Posts from the ‘Be’ Category

One Bird, One Stone

A few years ago Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling Upon Happiness) published a study in Science reporting that people spend 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing.  According to the authors, “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind….the ability to think about what is not happening is a [human] cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.” Read more

Smile At a Stranger Every Day

“Understand that no one is greater than another.  Feel it.  Practice helping one another.  We are all rowing the same boat.” – Brian Weiss, MD

Many Lives, Many Masters — a classic book about reincarnation (yes, reincarnation) — has been siting on my bedside table for the past week, and I finally finished it last night.  A friend gave me her copy after we talked about past life regression as a healing technique, and I was eager to learn more.  For years I’ve found the idea of reincarnation comforting, not due to any scientific explanation or personal experience, but just because of the hope it offers about what could be…what might be. Read more

The Moments That Make Up Our Lives

Someone asked me yesterday to think about what the five most defining moments in my life have been.  My mind darted amongst a number of relatively benign events — boarding my first solo flight out of the U.S., leaving for college, being with my grandmother shortly before her death, falling in love with my (now) husband, becoming a mother — a set of moments I’m trying to let sit in my mind to see if any more interesting or surprising ones stick out as I continue to think through this question.  After all, maybe one of those moments should be nearly failing Calculus, sleeping in a train station in Venice, making a dear friend cry, sobbing over heartbreak, or going to a shrink. Read more

On Compassion

There was a lot of talk at last year’s Wisdom 2.0 conference about compassion + mindfulness being more powerful than mindfulness alone. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I’ve been trying to find time and space to quiet my mind and worrying that it’s selfish to take this time away from my family or my other relationships or other responsibilities, and decided to dig a bit deeper into the research around compassion.  I found a great summary of the emerging data on UC-Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center’s site.  It’s way more thorough than anything I’d put together myself, so I thought I’d post the highlights here: Read more

A T-Shaped Life

Ever heard of a T-shaped person?  This has nothing to do with being pear-shaped or apple-shaped and finding jeans to fit accordingly; but rather, it’s a metaphor often used in the workplaces to help hire, build teams, and grow organizations.  The top of the “T” represents breadth, or working knowledge of lots of different things and the ability to collaborate across disciplines.  The vertical part of the T represents skills and expertise in a single area (like engineering or knitting or product design or ice cream making).  Read more