I just returned from a 7-day silent Chan meditation retreat at Dharma Drum Mountain in Taiwan, focused on the Silent Illumination technique, and this video covers five of the many things I enjoyed and learned on the retreat.
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Since YOU ARE NOT A ROCK launches in North America this week, I wanted to share about how we got here and what goes into a book like this. Everything begins with sticky-notes. I had a seething mass of constantly evolving sticky-notes that helped me layout the structure of the book before I began writing. I don’t have those notes anymore—they’ve been taken over by ideas for the next book—but I do have a rock. That rock up there in …
Five tips for when you’re struggling with stuff from the past.
When I was a kid, out at summer barbecues, I always went hunting through the coolers for the grape soda. So when Toronto got sweaty in a heatwave this August, and I just happened to be at home for a few weeks without any workshops to travel for, I got brewing some batches of kombucha and I wanted grape soda. One of the things I love about kombucha is those tiny armies of fizzy bubbles created during the second …
Be 👏 kind👏 to👏 yourself👏 When I started out taking care of my mental health and digging out of the mental illness hole, I had to make a lot of changes around things I thought were totally normal and necessary. Making those changes were tough because I’d spent years practicing and perfecting compulsions that made me miserable. I could spend entire days having imaginary arguments in my head about terrible things that hadn’t even happened but I didn’t know how …
I’m replacing myself! It’s been a wonderful time being me but robots are cool and they can make mental health resources accessible in ways that humans can’t. I can only have one conversation at a time and even though I answer questions at all hours of the day right now, I do get sleep sometimes and my sleep skills are top-notch.
Build a new relationship with uncertainty throughout your life or your daily practices will just logically and rationally have you struggling and suffering and relapsing back into a depressive anxiety hole. This video explains an approach that I credit with helping me recover and maintaining great mental health for the past eight years:
When I bring up the idea that judgment is the first compulsion that leads to all of the other emotions and behaviors we struggle with when we’re sinking into mental health challenges, people can often become very protective of their judgment skills. We can always think of ways our ability to judge has helped us. We’ve gotten positive feedback from others. Maybe our careers depend upon our judgment skills. But it’s not that judgment is necessarily bad. It simply has …