Of all the disciplines, all the improvements and adjustments we can make for ourselves, one of the simplest is breathing. Breathing is the simplest action in life, the most basic action in life. Breathing is a fundamental discipline in so many ways. Breathing is in the middle between active and automatic activities. So we can […]

You know, when we’re first getting started in making changes in our lives to find ways to live better, there’s a whole world of carrots and sticks that we can hold up to encourage us to make the change. Because that’s the biggest and hardest point of the change, is the very beginning. How do

Clearly a big part of simplifying and of bringing things down to basics, and in making our lives about something that is meaningful, is this idea of focus. What does it mean to be focused? To remove things from our attention, so that we only have a very select selection of things that are on

How easy is it for life to fall into a regular routine, this feeling of a grind, normalcy, a repeating pattern? And, well, there’s many advantages to that. We can have a lot of efficiency with having routines. We can get a lot of good healthy habits rolling, have that sense of order, and get

My thought for today is something that I’m really a beginner in, and it’s just a brief mention of a whole world of a topic. And it’s the idea of awareness, consciousness, the senses, and how do we organize them, how do we see them, how do we see ourselves? How do we perceive our

There are a couple of competing forces in my life, in my approach to life. One side being very open and creative and wild and free, and the other side being very orderly, controlled, methodical. And for most of my life I was heavily on the open creative side with almost no discipline, which left

Today, as part of an interfaith visiting group, I visited and attended a synagogue, a Jewish Shabbat service, for the first time. And I was amazed at the strength of the tradition, and it made me realize this is a very powerful thing that is really missing for a lot of us. And it’s one

So it seems like something that repeats every day, forever, is this necessity to bend things back to basics. We’re always being distracted. We’re always being led around, led away from our core principles, our basics, our foundation in life. There are so many influences that pull us in so many directions, and it’s a

It sometimes seems like the progress that we put in, the work, the input, can be steady, steady like a ramp, increasing intensity. So we do our repetitions, we put in the daily work, and, of course, nothing in life is completely steady and smooth, nothing is a straight line, but we can really be

So this afternoon I picked up a certain sense of dissatisfaction. I started to feel frustrated that I wasn’t getting what I wanted. Things aren’t moving fast enough. I started to feel like a lot of my efforts are in vain, that time is passing by too quickly with nothing to show. And I had