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Positivity= Compassion
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ~Dalai Lama
The ultimate test of my ability to be positive is with one of the most negative people in my life: my father. I have kept my distance from this relationship for most of my life because the reflection has been generally too much to bear. Seeing in him what I can’t bear in myself only...
Self-Compassion with Kristin Neff
Learn how to give up insecurity and self recrimination in this tender conversation with Kristin Neff, PhD and author of Self-Compassion.Compassion is one of the most misunderstood yet life changing skills in our emotional toolkit. It connects us deeply to all of humanity and in doing so offers us access to true open-heartedness. In practicing self compassion we give up the painful judgments that...
Joseph Goldstein on Relating Mindfulness and Compassion
Joseph Goldstein talks the Insight Meditation Center and the connection between mindfulness and compassion.
Dr. Kristen Neff on How Self -Compassion Enhances Your Relationships
Self-compassion can actually enhance all of your relationship. Dr. Kristen Neff, author of “Self-Compassion – Stop Beating Yourself Up” shares techniques for cultivating a practice of self-compassion. TheOpeningDoor.org to listen to the full interview Saturday.
For the Love of Animals- PETA Compassionate Business Award
“We applaud Good Clean Love® for pushing for modern animal-free test methods that are relevant to humans.” Dr. Amy Clippinger, Director of PETA’s Regulatory Testing Department
Animals are us. And they understand us much more deeply than we often get them.
I was the mother who never said no to another pet. Always intrigued by the wonder that different animals would bring to our home, I would often...
Be Kind to Yourself
“This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I give myself the compassion I need.”
This is a mantra that Kristin Neff, author of Self Compassion shared on my radio show recently when I asked her how can one be kind to oneself.
Self Compassionis an eloquent mix of strong social science research and her own personal stories of discovering the...
The Opening Door – Show 018: Dr. Kristen Neff
Discover a healthy and inspiring new way to view yourself and your life through Kristin Neff’sgroundbreaking research on self compassion. Find a new stability with your sense of self by making small but significant shifts in how you think about self esteem and the courage to care for yourself when facing challenging times. Learning to offer compassion to yourself is one of the ground breaking...
January 26th on the Opening Door – Dr. Kristen Neff
Show 18 features Dr. Kristen Neff, an associate professor in Human Development and author of “Self-Compassion – Stop Beating Yourself Up” and “The Horse Boy.” She shares her work on cultivating self-compassion and how it can improve your life. Visit us at http://www.theopeningdoor.org/ to listen to the interview.
You Are Your Own Best Friend
by Kristin Neff
The golden rule tells us that we should treat others as we would want them to treat us. Maybe so, but hopefully we won’t treat them even half as badly as we treat ourselves.
“You’re so lame!”
“What a screw-up!”
“How can you ever show your face in public again!”
Would you talk this way to a friend — or even to a stranger, for that matter? Of course not. (Or at least I hope not!)...
Suffering’s Sweetness
“You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and your turn it into compassion.” -Gyalwa Karmapa
Part of the daily Buddhist meditation that is known the world over is “May you be free from suffering…” The tradition teaches that suffering is as much part of life is as love and joy, certainly you don’t have to dive too deep into world current events or even probably the...
Relationships as a Spiritual Practice (Part 2)
Last week we discussed the idea of using your relationship as a daily spiritual practice.
At the root of all the major religions and spiritual practices are principles like love, faith, compassion, and trust. They aim to teach humanity about how to coexist in a world that is bigger than any one individual.
Victor Hugo once said this of love: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
Wh...
Day 13: Facing Tragedy
“The only thing worthy of you is compassion -invincible, limitless, unconditional.” -Thich Nhat Hanh
A comment on a recent positivity post came to mind today when I was watching the tragic post-earthquake unfold in Haiti. A reader wrote in and said that all the positivity babble in the world won’t change the suffering in the world one iota. The positivity quest is no different than Dale...
Positivity Reinvents Us: Not Making It Worse
When we feel broken inside, everything around us seems broken, too. The sense of being not enough- good enough, capable enough, kind enough, or loving enough, pervades every interaction. Judgments and storylines that uphold them are easy to grab onto, easier still to invent. In a ridiculous attempt to heal we chase the story like an animal chasing its own tail. We spin out of control the harder we...
Positivity Reinvents Us: Feeling What Is Ours
I am trying to learn how to stop feeling my children’s feelings. Today at the end of a challenging basketball game, which our side lost, I was working vigilantly to bear witness to my daughter’s frustration without feeling it. When I mentioned that I was trying to stop feeling my daughter’s feelings to another mother, she said: “Good luck- let me know how that works for you…” I am not alone in...
Day 88: Incommunicado
“You can’t not communicate. Everything you say and do or don’t say and don’t do sends a message to others.” -John Woods
The most challenging place for me is the place of no communication. It leaves me to spiral into the depths of my dark imagination, attributing the lack of response to a litany of what went wrong, usually beginning with me. This has been improving slowly with the positivity...
