Archive for the ‘Self Help’ Category

Author, Life Coach, BPD and Mental Health Coach, A.J. Mahari will be interviewing Dr. Judith P. Siegel, Ph.D., LCSW, on Wednesday September 1, 2010 at 6pm EST on her Psyche Whisperer Radio Show Do you overreact to many things emotionally? Do you feel easily triggered or easily angered? Are you unaware of what you are actually feeling? Are you sensitive to rejection or criticism? Do you withdraw often due to overwhelming emotions? Would you benefit from discovering a new way of processing impulsive feelings and thoughts and understand how overreacting emotionally can undermine your ability to think rationally in moment of crisis or stress? Well, in her book, Stop Overreacting – Effective Strategies For Calming Your Emotions, Dr. Siegel will give you practical information and and strategies to more effectively calm your emotions.

For more: Psyche Whisperer Radio Blog about the interview

 

You can also read more about this interview at: Psyche Whisperer Show Blog The archived show (after the interview takes place live) will be available on the above link as well.

For more: Psyche Whisperer Radio Blog about the interview

 

Searching stored memory for lessons we may have learned activates the higher areas of the brain which we use to be calculative in our actions.

For more: Psyche Whisperer Radio Blog about the interview

 

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 © Dr. Judith Siegel 2010 – All rights reserved.

Author and Life Coach A.J. Mahari, in working with clients, has witnessed the empowering reality of Radical Acceptance in people’s lives. Radical Acceptance is a philosophy and a skill that can be learned and practiced and that helps people to stop resisting what is actually blocking them from wanted and needed change and healing. Whether you have a mental illness, personality disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, love and care about someone who does, or whether you are stressed out, often anxious, or if you have been sexually abused or had a traumatic or even a merely difficult up-bringing (most have some wounds from childhood) or consider yourself to be healthy and just fine, Radical Acceptance can and will enhance your overall quality of life and your spiritual experience in and of everyday life.

Radical Acceptance requires that you change the direction that you allow your mind to go in. It requires that you accept that you have the ability to act with the power of choice and that most things we think and do are choices. Practicing acceptance, actually being accepting of whatever is, is a choice. It is a choice that brings with it emotional freedom. It is a choice that replaces chaos and suffering with manageable pain and in time, peace of mind.

Radical Acceptance practice allows you to unearth the very root causes of so much of your emotional angst and suffering. 

Radical Acceptance is a way of saying yes to each and every moment mindfully. If we can radically accept that we won’t always be accepted or liked by others and that life is full of challenges, for example, we can clear the pathway from the power of rejection and negative experience and/or thoughts and how we may have experienced them as severing our belonging. We can then make way for much more positive thoughts and feelings. Rejection or any other defined negative experience only has the power that we continue to give it. Radical Acceptance frees us up emotionally in reassuring ways that allow us to take back our personal power, or to not give it away to circumstance and whim anymore.

Practicing Radical Acceptance will, as Dr. Wayne Dyer, talks about in his book, Your Sacred Self” enable you to become more in tune with your “observer self”. It is from this “observer self” that one can begin to see things much more clearly. You can merely observe and accept whatever is. You don’t have to react to it. You don’t have to interpret it as “good” or “bad”. It can just be and so too can you just be. Just be with it, whatever, it is. Radically accept it. By doing so you will be exercising the power of your “observer self” and as a result you will be able to choose to stay in a calm and peaceful state no matter what emotions you are observing and/or feeling. Your “observer self” does not do anything with the emotions that you feel or that are at hand. They are just observed as existing. No more and no less.

Literally, using radical acceptance, through your “observer self” will gift you with the true “power of now” (Eckhart Tolle). The power of now is the inherent reality that willfully we can experience whatever the now has to offer us through observing and radically accepting without interpreting or taking any action whatsoever. This is freeing.

In Your Sacred Self Dr. Wayne Dyer says, “The little three-letter word ego has had various meanings applied to it…there are many misinterpretations of the word ego…I look upon the ego as nothing more than an idea that each of us has about ourselves. That is, the ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one…The ego is a mental, invisible, formless, boundaryless idea. It is nothing more than the idea you have of your self — your body/mind/soul self. Ego as a think is non-existent. It is an illusion. Entertaining that illusion can prevent you from knowing your true self.”

• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
• Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
• Learn From Loneliness

As I have written in my Ebook,  The Shadows and Echoes of Self, “Your true self awaits your mindful radical acceptance of things, thoughts, feelings, people, and events in your life. Your true self awaits your warm nurturing loving kindness, your forgiveness, your attention to his/her woundedness and pain. It is in these precious new moments of radical acceptance that the true self begins to slowly re-awaken from a trauma-induced slumber of denial and bullying abandonment through one’s own pain by his/her false self. That knock on the door of your soul is your spirited inner-child, authenticity personified clamoring to get your attention that he/she might have, finally, his/her wounded unmet needs satiated” (A.J. Mahari)

Learning about, reading about, and then beginning to practice Radical Acceptance is a crucial aspect of learning to find, know, and continue to develop your authentic self. Radical Acceptance, in my experience is like a pause button on a VCR, it gives you time to experience things that you otherwise wouldn’t. These experiences over time begin to be life-changing. These new experiences, even seconds at a time will open small new windows for any and all who have become enslaved to the repetitive and self-defeating worry thoughts and cognitively-distorted beliefs of his/her false self.

