Many of us grew up reading Dr. Seuss. If you have kids, you’ve likely relived your childhood reading over his books only to find, “Wow, there’s some real wisdom in these books.” One book that has grown on me over time as an adult is Oh, the Places You’ll Go! It brings you through all the experiences in life: the triumphs, the doubts, the confusions, the depressions, the fearful moments and the moments you stare your difficulties in the face and overcome them.

There are also several other notable books: Yertle the Turtle, Horton Hears a Who, The Lorax. The list is endless.

Here are 7 Life Lessons from Dr. Seuss:

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It may be the single most beneficial thing for your brain in terms of learning, mood and memory says Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Ratey, author of the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. I’m talking about exercise. But we also know that compassion, the act of which is altruism, are adaptive in terms of stress, anxiety, depression, and addiction, and great predictors of health and well-being. So why not marry the two?

The Dalai Lama, having had a life of reflection, comes up with some fairly wise quotes. One of them is:

“If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another.”

It helps to have that reflective time, but as you well know in today’s day and age, that reflective time is shrinking. We used to have reflective time while waiting in line, traveling home from work, waiting for the airplane to board, waiting for the fish to bite, or even taking our private time in the bathroom.

But now there’s always something to fill our time, any chance we get where there’s a space of waiting, we whip out our digital devices and check.

Even if we read a wise quote from someone like the Dalai Lama, odds are another notification is quick to follow so the process of self-reflection doesn’t last very long. In the past we wrote letters to one another where we had to take time and reflect or even when we read the letters we would stop and reflect on them. Nowadays with the quick texts, chats, and emails we hardly have time for the same reflection. This is the argument of Sherry Turkle, professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the founder

Today the Daily Now Moment I received was titled “Compausion”&  said:

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

~ Dalai Lama

Compassion is being able to step into someone else’s shoes and inclining the mind toward wanting to help. Try bringing compassion to yourself or to another today, or revisit the week of compassion in earlier Daily Now Moments.

Bring this into your life and see what you notice.

“Compausion” is a play on words to describe the process of developing compassion. It involves first pausing and then inclining our hearts either toward ourselves or another. This is an essential approach to healing whether the struggle is with stress, anxiety, depression, relationships, trauma, addiction, parenting, grief, or simply to be a better human being.

Science and the wisdom of the ages both agree that one of the keys to being happy is to keep things fresh in life to get in touch with novelty. For a long time I’ve been a morning cup of coffee kind of guy, but to shake things up a bit I decided to switch to tea. On a recent walk, I passed by a café that I’ve stopped into in the past for a cup of coffee and in that moment I learned a valuable lesson that unveiled a key to kicking bad habits.

If you’ve been following recent news in the mindfulness world, you may have heard about a recent study by David Creswell out of Carnegie Mellon University that showed the wonderful effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as a reduction on perceived loneliness in healthy older adults age 55-85.

Loneliness is something that most of us experience from time to time, caused and exacerbated by stress, anxiety, depression, addiction and trauma, but you may not have known how staggering the statistics truly are. A recent survey taken from the AARP showed over 44 million people are lonely and longing to connect with another living, breathing human being.

There’s a difference between being alone and lonely. The Buddhist Nun, teacher and author of “Taking the Leap,” Pema Chodron writes:

In 2000, Dr. Richie Davidson brought over a number of monks, who practiced a form of compassion meditation, to his lab in Madison, Wisconsin for at least 10,000 hours to find out what was happening in their brains.

He hooked them up to brain imaging machines and found that when exposed to a sound of human pain, their brains weren’t disturbed, but areas of the brain involved with empathy and compassion lit up. That obviously has implications for how we can train our minds to develop compassion and regulate in the face of difficulty, but who is going to practice for 10,000 hours?

The natural question arose, what difference will compassion meditation make for the rest of us?

Here is one thing Richie and his colleagues found:

Mindfulness meditation, the act of intentionally paying attention to the present moment while putting aside our snap judgments, has been shown to alleviate stress, anxiety, depression, trauma and open us up to wonders, happy moments and a sense of grace in life. But make no mistake, the longest of practitioners will tell you that they still experience the downturns, getting hooked by the inevitable frustrations of life, and anticipatory anxiety.

So it’s not a cure, but it gives us something that a cure can’t.

Implied in mindfulness is the acceptance that life is full of ups and downs. This acceptance breeds a sense of warmth and compassion that could not grow if the downs were cured. As the saying goes, it takes both sunshine and rain to make a rainbow.

Or Rumi’s quote:

“Don’t turn your gaze. Look toward the bandaged place that’s where the light enters.”

“Life, it all goes by so fast.”

This is a phrase that is said ubiquitously by people across race, ethnicity, socio-economic class, gender, you name it. When you hear something this common – something is telling us to listen.

Why do we lose sight that life is so temporary? Some might say that we have a fear of death so we block it out of our minds, and without the awareness of death we lose sight of the preciousness of life. Others might say we just get caught up in our daily routines and stop seeing or pondering this miracle of life.

Whatever the reason, we know it happens and it may take a death or a birth to remind us of the preciousness of life.

Here is a process I created and did a national research study around to help us cultivate more of these meaningful moments.

Throughout the course of 2012 in Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, we have interacted around topics on mindfulness, neuroscience, stress and media, Facebook, the Negativity Bias, addiction, technology, resiliency, parenting and so much more.

Thank you for all your wonderful interactions, here’s a chance to give back to you.

Here are the Top 10 Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Posts in recent months. Feel free to bookmark and come back to again and again: