Is love conducive to our bottom-line goals? Perhaps when it is the goal itself but from my experience, love is the big disruptor that often interrupts our progress on the things we can measure. Continue reading Loving and Learning
The Paradox of Tolerance Back in the 1940s, a philosopher named Karl Popper came up with something called “The Paradox of Tolerance.” He said that if everyone tolerates every idea, then intolerant ideas will emerge. Tolerate people, being the soft pushovers they are, will tolerate this intolerance. However, the intolerant will not tolerate tolerant people. So, eventually, the tolerant will get rammed up the backside. … Continue reading Why We Must Tolerate Intolerance
We might have experienced difficulties in the relationship with our partner. Distance, unkindness, distraction, not listening, too busy, and much more. I read this story and I want to share it with you. I think it has a powerful lesson to teach us. Sometimes things are easier than we think but we cannot find a solution because we are too distracted by the complications that … Continue reading How to Make Your Partner Love You Again
I came across something called the Map of Consciousness in a book I’ve been reading recently – Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins. In it he talks about the different emotional levels we operate on. He presents them in a way I’ve never seen before – as a kind of ladder that we can climb. Starting with depression at the bottom … Continue reading The Ladder of Enlightenment
So my kids have started doing this thing. Every evening before bath time – after we take their clothes off before they get into the tub – they run around the apartment like crazed feral wild cats. Screaming and laughing. Pure unadulterated joy. It got me thinking about the clothes we wear, metaphorically speaking. A kid doesn’t question why we walk around with clothes on … Continue reading The Joy of Running Around Naked
On the last morning I saw my beloved dad, he greeted me with a hearty “You look great.” His untimely death a short time later has permanently etched all the details of that breakfast into my treasure box of memories: the yellow walls of the Varsity Restaurant on NE 65th street, the booth in the open section, the jeans and sweater I was wearing, the … Continue reading Writing Last Lines That Count
The other night my wife and I celebrated our 6-year wedding anniversary. We went to a restaurant called Absurdities. It was, without a doubt, the weirdest dining experience of my life. The restaurant itself was comprised of various rooms or “worlds.” In each world (6 in total), we were served a different course. We had to find multiple hidden doors and crawl through various spaces … Continue reading Absurdities
The art of cultivating human relationships is so important that it is not surprising that the book of Dale Carnegie, How to win friends and influence people, published a long ago (1936) but still very current, has sold the most copies worldwide. Carnagie’s book needs to be interpreted under the current circumstances, where technology has changed dramatically the way we communicate and we relate to one another. … Continue reading How to Relate Successfully – The Art of Cultivating Human Relationships
It is easy to be dismissive of mythology in our modern-day secular culture. With the tools of logic, science and reason at our disposal, we arrive at our ideas of truth through rigorously testing our hypothesis with hard evidence and data. It was around the time when I was completing my undergraduate coursework in philosophy when I started to look at the world through a … Continue reading Diving into the Mythopoetic: A Personal Story
I’ve written before on the downstream effects of small any seemingly insignificant acts of goodness. Through our deeply interconnected world, we can never fully appreciate how our actions will impact others and our broader communities. Recent research being done on the science of awe-inspiring moral behaviour has begun to validate some of these claims. In his latest book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and … Continue reading Encouraging Goodness: How Moral Actions are ‘Awe-Inspiring’
I think every one of my dad’s sermons that I’ve heard or read opened with a bit of humor or personal story. It was his way of connecting – enticing the audience to want to listen and maybe even exhale a bit so they could take something deeper in. My dad was a Presbyterian pastor for 40 years. So he kept a well curated stack … Continue reading Tips on Love
High stake situations require complete and utmost concentration. Any distraction or lapse of judgement can shift your attention away from the present moment, hindering your efforts to achieve a state of effortless flow. This could make all the difference in the final moments of a championship game or dictate whether you are in peak performance mode when giving a big presentation at work. In the … Continue reading Reverse Engineering Bliss: Hacking the Flow State
I’m riffing the title of this post from Jack Canfora’s Things I Think I’ve Learned So Far because Jack’s post is one of my favorites and I’m too tired from parenting to think of one of my own. And that matches with my experience of parenting – you have to take small favors and lifts when you can. Admittedly, I’m pretty early on into this … Continue reading Things About Parenting I Think I’ve Learned So Far
Good riddance, what a year you have been 2022. You have upended the lives of many amidst the economic uncertainty and the rising anxieties posed by inflation. You have put the world on edge as we witness citizens around the world fighting corruption in autocratic regimes for liberty, justice and equality. You have shown us the fragility and vulnerability of our precious beloved planet. We … Continue reading Leaning into Uncertainty: Embracing the Unknown in 2023
O’ Modern Man, Modern Man, how you stand up tall with your undeserved pride. You hold infinite knowledge in the palm of your hand, Control nature, much more than it can withstand. Is there anything you can not know? No place where you can not go? Why are you so serious modern man? Don’t you see life is a great mystery. Is there still wonder … Continue reading The Ignorance of the Modern Man
In search of meaning in life Continue reading The Horizons of Meaning
More than 10 years after the fact, I can tell the story of my marriage/divorce with succinct clarity. I got married to my husband when I was 33-years-old. He had been married before and told me that he was divorced because wife #1 had a jealousy problem. In the marriage, I thought he just wanted a mindless side-kick to be with him for whatever HE … Continue reading Romancing the Stone
When my inquisitive daughter was about 3 ½ years old, we had a conversation about perspective. We looked out our back door at the houses around and I asked her to count how many she could see. Three. Then we went to the second floor and I helped her count – seven. And then we went to the roof, looked at all the houses we … Continue reading Expansiveness
As I was writing my post last week, Good Mood of the Soul, I came across the research that joy and gratitude often result in an upward spiral. The more we focus on gratitude, the easier it is to perceive joy. And when in the midst of joy, we are more open to gratitude. So here’s the list of things I’m grateful for this week: … Continue reading Upward Spirals
A meditation on inperfection Continue reading Finding Beauty in Brokenness