There is an inherent reality in each now that is missed and lost if we aren’t radically accepting what is in each unfolding present moment. Ekhart Tolle, in his book, The Power of Now says, “Instead of ‘watching the thinker’ you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation…The single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of the mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.”

It is important to not have your sense of self dependant upon the content of your mind. Living merely at the whim of each and every thought denies your soul room to be and to breathe. We are much more than our minds. In fact, as Tolle points out in his book, The Power of Now our minds our tools that we have at our disposal for specific tasks. Like any tool, a drill or a screwdriver, which we put away after we are finished using it for a specific task, we also need to lay down our minds from time to time. We no longer merely think, in this day and age, but we are actually more often than not, addicted to thinking and to processing information. We are addicted to thinking as a means of escape and also because we have identified ourselves with our thinking. We are much more than we think. This ghost-self that is addicted to thinking is the ego. To the ego, of which the false self is king, the present moment rarely exists.

The more you practice Radical Acceptance and allow the space of observation to permeate your experience the more you will learn to lay down your mind. This makes room for you to get in touch with a much more profound aspect of self – your true self, in all its authenticity which is the spiritual aspect of who you are — your soul.

• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
• Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
• Learn From Loneliness

If we are able to be fully present through radically accepting what is observing things such as our inner-body, our thoughts and feelings, events around us, surrender from a place of loving kindness and forgiveness and understanding and be a witness to the unmanifested of each moment we will be open to the ever-transforming reality of the power of now.

Radical acceptance means that we have to consciously choose to be aware in and of each and every moment. We need to be willing to choose to accept what is. Willing to surrender our wilfullness. Wilfullness is what often leads us to choose to deny what is and fight it with illogical thoughts, worry, anxiety and the like. It is not a fight that we often win really. Not accepting what is causes a tremendous amount of anxiety and worry and traps you in your suffering. Even if we have pain, accepting it and not fighting it can keep our pain from turning into suffering. There is a difference between pain and suffering.

Most of us don’t realize how much of our thinking is narrow, black and white, at times, and also very repetitive. Not to mention, often, negative and protective, often without cause. These kinds of thought patterns are always destined to give us similar feelings. Feelings that create anxiety and worry and leave us fearful and even angry. Feelings that, if acted upon, often produce very unwanted impulsive self-defeating and regrettable behaviour.

So much of what can be ruminated about and dwelt upon is what produces most of the anxiety and worry that many are suffering with and from. You can choose to stop it. You really can. By staying in the moment, being mindful, and radically accepting whatever is you can eliminate the ruminating and the need to worry and react in anxiety-producing ways. So much worry and anxiety originates with “what-if” thoughts or thoughts that build each feeling into a catastrophe of sorts usually with very dramatic reaction. If you make a choice to accept what is in the unfolding moment, mindfully, one moment at a time you can spare yourself the suffering from these cognitively-distorted anxiety-producing thoughts.

Radical acceptance does provide emotional freedom. It does this by freeing up our minds long enough with new information and possibility that we see that ruminating, dwelling on thoughts and worrying about things past or future robs us totally of every here and now unfolding present moment.

Life lived mindfully, with radical acceptance of all that is in each and every unfolding here and now moment, is manageable and transforms endless suffering into manageable pain and in time, into a greater more stable and consistent peace of mind.

When you radically accept something as being just as it is, no matter how initially undesirable the thought, emotion, or reality might be, you are freeing yourself to be able to, over time, cope much more effectively because you will be at the root of what actually is and not responding to how things appear to be or how you wish things were.

• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
• Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
• Learn From Loneliness

It is very important to work at tolerating the thoughts and feelings that you may have, for so long, felt very adverse to. Radically accepting them gives you an opportunity to get to know them in a new and more productive and manageable way. You will come to gain more insight into how you think and how that leaves you feeling by accepting what is and allowing yourself to equally accept how what is really feels without trying to deny it, push it away, mask it and/or escape from it.

Radical Acceptance unleashes our potential to experience the power of each and every now. It gives us an wonderful opportunity to experience more of what is, as it is and to learn to not react to anything and everything out of faulty thinking or faulty interpretations.

Whether you have a mental illness, personality disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, love and care about someone who does, are a Loved One of BPD or whether you are stressed out, often anxious, or if you have been sexually abused or had a traumatic or even a merely difficult up-bringing (most have some wounds from childhood) or consider yourself to be healthy and just fine Radical Acceptance can and will enhance your overall quality of life and your spiritual experience in and of everyday life.

 
© Ms. A.J. Mahari January 16, 2006 – All rights reserved.

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A.J. Mahari, an author and Life Coach, talks about the importance of now and how each moment is like a raindrop. What is, is now. Goals and dreams are important but what is it that keeps people blocked from their goals and dreams in ways that take them out of the now?

