves and want to connect, so we flirt or touch or dance; or more....
But this decision didn’t only affect him. His partner Jan Crowley, though supportive of his right to die, says she could barely make it through the day once Morcos had made the decision to, at some point, end his life. But then something changed for Crowley. The couple was featured in “Nagui’s Choice,” two CBC Radio White Coat, Black Art interviews with Dr. Brian Goldman. During one interview, Crowley says that initially, she felt a lot of anxiety and dread, just waiting to hear that her husband had killed himself....
In 2004, Aldrich herself received the news that her husband, Gordon, had a tumor in his spinal column. It’s a day she vividly remembers. “It was the middle of a Friday afternoon,” she recalls. “Our lives had been changed forever, and we wanted information fast, and to start fighting Gordon’s cancer right away. To add to the pressure, he was in terrible pain that needed immediate attention. After hours of bargaining and begging, we were told that our earliest chance for an appointment was still four weeks out....
In the study, Mindfulness-Based Attention Training (MBAT) co-developers Dr. Amishi Jha, Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Contemplative Neuroscience Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative at the University of Miami, and Scott Rogers, founder and director of the Institute for Mindfulness Studies and the University of Miami School of Law’s Mindfulness in Law Program, were curious to see whether professional trainers who work with military personnel but have no background in mindfulness, could successfully teach MBAT to soldiers....
Think you’re destined to respond the same way to the same old triggers? While understanding the science to turn around your bad mood can be helpful, as well as mindfulness practices, sometimes lending a good old helping hand does the trick, too. Caroline Adams Miller is a Maryland-based author and psychologist specializing in Applied Positive Psychology. She says one of the easiest ways to rebound from a bad mood is to help someone out....
What do you do when you encounter something that really scares you? 30% Can’t move an inch—but they’re dying to get away. Thankfully, another 24% have already made it outta the room! 13% have a compulsion to get their feet off the floor—especially in a theater, and 10% scream like a bear cub calling for its mother. Some answers we liked: • Hold my breath • DO SOMETHING—move, yell, grab my husband!...
It’s wonderful that her poetry has won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award as well a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement –but, it’s it hard for me to imagine that any of these rewards as prestigious as they may be, were at the top of her dream list. Her ecstasy is palatable in far more simple prizes, like watching a grasshopper eating sugar out of the palm of her hand....
Even so, I can’t stand it. There’s no good reason for my annoyance, but there it is every morning, as dependable as the sunrise and my daughters’ hunger rages if I don’t put enough food in their lunch bags. And then one morning a thought suddenly popped into my mind, emerging unbidden through the cloud of crankiness. I am so lucky. Within seconds, those four words bloomed throughout my awareness, and all I could think about was how lucky I am....
2020 has been a big year for all of us. Whether you’re looking to embrace difficult emotions, strengthen your concentration or feel more connected to others, you’ll find our most popular meditations here. The Most Popular Meditations of 2020 1. A 10-Minute Nourishing Breath Meditation In this practice, Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein bring our awareness to the breath as an anchor to the present moment. Breathing practice can help cultivate self-love and compassion in accepting things the way they are....
In this 5-minute video, Braincraft host Vanessa Hill dips into psychology research to highlight the factors that impact our choices. Here are three reasons we make the wrong decisions, and the solutions to take your decision-making confidence to the next level: 1. You choose something you’ve already invested in, even if it’s not the best option “We like to think that we always make rational decisions, but science shows that’s not always the case,” Hill explains....
Since touching each other brings a multitude of emotional, physical, and social health benefits you’d think we’d be cuddling all the time. Yet our culture is touch-deprived. One study noted that dining companions in France touched each other an average of 110 times during the meal, but Americans only twice. The next time you are someplace romantic, notice how few people are holding hands. My friend says he wishes I’d never pointed this out to him....
A 12-Minute Meditation on the BASICS of Mindful Eating B – Breathe and belly check for hunger and satiety before you eat Take a few deep breaths and relax the body. As you’re doing this, check in with your belly. Are there sensations of physical hunger? How hungry are you? What are you hungry for? You might want food. You might be thirsty. You might be hungry for something entirely different than food....
“We act like wind-up toys, repeatedly bumping into the same walls, never realizing there may be an open door just to our left or our right,” writes Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, in Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. Her book is a guide to life’s trickiest emotions: not how to avoid them but how to learn to move through them....
In one sense, a retreat is a laboratory for creating the conditions most conducive to meditation. It’s also a microcosm of life itself, a chance to observe deeply how things drift in and out of discord, regardless of how much effort we’ve put into creating an ideal environment. In the quietest place on Earth, a feather dropping can ring out like a gunshot. A minor ache, likewise, can scream like a broken limb....
While most of the psychological literature has painted such mind wandering as a detrimental “failure of executive control” or a “dysfunctional cognitive state,” a new study led by Paul Seli, a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow working in the lab of Dan Schacter, suggests that in some cases there’s no harm in allowing the mind to wander. The first-of-its-kind study showed that, when performing a task that didn’t demand constant attention, people were able to strategically allow their minds to wander without an impact on task performance....
Today the daughters of these runaway moms, having arrived at the shores of middle age, are taking flight, too. But they’re not, by and large, dumping their husbands. They’re not looking to the job market with expectations of liberation. Instead, they’re fleeing to yoga, imitating flight in the downward-gazing contortion called the crow position. They’re striving, through exquisite new adventures in internal fine-tuning, to feel more deeply, live more meaningfully, better inhabit each and every moment of each and every day and attain “a more superior, evolved state of being,” as Claire Dederer puts it in her just-published book, “Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses,” the latest installment in the burgeoning literature of postboomer-female midlife crisis....
What makes this post most interesting is that they followed up their report with these last two lines: “So! Next time you are in pain, try out a swear or two, like “the s-word” or “the f-word.” And if that doesn’t work, just meditate.” They then linked out to another story they’d written about a study about how meditation can be more effective than morphine. Read Mind over Pain, our news item about sensitivity to pain and meditation....
2. Try a Self-Compassion Break with Kristin Neff and Chris Germer As much as the good moments are a part of life, so too are the difficult ones—and self-compassion can allow us to soften our approach to difficult events and emotions. While this may seem obvious, it’s so easy to forget. This guided practice from Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer can be a pleasant reminder to apply the three core components of self-compassion—mindfulness, common humanity, and kindness—when life gets rough....
