A new year! Instead of briefly held resolutions, think back over the last 30 days. We're ahead of everyone else. Take your new 30 day habit of meditation, focus, presence and have a great year. We know that 30 days of repeated behavior is a powerful initiation of a new sustained habit (see the book: … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (31). Gratefulness to my reader(s) [hi mom!], and happy new year
Tag: Books
CT meditates: a comedy (29). Impermanence
FOR THE END OF THE YEAR. Let go. In the Book of Joy page 249. Impermanence, the Dalai Lama reminds us, is the nature of life. All things are slipping away, and there is a real danger of wasting our precious human life. Gratitude helps us catalog, celebrate, and rejoice in each day and each … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (29). Impermanence
CT meditates: a comedy (26) If something can be done about it …
From the Book of Joy: If something can be done about it, what need is there for dejection? And if nothing can be done about it, what use is there for being dejected? Seems eerily similar to the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (26) If something can be done about it …
CT meditates: a comedy (25) Merry Christmas- Holiday- Kwanzaa. And Zen Shorts!
Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Care-filled Kwanzaa! Happy Buddha! A book I gave to my physician and clinical informatics teams this year is 'Zen Shorts.' This is a terrific children's book with wonderful watercolors. You don't have to be a child or a Zen master to appreciate it. However the stories it tells are deceptively entertaining. … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (25) Merry Christmas- Holiday- Kwanzaa. And Zen Shorts!
CT meditates: a comedy (24) Three things you’re grateful for?
In multiple books including Option B, and Start Here: Life XT, I have come across the research finding that a specific practice of gratitude can be quite powerful. The habit is: take paper and pencil and every evening before bed, write down three specific things that you are grateful for. I don't mean "I have a … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (24) Three things you’re grateful for?
CT meditates: a comedy (22) Deep Work, The Shallows (book reviews)
Cal Newport's important work emphasizes the power of disconnected, uninterrupted time. Nicholas Carr speaks of the opposite trend: that Shallow thinking has affected our brains and made it tremendously more difficult to focus because, on the Internet, it is SO EASY to click that next link, and soon, you're looking at cute kitten videos instead … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (22) Deep Work, The Shallows (book reviews)
CT meditates: a comedy (21). Wisdom is like rainwater
The Dalai Lama, in response to the critique about detachment and laziness: if we are going to be mindful, and then detach ourselves from immediate concerns and not take them so personally, won't we become lazy, un-involved? What if we are ambitious and want to improve? From The Book of Joy page 212. The Dalai … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (21). Wisdom is like rainwater
CT meditates: a comedy (20). Stumbling on happiness (book)
I love Daniel Gilbert's work: Stumbling on Happiness. It is a collection of gems, and is interspersed with the results of clever psychology experiments that tell us how your mind works, and it doesn't work the way you think it works! Specifically, I enjoyed the three-part description of the components of happiness at work. Ask … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (20). Stumbling on happiness (book)
CT meditates: a comedy (19). The second arrow
It takes my son to teach me about important concepts from the Book of Joy. An ordinary person feels two pains, two arrows, with any tragedy. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he feels the pain of … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (19). The second arrow
CT meditates: a comedy (18). Flow!
Have you read Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? Mihaly's last name prompts me to remember Wheel of Fortune: "May I buy a vowel?" Nevertheless, this classic book introduced the world to the concept of flow: ...the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is … Continue reading CT meditates: a comedy (18). Flow!