Do you separate out your goals and dreams and your experience in the here-and-now of your life? This can be a major contributor to being blocked and/or feeling stuck. What you aren’t aware of, in the here-and-now, can help you so much in further understanding yourself in ways that can and will help you get unblocked and unstuck – into action – and be the catalyst that propels you forward into to taking necessary action-steps to achieve and realize your goals and dreams.

• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
• Self Help for Change – Healing and Recovery
• Loneliness is a Teacher
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
• Achieve Your Goals
• Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny

© A.J. Mahari, July 14 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Author and Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, in her Life Coach Zen series of videos, asks the question, “Where is there?” Is there some “there” you are trying to get to that you think is the destination that once arrived at will make everything okay? Do  you think that what you are needing or wanting, desiring, and looking for is out “there” somewhere?

Will make you better? Will make you happier? Will mean you finding the place at which all your goals and dreams are realized?

• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
• Self Help for Change – Healing and Recovery
• Loneliness is a Teacher
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation
• Achieve Your Goals
• Law of Attraction – Thoughts Determine Destiny

© A.J. Mahari, July 14, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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I have a new radio show. I am looking for guests too if you’re intersted. The show is called Psyche Whisperer. In many ways that what I do. In many ways, that’s what people have called me. In a sense this goes deeper than my life coaching work, however, the journey that I have taken from the brokenness of my childhood to where I am today has in fact given me a very profound understanding of many aspects of the human psyche. I have been told by many who know me and many who have appreciated my work, over the years, that I am somewhat of a whisperer.

However, that’s that. It’s a meaningful title to me. I hope it will be a meaningful title to listeners. At first it may be somewhat confusing, I don’t know. Time will tell.

I believe that everyone has the potential to be a psyche whisperer of sorts when there is willingness, openness, and awareness. So much of everything we experience in life, so much of what we focus on in life, all, at some point or other, in some way or other, does have to do with our individual and collective psyches.  This makes any and all topics relevant to this show.

If you’d like to be a guest on my show please email me at psychewhisperer(at)yahoo.ca and tell me about yourself and what you’d like to talk about. Perhaps you’ve written a book. Perhaps you have an active blog. Maybe you offer an interesting service. Perhaps you’ve had an interesting journey in your life thus far.

This show will be fairly ecclectic. So, really, no topic is out of bounds. What shapes my individual psyche and your individual psyche plays a part in shaping what Jung termed the “collective psyche”. In that way, I see many different topics as being much more related than perhaps many people think at first glance.

© The Psyche Whisperer – A.J. Mahari July 6, 2010 – All rights reserved.

Many people might be wondering what life coaching is all about. You may be wondering, why would I want to work with a life coach? What would actually be the point of life coaching? Life coach A.J. Mahari talks about how life coaching can play a central role in many facets of people’s lives, self help, personal growth, self improvement, mental health and wellness. Life coaching helps people to gain more awareness about what they need and/or want to change in their lives to have more peace, balance, and happiness. Life coaching with A.J. Mahari is client-centered and based in humanistic positive psychology. It is a sacred process between coach and client.

A.J. stresses the importance of her role as a compassionate, supportive, and non-judgmental listener. Life coaching supports the client and validates the client’s experience and concerns. A.J. sees her role as being a touchstone for her client’s personal growth. She reflects back to each clients what she hears them saying. She gives feedback and is also an educator. Life coaching is about living an examined life and learning new tools and skills to help you live a more authentic life. Life coaching also supports the client’s quest to identify goals, map out strategy to achieve those goals.

If you are asking yourself, what is life coaching, and or why life coaching? This just might mean you are interested. That you see potential to gain valuable insight and awareness into the kind of change you need and want to introduce into your life to achieve your goals and dreams. Asking about what life coaching is and why life coaching is a great beginning to taking the next step. An action step. Booking a session and finding out how A.J.’s life coaching can be helpful to you.

Coaching Sessions

1 Session $80.00 2 Sessions $160.00 6 Sessions $450.00 10 Sessions $750.00

© A.J. Mahari and Touchstone Life Coaching, June 11, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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How You Relate To Yourself Affects How You Relate To Others

Relationships are complicated. Relationships are often thought of as being vehicles to meet needs, share things with others, and more importantly for so many people, to not be alone. Relationships are often thought of by many as being central to what defines them. What happens if your relationship is defining you, whether you have been aware of that or not, and then your relationships is chaotic or troubled and/or fails or ruptures? The answer to that question will hinge upon how well you know yourself – who  you are really are. It will also hinge upon the degree to which you know how to be there for yourself – to soothe yourself, be kind to yourself, and to nurture yourself.

How can you know and experience healthy love with and from someone else if it isn’t a part of how you relate to yourself first?

Before you can really successfully address relationships difficulties with others you will first benefit from understanding much more about yourself. What is the state of your relationship with and to yourself? This is an essential question to pose that many benefit from exploring in the life coaching process. Seeking to answer this question can help you to identify and clarify your goals. In life coaching, I help people to not only identify and clarify their goals but also to then do the work necessary in how they feel and think about themselves that will help them to not be trying to relate to others as a means of avoiding Self.

