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.
Tag: video
Five tips for when you’re struggling with stuff from the past.
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:
Recently, Matt and I did a couple of videos exploring intrusive thoughts or anxieties and why it’s useful to look at why we’re afraid of the consequences of those thoughts or anxieties coming true. There’s an exercise for doing that, The 5 Whys, which I shared in my book, The Mind Workout, and Matt explains near the end of this video:
We can always come up with a rational reasons to excuse self-destructive compulsions while we chase safety. But chasing that feeling is no different than chasing any other feeling: it only leads to more of the experiences you’re trying to avoid.
For OCD Week, I joined The Mighty for a live Q&A on their Facebook page all about my journey with recovery from mental illness. I usually keep my videos focused on mental health and where I’m going now, so I don’t often talk about the specific symptoms I struggled with but in this video I go more in-depth into what it was like deep in the mental illness hole, and what was involved with getting out of that hole: Mark …
I sat down with Stuart from The OCD Stories for another wide-ranging interview (you can find the first one here) on a variety of mental health and OCD issues, from Internet/cellphone compulsions, to health anxiety, to false-memories, uncertainty, control, mindfulness, recovery, and why your therapist better start learning how to run marathons…
If you’re starting off the new year with plans to make changes that will support recovery from mental illness, be honest about where you are and the skills you’ll need to learn to get to where you want to be. Our goals are often the results of the skills we need to learn, so be sure to make space and spend time and energy on learning those skills. If your destination is on the other side of a lake, you need to …