Day 342: Fragile and Strong
“Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose.” -Turkish proverb
There is nothing like injury or illness to wake us up to our own fragility. Our bodies at once so strong and capable are also remarkably fragile. Health and vitality, which seems so natural a state when we are in its midst is just as equally tenable. Of late, my body is not quite able to keep up with the...
Day 284: Healing journey
“Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.” — Buddha
Healing is best accomplished when we think of it as a journey and not a destination. My son, who has become more and more lucid with time, is overcome with the enormity of the accident he suffered. The fear associated with the trauma is too big for him to hold onto and threatens to swallow him whole. These are...
The Teachable Moment
“We can teach from our experience, but we cannot teach experience.” -Sasha Azevedo
Lately I am learning how to not be a barometer for my children’s experience. I am unwinding the long-growing tentacles that have connected their experience to my own. Instead, I am looking for the teachable moments where I can be helpful, where my own experience can offer something useful. I am looking for the...
Day 206: The Stories Are Everything
“It’s the process of writing and life that matters… We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.” -Natalie Goldberg
I have been indulging in novels this summer. I have been lucky enough to find stories that capture my attention so much that I can’t stop reading, staying up late into the night, and cutting out less pressing goals in favor of reading time. I just finished reading I...
Why Self Soothing Helps
The first time I learned of the idea of self soothing, I was reading a parenting book and trying to let my first child settle herself to sleep. I was more upset than she was that evening, gripping the door knob, willing myself to not open it and go in to soothe her. Awash in my own inability to self soothe, I cried as she whimpered herself to sleep. That night provided only a glimmer of the power...
Positivity Again: The Weight of Sadness
Grief and sadness fill the world. There is so much loss, disappointment and frustrated attempts that impact so many people that I have come to believe that these are not just feelings but real entities that have weight and even take on a form inside of us. One of the dangers of learning to feel deeply is how impacted you are by the feeling experience of others. The Buddhist name for this practice...
Grateful For the Broken Places
“The chemist who can extract from his heart’s elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love.” – Kahlil Gibran
This last week has been punctuated by an emotional injury that feels like a pinched nerve between my neck and back. It is odd that this unique but persistent pain still catches me off...
Facing Change with Bodhipaksa
Discovering the way to fearlessly face the constant change that defines our lives is both a gift and a practice revealed by long time Buddhist teacher and author, Bodhipaksa in his most recent book Living as a River. His voice and compassion provides clear and authentic directions to the peace that comes from cultivating a rich inner life. Employing a broad collection of ancient wisdom and a...
Day 323: When Things Come Undone
“We work on ourselves, in order to help others, but we also help others, in order to work on ourselves.” -Pema Chodron
One of my favorite books of all time is Pema Chodron’s work “When things fall apart- Heart advice for difficult times.” It is the first place I go when things come apart. I am soothed to remember that life is a just a series of circles that build upon each other. The spiral in...
Present Moment Pain
“Perhaps everything terrible is in its being something that needs our love.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
The last few days have been marked by an acute and relentless pain in my upper back and neck. It has prevented me from most higher level thinking and has awakened in me a deep compassion for those who live with chronic pain, as well as a profound gratitude for our ability to heal. There is nothing like...
Life that Works: Perseverance is the Winner
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” -Calvin...
Building Resilience
“None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.” -Paulo Coelho
It’s easy to trust when life is giving us what we want, when our relationships are stable and communication flows. Leaning toward trust when our health is broken, our relationship connections are tattered and we can’t find the words to express our own needs...
Staying With Yourself
“The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.” -Michel de Montaigne
I am convinced that the most significant and meaningful change we can make within all of our relationships begins with our foundational ability to relate to our selves. This teaching is ancient and lies at the heart of every spiritual discipline. The Buddha summed it up saying: “You yourself, as much as...
Cultivating an Orgasmic Life
“The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.” -Wilhelm Reich
Orgasm is the most intimate human expression of life force available to us, and whether you are among the lucky ones who know it as the physical height of your erotic experience or are among the many who are looking for the gate in, it is a...
The Opening Door- Show 58: Mirabai Starr
How we face our dark nights of the soul defines our life course and not just the moments of deep crisis. Mirabai Starr, author and translator for ancient mystic teachers shares her timeless wisdom with compassion. Mirabai’s latest work with the ancient saints Francis De Assisi and St Theresa offers compelling insights into how love and connection surrounds you. Don’t miss this tender and...
Keeping it Real
This is my fifteen-year-old son’s favorite expression of late. It applies to everything from the right snack selection to a teacher’s grading system. Sometimes it also applies to the meaning that I try to live: about being authentic with the people that mean the most to us.
Authentic communication requires vigilance and presence. Slipping into habitual behaviors that offer protection and cover is...
