I need a vacation. For the last couple of months, I’ve been working like crazy getting my book ready for publication, and laying all the groundwork to promote it. I coordinated with my 30 contributing authors to get their chapters polished and ready, I got the books designed, printed, and then shipped out to reviewers, and…

So many kids these days are scheduled for every minute. Even in summer, on weekends and school holidays you would think they get a break, but kids are shuttled from camp to practices to games to holiday weekends, all without time to breathe or play. As an adult, that sort of schedule would leave me stressed…

I was a sporadic meditator at best for years, only to really commit to meditation when, just after turning 39, I discovered a mass in my right breast. From the point of discovery of the mass to getting the necessary tests, waiting for results, waiting for surgery, waiting to see if the newly diagnosed cancer…

2009 is now here and it is time to start planning for this New Year. Just what do you want from the coming year? How sure are you to achieve your New Year resolutions? Getting a fresh start with the New Year is an artificial custom – you can begin to get the life you love…

You probably read this blog because you want to get more done each day. But do you want to become more productive so that you can maintain a better work-life balance, or so that you can fill up your newly freed hours with more work? Sometimes the importance of downtime gets relegated to the sidelines…

Summer’s almost over, folks! I don’t know about you, but my summer was go! go! go! the whole time. Between the kids being off school, writing a ton (here and elsewhere), finishing up and self-publishing a book, keeping the house in order, looking for a new house (looks like we found one!), and of course…

I love weekends. Why?  I can wake up and just spend a few minutes lying awake without the need to do anything. No need to rush to work, or to speak to anyone. Just lying there with eyes wide open and nothing in mind. I realized then that those are some of the calmest moment…

I’m a crappy guitarist. In the 20 years that I’ve been playing, I can’t once remember playing scales, and I’ve never sat down to "practice". I still have trouble with F-chords, I have awful right-hand technique, and my tempo has been known to swing from too fast to too slow without ever hitting…

What would an ideal workday look like? While there might not be a single answer across the board, all of us can relate to the fact that many of our workdays are not designed for optimal productivity. We complain about too many meetings, not enough pay, travel that saps your energy and did…

Sometimes it seems like your life just isn’t your own anymore – work, family, and other obligations swallow it up to such an extent that we often look back and wonder where all the time went! No wonder, then, that many of us feel as if life is just passing us by, and we can…

Your mind is racing, your heart is like a time bomb. You can’t think straight and you feel like you will explode if you don’t relax. Then you remember the standard advice: “Take all of your senses to a grassy meadow. Smell the flowers, listen to the insects, feel the grass…

To coincide with the recent posts about napping – a great post from Brian Armstrong about designing the perfect nap, and this one on power napping – here’s a quick and easy step by step to get in that zone; good for short, meditating sleeps. 1 STRETCH your legs for 30 seconds. 2 SIT on…

If you are truly lazy at heart you may have already had this argument, but just because I want to do something the easy way doesn’t mean I’m lazy. Being lazy is intuitively seeking out the more efficient way of doing things. Well, at least sometimes. Scott H Young has a formula: Laziness + Drive =…

A little while ago I came across the Buddha Machine by FM3, a Beijing ambient duo. What they’ve created is a little box that plays a series of short ambient tracks over and over to create that nice little place of portable Zen. They look great but I wanted one for my computer while I work. Luckily…

Plumb: adjective: At right angles to the horizon or to level ground: perpendicular, upright, vertical. So many things in life can knock you out of plumb. As you roll on, focused on your life, along comes some crazy thing that slams you – and suddenly you find yourself askew. Many traditions of meditative practice use the term…