A Mindful Life

Having recently finished the masterfully written novel, The DaVinci Code, I became intrigued by the Divine Proportion, also known as Phi, or the Golden Mean. The number Phi is 1.618033987 (with the lowercase phi being 0.6180339887), and it is manifested in numerous ways. This is how it came to be known in the Renaissance as [...]

A name is a road. –Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (1978)

From the Sunday Herald: More and more parents in America are naming their children after the most sought-after cars, popular perfumes and expensive drinks. Among the most common were 273 boys and 298 girls called Armani; 269 Chanels (all girls); 24 girls called Porsche and six male Timberlands. Also popular were Nike, Chivas Regal, Champagne, [...]

Pain is an event. …Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare of reliving unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. –Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye,” Sister Outsider (1984)

The first noble truth in Buddhism is usually stated as “Life is suffering.” At its face value, this statement seems so negative that people (especially Westerners, I think) struggle against it, as if accepting this truth is resignation, a call to abandon optimism. I have also seen it stated as “Suffering exists,” which is more [...]

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done — then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. –Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911)

Ruby K. Payne, author of Understanding Poverty, defines poverty as “the extent to which an individual does without resources.” However, many people overlook the types of resources other than money that one needs. In addition to financial resources, a person needs the following resources as well: emotional: an internal resource involving the ability to choose [...]

Choosing an Online Therapist: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Professional Help on the Web, by Gary S. Stolfe. Harrisburg, PA: Whitehat Communications, ©2001. 108 pp. With our economy still in recovery, people who would benefit from counseling may not get the help they need due to cost. There are other reasons why people may not [...]

According to findings reported by the Associated Press, emotional pain such as a broken heart actually has a physical basis. Experiments designed to generate social distress indicated that the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain which responds to physical pain, was activated. It is suggested that our need for social connection is deeply [...]

Reticences are as revealing as avowals. –Elizabeth Bibesco, The Fir and the Palm (1924)