Excerpt from Home Without Going Crazy

Shaming signals, quite naturally, bring us to the topic of guilt, which is the internal version of shame. Guilt lock explains one of life’s great mysteries: how you can feel so bad about a given event and still do nothing about it. Guilt lock is the emotional equivalent to gridlock, and it is just as paralyzing.

excerpt from The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living After 50

Hang gliding. Studying Russian history. Opening a bookstore. Sitting in the hammock and staring at the clouds. After fi fty, the attitude should be “It’s my turn now, dammit,” and even if it’s still a few credit card payments off, you can start thinking about what your dream might be. You can even plan for it.

excerpt from Everyday Bliss for Women

After I emerged from years of paralysis, I felt a tremendous need to apol­ogize for being slow, overweight, and lacking in strength. I did this by telling the story of my broken back to everyone I met, elaborating on both how much I had suffered—and was still suffering—and how hard I was working on my recovery.

Thanks to brilliant, caring friends and an extraordinarily dedi­cated yoga teacher, I realized that I wasn’t simply a broken-back story and got on with living my life.

by guest blogger Kathryn R. Simpson, M.S., author of The Perimenopause & Menopause Workbook and The Women’s Guide to Thyroid Health

Take this simple quiz to see if you may have low thyroid function:

Excerpt from Making the Grade with ADD

People with ADD can find it rather easy to use their credit cards. It’s easy to forget that you’re spending real money. You just hand the cashier a plastic card; you don’t actually see the money leaving your pocket. And, since people with ADD are more likely to experience depression and anxiety, they may have a tendency to engage in “retail therapy,” raising their credit card bill.

by guest blogger Stephanie Moulton Sarkis, Ph.D.,

You may be thinking that mindfulness and money don’t really go together—how could a practice focused on non-materialism apply to the source of materialism? But in fact, the practice of mindfulness can be applied to your daily money management practices.

Excerpt from The Mindful Path through Shyness

That we have emotions is a given. How we react or respond to them is a matter of choice. Victor Frankl offered the important insight that there’s a space between stimulus and response, and if we can pause and bring the full light of our awareness into it that space, we can free ourselves from automatic reactions that are often dysfunctional. Mindfulness practice will allow you to recognize that space and use it to respond to your emotions with clarity, compassion, and skillfulness.

Excerpt from The Mindful Path Through Worry and Rumination

Traditionally, mindfulness was taught as the essential foundation for meditation practice. However, it was also understood that mindfulness was half of this foundation. The other essential half was compassion. For thousands of years, mindfulness and compassion have been understood to be the two wings of spiritual enlightenment and psychological freedom.

by guest blogger Thomas Roberts, author of A Mindfulness Book

Greetings!

Recently, mindfulness has become somewhat of a commodity, a buzzword, something we can learn or get and be guaranteed wonderful outcomes. Be aware that mindfulness isn’t a thing to possess, an end state, something you have or do.

Consider, instead, that mindfulness is a way of being in the world. A way of being with great compassion, of remaining present amidst the flow of experiences that is our life. Turning down the volume on all our resistance, our need to control, manipulate and react. Instead, hang in there with what is going on. Remain patient with this flow, remain curious, and respond with great compassion.