Breathing Exercise

First, pay attention to your anxiety by noticing your breathing and scan your body for any signs that tell you that you are anxious. Ask yourself: Where am I tense? Is my breathing labored? Am I holding my breath? Second, look within to find which emotion or emotions are linked to or are being covered

18 May, 2015
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Pause Your Machinery: Acting Mindfully and Changing Behavior

Stop and take a moment to “pause your machinery.” The concepts and techniques I present throughout my latest book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, require mindfulness to learn and master, and this brief written exercise will give you the opportunity to rest, step outside the pattern of passive reading, and

11 May, 2015
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Moses and the Promised Land

A metaphor for the process of developing new neural circuitry is the Old Testament story of Moses and his people, after leaving the bondage of slavery in Egypt, wandering through the desert for forty years before they got to the Promised Land. Geographically, it’s a relatively short distance to the Promised Land from Egypt, where

4 May, 2015
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Frogs in Hot Water and the Five Stages of Grief

I’ve noticed that the experience of being a frog in hot water shares aspects of the five stages of grief that Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler identified as what people experience when faced with imminent death, a theory later adopted to apply to what survivors experience after the loss of a loved one. These

27 Apr, 2015
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The Transference Phenomenon

The reason we stay in an unsatisfying relationship is that our machinery can’t choose any of the three doors. When our machinery is running us, we cling to familiar pain at all costs and continue suffering because our perception is that we need the relationship and the only way to have it is to pay

20 Apr, 2015
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