Coaching Sessions

1 Session $80.00 2 Sessions $160.00 6 Sessions $450.00 10 Sessions $750.00

The understanding of love so many live with can be more of an illusion than it is reality. This creates toxicity in many relationships. Fighting harder through discord and distress and often even abuse will not make healthy love become reality. Life coaching can help you to understand how to unravel the nature of the patterns of relating you have become involved with that leave you looking for love in all the wrong places.

Relating to others as a means of avoiding who you really are, or as a way of trying to have someone else meet you needs for you, or you meet needs for someone else, is at the heart of so much codependence. Codependence is a not a healthy relationship model. It is not a recipe for happiness or contentment. It is a breeding ground for anger, hurt, frustratation, pain, chaos and turmoil – not to mention distrust, alientation and getting stuck. Unhealthy relating that can become toxic tears away at the fibre or who you really are. People lose themselves more and more to these relational dynamics.

• How To Identify a Toxic Relationship
• Break Free of the BPD Maze – Recovery For Non Borderlines
• Dilemma on The Other Side of BPD – Overcoming Denial about BPD and Love – Loved Ones of BPD
• Inside The Borderline Mind For Loved Ones of BPD
• Loneliness Is a Teacher
• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life
• Thoughts Determine Your Destiny
• Achieve Your Goals
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation

I life coach many people who, in the process of our work together, find their way out of this maze of trying to be filled up, understood, and/or validated by other people. I also work with many who are the person trying to fill up, validate, or understand the illogical in trying to meet needs for others that they need to meet for themselves.

This relational dynamic - this way of relating does not make room for healthy love. The fact that the struggle and the issues may feel familiar often gives people an illusion of being loved or of loving.

Can you relate to this? If so, do you want to free yourself from this painful way of  relating and having relationships? Do you want to be able to love yourself and meet your own needs? If you can relate to this and you are answering yes to these questions I hope you will purchase life coaching sessions with me so that I can support you in learning more about the lessons that relationships are trying to teach you and the many reasons why you haven’t been able, thus far, to find the relational peace and happiness you really want.

© A.J. Mahari, June 5, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Life Coach A.J. Mahari, on video, talking about being the change that you want to see in the world, and the need that each and every one of us needs to know who he or she authentically is and how to feel empathy, compassion, and tolerance for self and for others. Respect, and understanding difference is what each person in this world needs more of and it is what each one of us can individually add to the collective in a world that requires much positive change and healing.

It is important to embrace the paradox. It is important to be aware. Important to know that you will benefit greatly from becoming more consciously aware of who you authentically really are, what that means, and how you embrace and accept yourself or how you don’t and what that means for you in your life. Life coaching with A.J. Mahari can help you to begin living an examined life. An examined life that will help you to create the change and healing to set goals and reach goals in your life – to find emotional peace, contentment, and happiness.

Compassion is being eroded for all-too-many people by polarized thinking. Polarized thinking that is a cognitively distorted way to think and that breeds negative thought patterns that leave people with negative and painful experience in relationships and in life. Life coaching with me can help you to change how and what you think in ways that can help you to create a more balanced and positive way of thinking, feeling, and experiencing your relationships and your life.

Life Coach A.J. Mahari on Compassion Part 2

Click Here To see Parts 1 and 2 in order

© A.J. Mahari – All rights reserved.

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Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

 Sometimes we’re angry but forget why. We may not be sure of the real reason for our anger, but our gut feeling says our anger is justified and we hold on to it. We start to think of justifications for our anger: the time our friend forgot to call, insulted the family dog, was late for the movies, never picks up checks, and constantly complains. Suddenly, we have lots of reasons to be angry. The list is endless. That cheers us up, and our busy minds are satisfied for a moment.

Whether it’s anger or passion or just our “to do” list, the mind always seems to be actively involved with something. One instant, it runs outward toward something it sees and wants, the next moment, it retreats inward toward some engrossing thought. Then it’s back to our friend and the anger that’s becoming so familiar. Our minds are always busy keeping track of this and that in our inner and outer worlds. It’s like having a job and a family — between the two, there’s hardly any break. One thought leads to another, and that thought leads to a third. At some point, we lose track and can’t remember how we got to where we are. When the mind goes around and around like this, it’s like water that’s stirred up all the time. It never has a chance to settle and become calm and clear. You can even have trouble sleeping because your mind is not at rest.

If you know your mind is busy and full of thoughts, then that’s actually not too bad. But often that’s not the case. Sometimes we’re juggling five or six trains of thought and the emotions attached to them. With so much going on, the mind starts to get agitated and confused. We can’t see clearly how disturbed our minds have become. We also can’t see that there’s no logic to our confusion. Still, we remain very diligent and patient when it comes to holding on to our thoughts. We try to keep them all alive, to keep up the steady stream of thoughts. If the stream starts to slow down or stop, we immediately try to revive it. We even have gadgets to help us hold on to our thoughts — pocket PCs, Palm Pilots, notebooks, iPhones — so we can record anything. It’s all there: your emails, texts, schedules and shopping lists. That’s not always a bad thing, but with all this going on, it’s easy to see how our minds never get any rest.

