Mary Martin

When the mind searches for the future, it sees the past.

Are you playing on easy mode or hard mode? What can you do to put things on an easier setting? Go back to basics. What’s one thing you can do today that will make tomorrow easier? What can you can do this year that will leave you in a better position for next year?

If you’re told that you must listen to your momentary and subjective feelings of annoyance and hurt, and view them as your truth, minor interpersonal discomforts are much harder to let go of gracefully. If you’re then told that your troubles with relationships stem from your parents’ failure to be fully present and meet your needs in childhood, the... See more

“It seems like there’s a dog paper every day,” says Alan McElligott, a zoologist at the City University of Hong Kong who has studied the minds of goats and other farm animals. “It’s almost impossible to keep up with it.” What’s worse, others say, most money for livestock research still goes to studies aimed at improving milk or meat yields, not to... See more

There is indirect evidence to support this idea. For instance, individuals tend to act in a way that is consistent with or constrained by how they have imagined themselves in those situations (Johnson and Sherman, 1990), implying that some record of that simulation influences later behavior. There is typically a high correspondence of stated... See more

If you do this long enough, if you tune this instrument on the meditation cushion long enough, after a while that does become more your default mode. You live in the room rather than living in the agitation of your conceptual reality.

The unwanted and the shadow imagination are real and necessary parts of our inner landscape. They’re wisdom, dipped in discomfort. When teaching mindfulness, I’ve noticed people either move away from their unwanteds or get sucked into them. Those who move away have conditioned themselves to avoid what they don’t want to hear, see, feel, or think.... See more