Stillness
You’re doomscrolling because you’re looking for something to transform you but you can’t stay with one thing for long enough to be transformed by it. You have short attention span on an existential scale. You’re gliding past thousands of small worlds in minutes, laughing at one post, feeling dread at the next, tempted to buy something right after.... See more
Sherry Ning • You’re bored because you don’t love anything
Stillness is not about focusing on nothingness; it’s about creating a clearing. It’s opening up an emotionally clutter-free space and allowing ourselves to feel and think and dream and question. Once we can let go of our assumptions about what stillness is supposed to look like and find a way to create a clearing that works for us, we stand a
... See moreBrené Brown • The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
To add to Snyder’s work on hope, I found in my research that participants who self-report as hopeful put considerable value on persistence and hard work. The new cultural belief that everything should be fun, fast, and easy is inconsistent with hopeful thinking. It also sets us up for hopelessness. When we experience something that is difficult and
... See moreBrené Brown • The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
We touch the deepest experience of all human beings throughout history when we allow ourselves to be truly quiet.
Brad Warner • Don't Be a Jerk
But after spending countless hours collecting stories about joy and gratitude, three powerful patterns emerged: Without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. Both joy and gratitude were
... See moreBrené Brown • The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
When I asked my teacher Tendo Nyojo what the most important Buddhist principle was, he said that it was the idea that practice and experience were one and the same. That is, you don’t do zazen in order to achieve some result like enlightenment in the future. Zazen itself, he said, is enlightenment. Master Nangaku Ejo said, “I do not deny that there
... See moreBrad Warner • Don't Be a Jerk
“That’s enough screen time for today,” you tell your kid, urging them to turn off the video-game console or iPad. As for what they should do instead, you are not quite sure. And what about you? If only you could put down your phone and listen to your spouse, or read a book, or embrace the sensation of your own existence, then surely you would be a... See more
Ian Bogost • You’re Getting ‘Screen Time’ Wrong
The perception of those individuals who practice zazen never interferes with the reality of zazen. It doesn’t matter if you notice all this wonderfulness or not. This is because in the quietness, with nothing to accomplish, there is only direct experience. This realization takes place in the stillness of the self-receiving and self-using samadhi