Our problem is that this busy mind can lose its connection to its real nature. When we take time to look beneath all this activity, we discover a sense of spaciousness and awareness, peace and happiness, that doesn’t change from moment to moment. It’s always there for us. The Buddha taught that this is the actual reality of our minds. To reconnect to that reality, we need to slow down and relax — totally let go and rest our minds. Then there is the possibility of the mind clearing up, calming down, and tuning in to its basic state of peace and happiness.

So how do we rest and relax our minds? There are a number of things that can help. You can nourish and relax your body with a healthful diet and exercise, especially yoga. You can take breaks, go for walks, listen to music, and disconnect for a while from the cyber-, info-, and techno- worlds. But what can help the most is the practice of meditation where you are just watching your thoughts and resting your mind on the coming and going of your breath. This style of meditation is simple, can be practiced anywhere, and has a strong impact on our well being. Once we become comfortable with the basic technique, which is described in many places, we can take a closer look at our thoughts.

The first thing you’ll notice is how many thoughts you have, how they’re always shifting and changing, and how the mind chases after them. The practice is simply to notice when your mind wanders off and bring it back to the present, again and again. The way you come back is by letting go of the thought you’re following. Once you notice it’s there, you don’t hold on to it. Then you’ve cut the momentum of the stream of thoughts instead of encouraging it. There’s a sense of relief when you’re not being dragged around by your thoughts. It doesn’t matter whether the thoughts are positive or negative. If a good thought appears, you don’t need to improve it or rejoice in it; just let it be as it is. If a bad thought pops up, you don’t need to get upset about it or try to block or change it. You can just let it be as it is.

The way to really rest our busy minds in meditation is to let go of all thoughts about our thoughts. We can simply relax as our thoughts come and go. The more relaxed we become, the more we can see the mind’s spacious, wakeful quality, which we’ve been more or less blind to. When we see this, we are seeing what the Buddha called our “enlightened potential,” which everybody has.

What this means is that we can find our own happiness and peace of mind just as we are in this very moment, because it is within us. We don’t have to change our thoughts or change ourselves into someone else. We don’t need to think that who we are, this “me,” is not good enough, smart enough, or lucky enough to be happy. We don’t need to be Mother Theresa, Bill Gates or the people in the Vogue magazine ads to be happy. If we think we do, we don’t have to chase after that thought. We can just let it go like any other, and rest our busy mind.

© 2010 Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

 Author Bio
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is a widely celebrated teacher known for his skill in making the full richness of Buddhist wisdom accessible to modern minds. A lover of urban culture, Rinpoche enjoys writing poetry and creating art of various kinds in his leisure time. Based in the United States for the past 20 years, he devotes much of his energy to his vision of a genuine American, and Western, Buddhism, free from the cultural trappings that sometimes distort the Buddha’s essential message of wakefulness. Born in 1965 in northeast India, Rinpoche received comprehensive training in the meditative and intellectual disciplines of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism under the guidance of many of the greatest masters from Tibet’s final pre-exile generation. Among the many organizational roles he juggles, he is the founder and principal teacher of Nalandabodhi, an international network of Buddhist practice centers. His latest book is Rebel Buddha (Shambhala Publications) forthcoming in November 2010. For more information please visit Rinpoche on Facebook, Twitter and his Website.

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 If we want to be free of the pain we inflict on ourselves and each other — in other words, if we want to be happy — then we have to learn to think for ourselves. We need to be responsible for ourselves and examine anything that claims to be the truth. That’s what the Buddha did long ago to free himself from his own discontent and persistent doubts about what he heard, day after day, from his parents, teachers, and the palace priests. Although he was a prince born into a wealthy and powerful family, the young Siddhartha often just wanted to get away from it all. He wanted the space to think independently about who he was and what the spiritual path was about. Such freethinking was important to the Buddha’s search for inner truth and his ultimate realization of enlightenment. These days more and more people in the West are following the teachings and example of the Buddha. But what are these teachings about? What is Buddhism?

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

It looks like a religion, but is it? There are many definitions of religion. Some are so broad they’d include your neighborhood garden club. Others are narrower: your garden club would need a deity, enthusiasm for that deity, and a set of beliefs and practices. We all have some sense of what religion means to us, but when we start talking about it — trouble!

If you search “world religions,” you’ll find “Buddhism” on every list. Does that make Buddhism a religion? Does it mean that because I’m a Buddhist, I’m “religious”? I can argue that Buddhism is a science of mind — a way of exploring how we think, feel and act that leads us to profound truths about who we are. I can also say that Buddhism is a philosophy of life — a way to live that maximizes our chances for happiness.

What Buddhism is, at this point, is certainly out of the Buddha’s hands. His teachings passed into the hands of his followers thousands of years ago. They passed from wandering beggars to monastic institutions, from the illiterate to the learned, from the esoteric East to the outspoken West. In its travels, Buddhism has been many things to many people. But what did the Buddha intend when he taught?

