All of us have an innate desire to heal our suffering and step into a wiser and happier life. Today it is my great pleasure to bring a favorite author, teacher and psychologist of mine who is at the forefront of integrating mindfulness into psychotherapy and our lives. Tara Brach, PhD is author of the recently released and the soon-to-be-a-classic True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, bestselling book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, and many more. Tara has weekly podcasts from her Wednesday night sitting groups and is senior teacher and founder of the Insight Meditation Communityof Washington. She embodies and emphasizes that beneath the turbulence of our minds and hearts is a loving awareness that as we learn to tap into over and again can reveal a source of resiliency, peace and genuine happiness.

Today, Tara will talk to us about her own journey through suffering that led to true refuge, the differences between true and false refuges, key practices to begin with this in our lives, how this applies to anxiety and depression and a final message for us to walk away with.  

Elisha: One of the aspects of your book that I deeply appreciated was your personal journey from suffering to find your true refuge. Can you share a little of that with us here?

One thing we’ve learned about the brain over the last 15 years is that it can form new neural connections throughout the lifespan. This is called neuroplasticity, you may have heard of it. Neuroplasticity occurs when we practice and repeat doing things and eventually it just become automatic, like a habit. We see this in walking, talking, learning new car routes, playing an instrument or even meditation. When it comes to the enormous repetition of a constant connection to our technology, you have to assume, or likely you’ve experienced that the brain is strengthening that habit often times with a stressful cost.

Technology is great, but we’re just infants with it and we have to begin evolving with a wiser relationship.

Not too long ago humans had many uninterrupted spaces in their lives. If you were sitting at lunch with a friend the focus was on the conversation and there weren’t many things that would intrude. Now the brain has rewired to constantly monitor beneath your awareness any incoming messages and if there is a sign of one, a knee-jerk reaction occurs to check it.

Sherry Turkle from MIT and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, has been studying this for decades. She talks about

Our brains are amazing, so amazing that even with all the wonderful advances in technology, neuroscientists are only still scratching the surface as to the way they work. But this fabulous brain can work for us and it can work against us stressing us out, sleepwalking into addictive behaviors or just leaving us feeling far away from any semblance of balance. But the moment we realize we’re out of balance is a moment where we have touched a glimpse of balance.

This space of awareness is a “choice point” to understand this nugget of wisdom and practice:

Continue reading… »

Rainn Wilson is the goofy guy that you may or may not know in the hit series The Office. In a recent interview with him he said something enlightening, “We’re so focused on the externals, looking outwards all the time and this is the trap of technology.” This is without a doubt true and for our developing kids and teens there is less and less time spent in self-reflection. We’re still infants in this technology age and if we’re aware enough, we can learn how to have the best relationship with it. One article recently came out with some suggestions and here are a few more key ones. 

Here are a 3 mindful ways for Adults and Teens to get started.

1. With so much stimuli demanding our attention, formal Apple and Microsoft Executive Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention” the main state of our brains nowadays. That’s why the first thing we want to do is cultivate ways for “continuous anchoring attention” to bring us back to the present moment, to this life. This is important for adults and teens. This is one of the reasons Stefanie Goldstein, PhD and I created Mindfulness for Teens – CALM (Connecting Adolescents to Learning Mindfulness) that is starting in LA on Thursday, November 24th from 4-5:30pm.One way of doing that is just taking some time during the day to take a few deep breaths. You can even breathe counting up to 10 and back down to 1.

   You might even consider just using this 3-minute guided video from The Now Effect to train this grounded attention.

   Continue reading… »

It’s been a week out since The New Year has set upon us. Whether you’re a resolution person or not, odds are there are some thoughts that you have about what you’d like to see unfold over this next year. In The Now Effect I call this “Paying Attention to Your Intention” and one of the best ways to do that is to intentionally carve some time out of your busy life and take a mindful look at how you’d like to be in this next year. Taking a retreat is a great way to create the space to do this. You can do a mini-retreat of blocking out an hour or more or go to an organized retreat for deeper connection.  This weekend, I’ll be at Kripalu in the Berkshires this weekend teaching The Now Effect Retreat to get the year started right. I’d love to see you there.

