I had the good fortune of teaching a symposium on the theme of GRATITUDE at the Sivananda Yoga Center in the Bahamas during Thanksgiving week. It’s an extraordinary place with palm trees, delicious food, daily yoga classes and a great community. On Saturday night I was on a panel consisting of (left to right) Swami…
from ToDo Institute Japanese children “consume incredible amounts of soft drinks and junk food,” says Hiroshi Osawa, a retired psychology professor at Iwate University. According to Iwate, the consequences go beyond poor nutrition and expanding waistlines. This junk food diet may be contributing to Japan’s alarming juvenile crime wave. According to Osawa, “There is a…
. . As we age we try to find strategies to make life easier. IPhones, GPS, Remote controllers, and Calculators are just a few examples of technologies that make life easier for our minds and bodies. But when we make life easier for our mind, we accelerate the decay of our cognitive skills. The best…
A friend of mine recently visited her mother in a nursing home. But her mother didn’t recognize her. Her mother’s mind had lost the capacity to recognize someone she had known all her life. Actually we have a similar experience every day when it comes to our thoughts. Our thoughts arise, thousands of times a…
Are you familiar with the “invisible gorilla” experiment? A group of people were asked to pass basketballs back and forth to each other. Three of the people wore white t-shirts, and the other three wore black t-shirts. Participants in the study were asked to count the number of times the basketball was passed between the…
Imagine there was a love competition. People competed to see who was most able to love another person. How would you measure this? Well you might have to evaluate the person over a long period of time. You’d have to examine their relationships. What evidence do we have that this person is loving? . .…
Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones. -Rick Hanson For the past twenty years I’ve been presenting a scene at my workshops, in which a husband and wife come home after work and greet each other in the living room. One spouse begins by reporting the litany of problems…
In this extraordinary video, Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the left and right halves of the human brain. It’s not simply “emotion on the right, reason on the left,” but something far more complex and interesting. Before McGilchrist became a psychiatrist, he was a literary scholar — and his work on the brain…