Buddha

At the start of his own spiritual quest, Prince Siddhartha left his royal home, along with its many luxuries and privileges. He was determined to find answers to life’s most perplexing questions. Are we born into the world just to suffer, grow old, and die? What’s going on — what’s the meaning of it all? After years of experimenting with different forms of religious practice, he abandoned his austerities and all his concepts about his spiritual journey — all the beliefs and doctrines that had led him to where he was. At the end of that journey, with only an open and curious mind, he discovered what he was looking for — the great mind of enlightenment. He woke up from all confusion. He saw beyond all belief systems to the profound reality of the mind itself — a state of clear awareness and supreme happiness. Along with that knowledge came an understanding of how to lead a meaningful and compassionate life. For the next forty-five years, he taught how to work with the mind: how to look at it, how to free it from misunderstandings, and how to realize the greatness of its potential.

Those teachings today still describe a deeply personal inner journey that’s spiritual, yes, but not religious. The Buddha wasn’t a god — he wasn’t even a Buddhist. You’re not required to have more faith in the Buddha than you do in yourself. His power lies in his teachings, which show us how to work with our minds to realize our full capacity for wakefulness and happiness. These teachings can help us satisfy our search for the truth — our need to know who and what we really are.

Where do we find this truth? Although we can rely to some degree on the wisdom we find in books and on the advice of respected spiritual authorities, that’s only the beginning. The journey to genuine truth begins when you discover a true question — one that comes from the heart — from your own life and experience. That question will lead to an answer that will lead to another question, and so on. That’s how it goes on the spiritual path.

We start by bringing an open, inquisitive, and skeptical mind to whatever we hear, read, or see that presents itself as the truth. We examine it with reason and we put it to the test in meditation and in our lives. As we gain insight into the workings of the mind, we learn how to recognize and deal with our day-to-day experiences of thoughts and emotions. We uncover inaccurate and unhelpful habits of thinking and begin to correct them. Eventually we’re able to overcome the confusion that makes it so hard to see the mind’s naturally brilliant awareness. In this sense, the Buddha’s teachings are a method of investigation, or a science of mind.

Religion, on the other hand, often provides us with answers to life’s big questions from the start. We don’t have to think about it too much. We learn what to think and believe and our job is to live up to that, not to question it. If we relate to the Buddha’s teachings as final answers that don’t need to be examined, then we’re practicing Buddhism as a religion.

In any case, we still have to live our lives and face up to how we’re going to do it. We can’t escape having a “philosophy of life,” because we’re challenged every day to choose one action over another — kindness or indifference, generosity or selfishness, patience or blame. When our decisions and actions reflect the knowledge we’ve gained by working with our minds, that’s adopting Buddhism as a way of life.

As the teachings of the Buddha reach us and pass into our Western hands, what determines what they will be for us? It’s all in how we use them. As long as they help to clear up our confusion and inspire confidence that we can fulfill our potential, then they’re doing the job that the Buddha intended.

We can use all the help we can get, because strange as it seems, we hang onto to our confusion. We cling to it because we think it shields us from something. But like wearing sunglasses day and night, we are only avoiding looking at who we truly are. We prefer to wear our “shades,” simply because we’re not used to the bright light of our minds. The teachings of the Buddha — no matter how we label them — show us how to open our eyes to that brilliance.

 

 Author Bio

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is a widely celebrated teacher known for his skill in making the full richness of Buddhist wisdom accessible to modern minds. A lover of urban culture, Rinpoche enjoys writing poetry and creating art of various kinds in his leisure time. Based in the United States for the past 20 years, he devotes much of his energy to his vision of a genuine American, and Western, Buddhism, free from the cultural trappings that sometimes distort the Buddha’s essential message of wakefulness. Born in 1965 in northeast India, Rinpoche received comprehensive training in the meditative and intellectual disciplines of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism under the guidance of many of the greatest masters from Tibet’s final pre-exile generation. Among the many organizational roles he juggles, he is the founder and principal teacher of Nalandabodhi, an international network of Buddhist practice centers. His latest book is Rebel Buddha (Shambhala Publications) forthcoming in November 2010. For more information please visit Rinpoche on Facebook, Twitter and his Website.

 

 

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The following is an excerpt from the book Body Intelligence: Lose Weight, Keep It Off, and Feel Great About Your Body Without Dieting
by Edward Abramson, Ph.D.
Published by McGraw-Hill; July 2005;$21.95US/$28.95CAN; 0-07-144206-5
Copyright © 2005 Edward Abramson, Ph.D.

Eating Rituals

Eating because it is mealtime is not the only example of habits determining food consumption. Eating rituals may develop in certain situations regardless of the time of day. When you go to the movies, do you buy popcorn before taking your seat? Would it feel a little strange to watch the movie without nibbling on something? If this is one of your eating rituals, it doesn’t make any difference if you’re going to a matinee or an evening show, or if you had a meal right before the movie started. Whatever the circumstances, you will have the popcorn. Popcorn at movies, hot dogs and beer at baseball games, coffee and doughnuts at the morning work break, and milk and cookies after school are a few of the common eating rituals. In addition, most people develop their own, unique eating rituals.

Charles, a forty-five-year-old pharmaceutical salesman, was required to make a 200-mile trip every other week to call on doctors in a town at the far edge of his territory. He dreaded the long drive, especially the hour and a half he had to spend on a lengthy stretch of desolate interstate. After several months, a new Wendy’s opened at about the halfway point in the journey. Charles stopped for a chocolate Frosty one day, and he was hooked. It didn’t make any difference if he was traveling at 10:00 a.m., 4:30 p.m., or 8:00 p.m. If he had a meal before leaving, the Frosty was his dessert. If he was going to eat when he arrived, it was an appetizer. Regardless of the time of day, or the amount of time that had elapsed since his last meal, every trip included a stop for the Frosty.