Whether your intentions for the year have to do with work, parenting, stress, relationships, procrastination, compassion or any other areas of your life, setting goals is an integral piece to making change. But often times when we do this we are rigid, it has to be a certain way or else we haven’t achieved success. But this rigidity only backfires on us.

The thought arises, “I’ve failed once again,” arises, leading to a sense of sluggishness and the next thought, “What’s the point?”

There’s another way.

Is it possible that everything you do matters? A  number of years ago social scientists Nicholas Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., and James Fowler, Ph.D., conducted a study that found obesity is contagious by up to three degrees of separation. Then later found that loneliness is also contagious by three degrees of separation and it matters if you have people in your life who feel happy. In 1951 David Bohm wrote a book with a theory that if you split an atomic particle into two sub-units and sent them to opposite ends of the universe, if you gave one a spin, the other would spin too. Neuroscience shows us that how we pay attention and what we pay attention to effects neural growth in our brains. What would be different if we understood that our actions matter?

Here’s a picture that says it well:

No matter what time of year it is, stress will likely be a part of it. A little stress is good, it fuels motivation, but there’s a tipping point where it starts to have diminishing returns. When that higher level of stress hits, if it’s left unchecked it can lead to anxiety, depression, chronic pain, addictive behaviors, you name it. Today I want to give you something that you can BET on anywhere, anytime to help turn the volume down on the chaotic mind and bring you back into balance.

I’m a big fan of things that are short and sweet. Something I can remember that can help me in a pinch.

Here’s a short acronym that you can BET on throughout the day:

• Continue reading… »

If you’re reading this you have access to technology and that means that you are likely going to engage in media multitasking at some point or another. In a previous post I looked at a study that says that media multitasking leads to poorer cognitive performance. That’s not so shocking since our attentional capacity is limited and when it’s splintered off we’re not going to be as sharp on any one thing. However, the reality is, we’re going to multitask, it’s not only rewarded in work environments, but it’s something that comes natural to our brains. So if we’re going to do it, what’s the best way?

Research suggests you look into mindfulness training.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist (Catholic) monk who spoke these words a couple hours before his final breath:

“Compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.”

I’ve made it a practice to be interested in what people say toward the end of life. I think at that point, people often come to a space of presence and clarity that I’ve called The Now Effect. This isn’t a special moment of wisdom that is reserved for our deathbeds, it’s something we all glean at some point or another and yet at the same time it is a skill that can be cultivated.

Merton’s quote strikes at the fundamental delusion that underscores much of our dis-ease.

We walk around life with this belief that we are somehow separate from one another and this growing feeling of disconnection leads to a state of imbalance. When we’re mentally imbalanced it’s a lot easier for our buttons to get pushed sending us into states of stress, anxiety, depression and addictive behaviors.

What would be different if we flipped it around and we walked around day to day with a fundamental belief that we are all connected, that there’s an interdependence of all being and that my actions reverberate in an interconnected web that cause ripple effects?

Maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to judge others. Or maybe we’d be more likely to help out other people or beings in this world. What would your life be like if there was more of that sentiment in it? What would the world be like if more people believed that?

Here is a truly worthwhile endeavor to practice today:

Almost 15 years ago Saundra Adam’s grandson, Chancellor Lee Adams came into her life in the most heart-wrenching way. One night in 1999 after the past NFL player Rae Carruth and Cherica Adams went to a movie they got into separate cars to drive back to Cherica’s house. As Cherica parked another car drove beside her revealing a gun and fired a number of rounds into Cherica. At the time Cherica was in her third trimester with Chancellor and had enough energy to dial 911 and implicate Rae in the shooting. The paramedics got to Cherica in time to save her son’s life and performed an emergency c-section. Because of Cherica’s death, Chancellor had been oxygen-deprived and would spend the rest of his life with severe disabilities unable to feed and change himself.

But Saundra, his grandmother who inherited him tells this a different way.