Category: meditation
-
Can mindfulness meditation make you happier?
Quite possibly. Recently, there’s been a spate of research on the effect of meditation on quality of life. According to this article from the NYT, it’s been found that 30 min. a day of mindfulness meditation can reduce overall stress, improve attention, and increase empathy for others.
-
Senecan meditations
Premeditation In the morning, imagine the worst thing that can happen to you today. It may seem as if doing so would lead you to dwell on bad fortune, to morbid thinking, to panic and anxiety. In truth, Stoical premeditation has the opposite effect: it focuses your attention (a) on accepting what’s beyond your control…
-
What if pain weren’t a bad thing?
Meditate on the difference between these two statements: 1. Pain is not a bad thing. 2. Pain is something very bad. (Example taken from A.A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy) On the face of it, statement 1 seems puzzling. How can pain not be a bad thing? Isn’t that rather like saying that a cat isn’t a…
-
On being resentful
In the Jan. 17, 2011 edition of The New Yorker, the journalist James Surowiecki writes that the “recession has… magnified the gap between unionized and non-unionized workers.” He goes on to say that “[t]his resentment is most evident in the backlash against public-sector workers (who now make up a majority of union members).” Here we…
-
Will training exercise: bearing hot and cold
There are a few problems we urban dwellers deal with on a daily basis. One is the feeling that we know what the right thing to do is and yet we seem to be unable to bridge the divide between intention and action. I know it would be good to help push the car that’s…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 