Katherine, a thirty-seven-year-old social worker, would come home from work and have dinner with her family. As soon as the dishes were done, she would make herself a huge bowl of popcorn, grab a bunch of grapes (when in season), and get into bed and watch the soap operas she had prerecorded. If popcorn and grapes were not available, she would search the pantry to find another food she could eat while watching her soaps. The taste of the food wasn’t as important as the eating-while-watching ritual.

Think about your own routines:

• Can you find examples of eating that occur in a specific situation regardless of your physical hunger or the time of day?
• Do you need a snack when watching television?
• Is there a task that you routinely perform that is followed by a treat?
• Do you reward yourself with a treat when you get home from work??

The sidebar, Changing the Ritual, offers some suggestions.

Katherine, the popcorn-eating, soap-opera watcher, rarely paid attention to the sensations of eating popcorn since she was usually involved in her soap opera. It was just a mindless activity that kept her hands busy. To give up this eating ritual, Katherine took up crocheting while watching her soaps. She left the yarn and needles on top of the television so she could grab them before getting into bed. Charles, the Frosty-loving pharmaceutical salesman, prepared a snack before his trip and then stopped at a rest area two exits before the Wendy’s. When the weather cooperated, he broke up his drive by taking a little walk and having his snack.

CHANGING THE RITUAL

Identify one of your frequent eating rituals. This is a type of eating that is not motivated by hunger or mealtimes, but by a specific set of circumstances such as going to the movies or coming home from work. Visual cues may be present, but they are not necessary for some rituals. In your notebook, briefly describe your ritual.

Where does this ritual usually take place? For example, you snack while watching television in the living room, or wherever you usually watch. Write these locations in your notebook.

Plan an alternative to eating when you are in the ritual situation. In your notebook, write down some specific activities you could do instead of eating, such as knitting while watching TV, holding hands in the movies, or drinking a glass of sparkling water when you get home from work.

            Copyright © 2005 Edward Abramson, Ph.D.

The following is an excerpt from the book The Untethered Soul
by Michael A. Singer
Published by New Harbinger Publications; October 2007;$16.95US; 978-1-57224-537-2
Copyright © 2007 Michael A. Singer

Chapter 17 – Contemplating Death

It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death. No person or situation could ever teach you as much as death has to teach you. While someone could tell you that you are not your body, death shows you. While someone could remind you of the insignificance of the things that you cling to, death takes them all away in a second. While people can teach you that men and women of all races are equal and that there is no difference between the rich and the poor, death instantly makes us all the same.

The question is, are you going to wait until that last moment to let death be your teacher? The mere possibility of death has the power to teach us at any moment. A wise person realizes that at any moment they may breathe out, and the breath may not come back in. It could happen any time, in any place, and your last breath is gone. You have to learn from this. A wise being completely and totally embraces the reality, the inevitability, and the unpredictability of death.

Any time you’re having trouble with something, think of death. Let’s say you’re the jealous type, and you can’t stand anyone being close to your mate. Think about what will happen when you’re no longer here. Is it really all that romantic that your loved one should live alone with no one to care for them? If you can get past your personal issues, you’ll find that you want the person you love to be happy and to have a full and beautiful life. Since that is what you want for them, why are you bothering them now just for talking to someone?

It shouldn’t take death to challenge you to live at your highest level. Why wait until everything is taken from you before you learn to dig down deep inside yourself to reach your highest potential? A wise person affirms, “If with one breath all of this can change, then I want to live at the highest level while I’m alive. I’m going to stop bothering the people I love. I’m going to live life from the deepest part of my being.”

This is the consciousness necessary for deep and meaningful relationships. Look how callous we get with our loved ones. We take it for granted that they’re there and that they’ll continue to be there for us. What if they died? What if you died? What if you knew that this evening would be the last time you’d get to see them? Imagine that an angel comes down and tells you, “Straighten up your affairs. You will not awake from your sleep tonight. You’re coming to me.” Then you’d know that every person you see that day, you’d be seeing for the last time. How would you feel? How would you interact with them? Would you even bother with the little grudges and complaints you’ve been carrying around? How much love could you give the ones you love, knowing it would be the last time you’d get to be with them? Think about what it would be like if you lived like that every moment with everyone. Your life would be really different. You should contemplate this. Death is not a morbid thought. Death is the greatest teacher in all of life.

Take a moment to look at the things you think you need. Look at how much time and energy you put into various activities. Imagine if you knew you were going to die within a week or a month. How would that change things? How would your priorities change? How would your thoughts change? Think honestly about what you would do with your last week. What a wonderful thought to contemplate. Then ponder this question: If that’s really what you would do with your last week, what are you doing with the rest of your time? Wasting it? Throwing it away? Treating it like it’s not something precious? What are you doing with life? That is what death asks you.

