bodhi tree swaying

I don’t know if anger, rage, and frustration are getting more common, but it certainly seems like they are. As we find ourselves snarled in impossibly heavy traffic, overloaded with life’s complexities, dealing with technology that we think should work but sometimes doesn’t, and struggling to survive in a precarious and heartless economic system, it [...]

I enjoyed the article in Psychology Today that this extract is taken from.

What do you do every day… maybe many times a day? Open the door of your car? Wash your hands? Turn on your computer? There are a million of them. If you choose even one of those rote, means-to-an-end kind of things and decide to attach an altogether different meaning to it, it will become the repetition that you already do, in service of your own private meditative practice. And you’ll be doing it many times a day. And without having to push away your busy world. And while you are doing something you had to do anyway.What is it you would like to meditate on?

And how would you like to meditate? Whatever form you know or create can be put into a “to go” version. My mantra? I’ll say it once every time I open my

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I’ve long advocated the usefulness of “creative daydreaming.” In fact I wrote a piece on Wildmind several years ago that touched on the subject, which I suspects is a bit taboo with some meditation teachers who are stuck with the idea that we should let go of all thinking.

Anyway, there was an interesting article recently in the New York Times, called Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, confirming the notion that daydreaming can be a creative act. Fortunately research is being done on the topic, and there are some interesting results:

During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time…

From one third to three quarters of our time being …

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

It’s a simple bookmark that you put on your browser toolbar and then click when you want to simplify a web page. On a blog it removes all the sidebars and ads, allowing you to focus on the main content. On a regular site it can be useful for reformatting the font and column width. Here’s an example:

“Before”

Note the excessively wide “column.” Actually, the text runs right across the page width, meaning that your eyes have to work very hard to scan across the width of the text.

“After”

See how much easier it would be to read the text in a proper column?

Here’s another “before.” …

I’ve just started reading Susan Blackmore’s “Ten Zen Questions” so that I can review it on Wildmind.

I’ve only read the (long) introduction and the first chapter so far, but it’s a great read. If you’ve ever seen or heard Susan (I’ve heard her on Podcasts and seen her on TED videos) you’ll know she’s an unconventional character. She’s a psychologist who researches consciousness and she also practices Zen, although she stresses she’s not a Buddhist.

Her writing style is both perky and very, very thought-provoking. Or rather she’s “non-thought” provoking, in that she reminds you over and over again to pay attention to your present moment experience (in the first chapter at least) by asking the question “Am I conscious now?” (although I’d express the question as “Am I conscious of being conscious now?”).

The constant reiteration of the question …

I bought David Allen’s “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” a while ago, and found it very useful in helping me get more organized. Then I lapsed, mainly because I got overly focused on a writing project and let other things slide.

But I’ve been playing catch-up recently, blasting through a backlog of household accounting and emptying my email in-box. It’s that latter thing I wanted to say a few words about.

I’m pretty good with email. People compliment me on how quickly I respond, and this seems to be different from their usual experience (and mine) where emails often go entirely unanswered or replies can take weeks or months.

I tend to get very uncomfortable when the number of emails in my in-box gets above 20 or so. Above 30 and …

There’s a nice article (or was) in Psychology Today on the topic of mindfulness. It contains a lot of useful tips for bringing your awareness back into your present-moment experience.

Here are some practical tips to help you get mindful now.

• Meditate. Meditating is nothing more than focusing on the present moment. The easiest way to meditate is to simply focus on your breath—not because your breath has some magical quality, but because it’s always there with you. The challenge is to keep your attention on your breathing. Inevitably, your mind will wander and thoughts will arise—and that’s fine. When it happens, just let go of the thought and bring your attention back to the present by focusing once again on your breath.

• Use a reminder of the string-around-your-finger variety. Wear your watch upside-down, put a quarter in your shoe, or put a smudge on one of the lenses of

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I found this interesting, and I found it here. We completely take it for granted that we live in “the present” and yet everything we perceive is a split second behind reality because of the transmission lag in our nerves. This means that for tasks like catching a ball the brain has to employ some interesting trickery so that our hand reaches the ball and not the place it was 1/30 of a second ago. I wonder if babies have to learn this? I rather suspect they do.

In this brief excerpt from The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, the novelist Wolfe describes the mind-set of writer and counter-cultural guru Ken Kesey. Kesey, who died in 2001, was the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, two novels that defined American life in the 1960’s. (“The Movie” mentioned in the excerpt was never finished.)

The

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Interesting interview from Wired, with Maggie Jackson, the author of “Distracted.” Ironically I started reading “Distracted” but put it to one side while I immersed myself in some of other books.

Paying attention isn’t a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots — and this complex faculty, says Maggie Jackson, is being woefully undermined by how we’re living.

In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of “our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society” on attention. It’s not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively.

Of course, every modern age is troubled by its new technologies. “The telegraph might have done just as much to the

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I believe that the state I live in — New Hampshire — is currently debating once again whether to make it illegal to use a cellphone or to text while driving. From what I understand it’s unlikely they’ll being a ban into effect, and in fact I think it’s legal to use a laptop while driving here. They say this is the “Live Free Or Die” state but I think it would be better known as the “Live Free And Die” state.

Anyway, there’s plenty of ammunition in this NYT article supporting a ban, not just on hand-helds but on hands-free devices. I appreciated the following quote: “It’s not that your hands aren’t on the wheel, it’s that your mind is not on the road.”

In half a dozen states and many cities and counties, it is illegal to use a hand-held cellphone while driving — but perfectly all right to

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There’s an excellent but rather long article in Psychology Today about the benefits of mindfulness, called, “Psychology Today: The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment.” Here’s a digest of some of the main points, in case you don’t have time to wade through all seven pages of the piece.

1. To improve your performance, stop thinking about it (unselfconsciousness)
By reducing self-consciousness, mindfulness allows you to witness the passing drama of feelings, social pressures, even of being esteemed or disparaged by others without taking their evaluations personally, explain Richard Ryan and K. W. Brown of the University of Rochester. When you focus on your immediate experience without attaching it to your self-esteem, unpleasant events like social rejection—or your so-called friends making fun of your dancing—seem less threatening.

2. To avoid worrying about the future, focus on the present (savoring).
When subjects in a …

When I was teaching meditation at the University of Montana I had a student called Connie who was very concerned about her smoking habit. In my youth I sometimes used to smoke roll-ups at parties and I sometimes even bought tobacco so I could make my own and not be cadging from other people all the time, but I never got addicted and so I had no experience I could share about giving up the evil weed. But I do encourage people to be mindful, and so I suggested that she really pay attention to the sensations and mental patterns that arose each time she was smoking a cigarette. It seemed like a long-shot, but it was all I had.

She reported that after taking up this suggestion she was smoking a lot less. It took her longer to smoke each cigarette, and she was …

In an article in Atlantic magazine, author and Yale University professor of psychology Paul Bloom makes a provocative observation about parenthood and happiness:

Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with

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Kirk Warren Brown, an assistant professor of social psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, co-developed a 15-point mindful attention awareness scale (see box) and has used it to test the levels of mindfulness of college students in romantic relationships. He has conducted two studies that suggest increased mindfulness correlates with overall relationship happiness.

In the first, he found that men and women are equally likely to be mindful, and if one person in the relationship is mindful, both members of the couple can benefit.

In the second study, Brown asked longtime couples to discuss a contentious issue in the relationship while being observed in his lab. Those who scored higher on the mindfulness scale were less anxious and less hostile after having such simulated conflicts with their significant others, he found.

“Mindfulness tends to inoculate people against feeling negative thoughts in the first place. You go into

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