I recently published my first book on Amazon, "Advice for Every Hour." It's available in both ebook and paperback. It has many of the essays on this blog, as well as additional content. It chronicles my adventures applying mindfulness and other strategies in my life, and classroom.
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I can’t control if I wake up with a headache, but I can wiggle my toes and move my feet I can’t control what politicians say or do, but I can get off my couch, and put my shoes on I can’t control if my dog leaves a mess on the carpet- but I can pick up my left leg I cannot control how I'm feeling - up, down, bored, excited..., but I can place one foot on the pavement I can’t control whether it’s about to rain, but I can pull out my umbrella - and take another step I can't control all the thoughts running through my head, but I can focus on the sensations in the bottom of my feet, and take another step I can’t control what people think of me, or say about me... but I can keep moving anyway I can’t control what’s past, or what’s yet to come- but I can look around me, and take another step Someday, I won't be able to move my legs, or my feet, or any part of my body...and I cannot control when that day may come. ...
While the mindfulness in education movement is still young, it has an increasing footprint in schools across the US and the globe. One can argue that most of the practices are body and sensory based practices- breathing, awareness of sound, mindful movement, etc. All in the service of self-awareness and emotional health, all well and good. But some educators are trying to expand that interpretation of mindfulness. Amy Edelstein is an educator in the Philadelphia schools where she has worked as an outside provider (meaning she is not a regular classroom teacher) teaching mindfulness to students for many years. She has developed her own program called The Inner Strength System , and her most recent book is entitled, The Conscious Classroom (Emergence Education Press, 2017) . In this wide-ranging book Edelstein shares her experience working in the urban schools of Philadelphia. She does not shy away from describing the tremendous challenges her school f...
My local grocery store has lots of "BOGOS" in their aisles- buy one, get one free deals. Instead of getting just one bag of Tostitos with your purchase, you get two. Awesome, right? It struck me that emotional states often come as BOGOS too. Buy into one, and you get another right along with it- often the same one. But in our emotional life, the effects are not always so awesome, and sometimes, the price is high. For example, if I notice anxiety arising, I might feel anxious about my anxiety. If anger is present, I might get angry at myself for being angry. As the psychologist Albert Ellis put it, "If you look at what you are doing, you can often discover that you are making yourself anxious about your anxiety, depressed about your depression, and guilty about your rage. You really are talented at upsetting yourself!" (from the book, How to stubbornly refuse to make yourself miserable about anything, yes anything ). The problem is that the seco...
Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash Life has a way of knocking us flat at times - but for some, that's not just metaphor. Recently my friend Michele told me a story about just that: being knocked flat in a violent encounter during a broom ball match. As she was scrambling after the ball, a member of the opposing team crashed into her hockey style, tripping her and knocking her flat on the ice. She was left with with painful bruises on her side. She experienced a wave of intense anger flow through her. She "saw red", and noticed an impulse to strike back at her aggressor, whom she was sure made the hit intentionally. Her natural impulse to fight or flee was fully online, "completely out of the ordinary", as she says. But what really made her story memorable was what she did - and didn't do- next. After the hit, she paused and said out loud, "I am experiencing rage right now!" She watched her rage- and though...
I met Tom Odland my freshman year at St. Olaf college in 1977. He was a typical college kid, full of life and had a great sense of humor. He was a talented trumpet player too, and was always after me to sit and listen to his latest jazz hero. (He was part of a small band that played Mexican and traditional rock music which I remember dancing to and having a ball.) Tom eventually left St. Olaf, to continue his studies at the University of Minnesota, eventually becoming a successful research scientist for St. Jude's Medical for ten years. After that, he worked for a German medical company and later, went on his own as a consultant. He was happily married, with a wife and four daughters, when tragedy struck. While fixing a toilet one day, he realized something was going terribly wrong. When he tried to grasp a plunger with his right arm, he couldn't hold it. With his knowledge of biology, he figured he was having a stroke. By some miracle, he...
Enlightenment comes in many shapes and sizes. The classic story of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree, or Sir Isaac Newton getting hit on the head with an apple, come to mind as examples of insights that changed the course of history. Photo by Drew Coffman on Unsplash But for most of us, insights come in more modest packaging. And like the previous examples, they can come after months or years of preparation. Suddenly, one day, we see something differently that changes our lives. I recall a moment many years ago, when something I knew intellectually, abstractly, I suddenly knew with my whole being. One of my own breakthroughs came as I was sitting on a noisy bus. I had been struggling with anxiety, and here I was again, feeling jittery. And then, it hit me: I don't have to do anything. I can just let these feelings be there. Bam...
I f you ask most kids to clean up their room, they're going to say, "No way", or be out the door before you can finish your sentence. But when I was little, my older sister had an ingenious way of getting us to pick up the house. We'd be hanging out in the living room, and suddenly Sherry (my older sister) would announce, "Would you guys like to play "king and queen' ?" We would leap to our feet, all excited, and ready to go. She would then exclaim in solemn tones, "King, I command you to go over and pick up that stuffed teddy bear"- or whatever the thing lying around was- and I would reply, "Yes, your majesty", and run off to pick up the aforementioned item. Then it would be my little sister's turn. She would take her order and run to pick up the next thing- and in a few minutes, the whole living room would be clean, and my sister had achieved her goal of a tidy living space. In her creative way, my sister had ...
Photo by Steven Kamenar on Unsplash I've taken hundreds of walks through the woods near my home but yesterday was different. About an hour in to my hike, I looked up and saw a tall young man with red hair coming at me. He reached up with one hand, as if he wanted to "high five" me. OK , I thought, and I reached up with my own hand to give it back to him. Suddenly, he grabbed my hand, and started to pull me toward him. He began entwining his fingers in mine, tugging on me to come close to him. I couldn't read his facial expression, or what his intent was. Before I knew it, we were chest to chest, as he grabbed my other hand too. I felt confusion and concern kick in, but also the thought, stay present here . And I did. I felt his shirt press against mine, and noticed the slight smell emanating from his chest. I was determined to stay in touch with what I was experiencing- a sudden and bizarre dance in the woods. Within seconds, a smiling young woman with bro...
When people introduce mindfulness, it's common to use a definition credited to Jon Kabat-Zinn: "Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally." But lately, I've been exploring the historical roots of the word Sati , which is the ancient Pali word translated as mindfulness. Experts tell us that the true definition of this term is more like "remembering", or "recollection." T here seems to be an obvious and intimate connection between awareness and remembering. We probably won't remember what we aren't aware of in the first place. And we often need to remember what we are doing, where we are, or what we're supposed to be paying attention to. It could be argued that mindfulness is the practice of remembering . We sit down, select an anchor, (like the breath or the whole body), and remember our anchor, over and over. The mind wanders off somewhere, there is a momen...