Let’s say you’re living life without the thought of death, and the Angel of Death comes to you and says, “Come, it’s time to go.” You say, “But no. You’re supposed to give me a warning so I can decide what I want to do with my last week. I’m supposed to get one more week.” Do you know what Death will say to you? He’ll say, “My God! I gave you fifty-two weeks this past year alone. And look at all the other weeks I’ve given you. Why would you need one more? What did you do with all those?” If asked that, what are you going to say? How will you answer? “I wasn’t paying attention . . . I didn’t think it mattered.” That’s a pretty amazing thing to say about your life.

Death is a great teacher. But who lives with that level of awareness? It doesn’t matter what age you are; at any time you could take a breath and there may never be another. It happens all the time — to babies, to teenagers, to people in mid-life — not just to the aged. One breath and they’re gone. No one knows when their time will be. That’s not how it works.

So why not be bold enough to regularly reflect on how you would live that last week? If you were to ask this question of people who are truly awakened, they wouldn’t have any problem answering you. Not a thing would change inside of them. Not a thought would cross their minds. If death were to come in an hour, if death were to come in a week, or if death were to come in a year, they would live exactly the same way as they’re living now. There is not a single thing they carry inside of their hearts that they would rather be doing. In other words, they are living their lives fully and are not making compromises or playing games with themselves.

You have to be willing to look at what it would be like if death was staring you in the face. Then you have to come to peace within yourself so that it doesn’t make any difference whether it is or not. There is a story of a great yogi who said that every moment of his life he felt as though a sword were suspended above his head by a spiderweb. He lived his life with the awareness that he was that close to death. You are that close to death. Every time you get in the car, every time you walk across the street, and every time you eat something, it could be the last thing you do. Do you realize that what you’re doing at any moment is something that someone was doing when they died? “He died eating dinner . . . He died in a car accident, two miles from his home . . . She died in a plane wreck on a trip to New York . . . He went to bed and never woke up . . .” At some point, this is how it happened to somebody. No matter what you’re doing, you can be sure somebody died that way.

You must not be afraid to discuss death. Don’t get upright about it. Instead, let this knowledge help you to live every moment of your life fully, because every moment matters. Thar’s what happens when somebody knows they only have a week left. You can be certain that they would tell you that the most important week they ever had was that last week. Everything is a million times more meaningful in that final week. What if you were to live every week that way?

Copyright © 2007 Reprinted with permission by New Harbinger Publications, Inc. From the book Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer http://www.newharbinger.com/productdetails.cfm?SKU=5372

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By Tal Ben Shahar,
Author of The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life

“I am a human being: nothing human is foreign to me.”
-Terentius

It was when I welcomed unhappiness, that I became happier. My most significant psychological breakthrough came when I realized, truly internalized the notion, that it was OK for me to be sad, that there was nothing wrong with feeling dispirited, stressed, lonely, or anxious — that it was just fine to be human. Allowing myself to freely experience negative emotions did not only weaken these sentiments, it also intensified the positive ones.

Acceptance is a prerequisite for a healthy emotional life. When we accept ourselves, when we welcome everything that is human about us, we open up a space within which we can act, and feel. If we repress an emotional reaction and refuse to accept it — whether anger or disappointment or joy — we create a knot in the channels that make up our emotional system. The same system is used for the flow of all emotions — positive and negative — and if we block the flow of one emotion it affects our ability to experience other emotions. For example, if I do not accept my agitation after having made a mistake I will hinder my ability to experience joy when something good happens to me.

At the onset of negative emotions we have a choice — to stifle and reject or to accept and experience. What we choose to do at that moment affects our emotional life in general because the emotional system as a whole is affected. Closing off the emotional valve to the flow of negative emotions inevitably restricts future flow of positive emotions. We cannot eat the cake (deny the free flow of negative emotions) and leave it whole (enjoy the free flow of positive emotions). Pain and joy are two sides of the same coin and there is a symmetry between our capacity to experience one and the other. In the words of psychologist Abraham Maslow: “By protecting himself against the hell within himself, he also cuts himself off from the heaven within.”

We can’t have it both ways — stifling negative emotions while expecting a free flow of positive ones. We have to choose whether or not to allow ourselves to fully experience our humanity — its sorrows, at times, but also its joys.

To accept ourselves is not necessarily to like what we did or to approve of it, but rather to forgive ourselves. To forgive, in Sanskrit, is to untie — when we forgive we untie an emotional knot and unclog the emotional system. And it is when we allow our emotions to flow freely — when we experience the lows and the highs, the pain and the pleasure, the sorrows and joys — that we are, as we can and ought to be, fully human.
 

©2009 Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D, author of The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life

Author Bio
Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D., author of The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life, is the New York Times bestselling author of Happier. He taught one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history, and he currently consults and lectures around the world to multinational organizations, the general public, and at-risk populations. He obtained his Ph.D. in organizations behavior and his B.A. in philosophy and psychology from Harvard.

For more information, visit www.talbenshahar.com

The following is an excerpt from the book Life Lessons for My Sisters: How to Make Wise Choices and Live a Life You Love!
by Natasha Munson
Published by Hyperion; May 2005; $11.95US/$15.95CAN; 1-4013-0805-8
Copyright © 2005 Natasha Munson