When you spend time in the woods, something happens in your body and mind: your shoulders relax, your breathing becomes deeper, and the mind stops chasing itself. What is going on? It is not just fresh air or exercise. There is something specific happening to the tired part of our attention when we notice the shifting of light and the movement of leaves.
Many of us treat worry as proof of love. But fretting is not caring — and the more we fret about what we can’t control, the less energy we have for what we can. How do we care about a hard world without fretting ourselves into exhaustion?
As my teenage son starts lifting weights and getting more involved in sports, I can…
The yoga tradition always recognized that human beings are not one-dimensional or merely physical entities,…
Before I ever truly experienced anxiety, I studied it. I read about it. As a…
Just try preparing for a test or think about giving a speech to a large…
One of the things I missed the most during the past year was travel. I…
How do you start your morning? In a given week, do you create space to…
I find it curious that Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras, does not explicitly distinguish between…
In Macbeth, Shakespeare states that sleep is “the chief nourisher in life’s feast.” And modern…
In 2004, one scientific study made quite a splash. In this study, the scientists monitored…
For a long time, I’ve been wondering: Where do emotions belong in the Panchamaya model?…
When new students arrive at a yoga class, they often have little awareness of their…
At a holiday party a couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with…
The movie Cake follows the main character, Clair (played by Jennifer Aniston), as she struggles…
At the beginning of my yoga studies many years ago, I was fascinated by a…
Pop culture has a way of taking over some potent concepts and then diluting and…
I saw this movie a decade or so ago called “What the Bleep Do We…
There was a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate…
In Pixar’s movie Inside Out, there is a scene where two characters travel on a…