The Opening Door- Show 56: Karla McLaren, The Art of Empathy
Relationship success is dependent on our capacity for empathy which is not only how we literally learn to feel our loved one’s experience but even more deeply know ourselves. Even though our empathetic response is hardwired into us, and arguably one of our most basic survival mechanisms, for many of us, our empathetic abilities remain undeveloped. Don’t miss Karla McLaren’s life changing insights...
The Opening Door- Show 53: Wendy Plump, Vow
There is no good side of the fence when it comes to infidelity- whether you are the betrayed or the betrayer argues author Wendy Plump. She shares her intimate history of a broken marriage and the affairs on both sides that brought about its collapse with deep insight and compassion. How ever this hot prevalent issue of affairs has touched your life, you don’t want to miss this provocative...
Rethinking Our Fear
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” -Franklin Roosevelt
Insecurity is a natural consequence of our mortal human experience. The most primal hardwired function of our brain is driven by a survival instinct, which is governed, to a large extent, by a negativity bias that operates without our conscious awareness. Negativity bias creates thinking mechanisms steeped in our worst fears and...
The Opening Door – Show 024: Dr. Jen Landa
If you are one of the millions who suffer from a dissatisfying sex life, don’t miss this talk with Dr. Jen Landa, known as America’s Gynecologistand recently interviewed on Dr. Oz. Listen and learn to her 4 point plan to both increase your energy, improve your overall health and wake up the libido that you need for a satisfying intimate life. As a survivor of the lost libido club herself, Dr. Jen...
The Opening Door – Show 25: Dr. Barbara Fredrickson
Everything you may have ever believed about love and how it lives in you may well be incomplete. Recent research by positive emotion expert, Barbara Fredrickson, author of Love 2.0 calls Love our supreme emotion and demonstrates in her research that every true connection we make, even with strangers widens and expands our experience of love in the world and in our own hearts. In fact, it is our...
Positivity Again: What Joy Looks Like
Even for as long as I have been studying positivity consciousness and working on maintaining a daily practice, it still surprises me that the simplest, seemingly the most basic aspects recede from view. It was upon listening to a Pema Chodron lecture on joy that I realized what was keeping me from experiencing positivity lately. When she was explaining the basic experience of joy, she shared a...
Text Break Ups/ Communication Break Down
“We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.”
-Sherry Turkle
A couple of years ago, not long after I won the Angel Conference I got a text message from a successful local businessman who had agreed to become our CEO and probably had a lot to do with my winning...
The Beauty of Waking Up
“One day a monk spoke bitterly to the Buddha. All he wanted to talk about was the unbearable sorrows of the world. The Buddha remained silent while the monk talked, then a faint smile appeared on his face. He pointed to the ground below his feet and said,“On this earth I have attained awakening.” -Buddhist Mondo
It is easy to become bitter by the weight of so much unresolved sorrow in life. I...
Love and Violence
Today the world feels overcome with violence. Mass shootings in a college classroom capture the front page of newspapers all over the country. The questions of how and why and what is to be done weigh heavily. Senseless violence. The report is followed on NPR by a story about Marines who went on a rampage after their buddy was killed by a bomb. They murdered a small village of 24. The killers in...
Positivity Reinvents Us: The Body Temple- a Thanksgiving Homecoming
This week I am bowing down to the body. Our body condition is our first reality and the one that supersedes everything else. I am reminded of this as I work on our new Positive Community Cures project which trains teens to make organic food for acutely sick people. We have a woman on our staff who has, in her 20s, struggled with cancer. We are bringing food to another woman in her 20s who has...
Day 41: Coming To The End Of The Day
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.'” -Mary Anne Radmacher
I am totally out of hormones. Grateful that my cyclical clock is still ticking, but the down turn hits hard. Multi-tasking is out of the question and just finding a neutral place to wait it out feels like a victory. It is easy to dwell in the place...
Life that Works: A New Day
“There is nothing as mysterious as something clearly seen.” -Robert Frost
It was a great pleasure to have a regular day today. The drama that consumed most of my energy and concentration yesterday was over and I emerged whole and intact. Maybe even more than intact; I was stronger today with more trust in myself and more faith in my process. We learn about our fortitude from using it, we know our...
Positivity Quest: Aspiration #8- I Let Go Easily
“I let go of past circumstances easily and painlessly.”
I could use a few more instructional affirmations for this one. And I don’t think that I am the only one who gets stuck in the past. Our unresolved issues don’t just disappear with the circumstances, rather they take up residence somewhere in our body until we take the time and attention to listen to what aches in us. I have been dedicated...
Day 127: We Are Loved
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” -Victor Hugo
This is one of my favorite quotes of all time. It is the true state of things underneath all the layers that block our view. Interpersonal relationships are often the grounds around which people base their experience of loving. This is difficult because...