A patient recently came in complaining that she cannot find a healthy romantic partner. She said she keeps choosing men who just don’t know how to be happy. Regardless of how well their life is going, they complain about something. And nothing she ever does seems good enough to make up for their unhappiness. I […]
Tag Archives | Happiness
The Key To Happiness
The Grant Study began in 1938, tracking a group of 268 students at Harvard University, and these students have now been observed and interviewed over nine decades. The results are quite revealing and inspiring. Dr. George Vaillant is the storyteller of the study and the “curator” of these men’s lives. What he shares about his […]
Happy Couples — Day 8 — Maya Tulum
We are at the end—the physical end—of this Live Conscious Retreat, in Maya Tulum. But I don’t think of this as an end, instead it is a beginning for the people who came together for the past eight days. As we learned to use a new set of communication tools and we lived together in […]
The One Simple Thing That Will Change Your Life
Today is Martin Luther King Day. Consider how vitally alive he was while he lived. He did not waste his short but ‘chosen’ life. Have you chosen the life you are living? If not, what is one simple thing you could do to change your life? Or what one thing could you do that would […]
Who Is Responsible for Your Feelings? | Huffington Post
Do you take credit for making yourself happy? How about when you are feeling angry or hurt or rejected or abandoned? It is much easier to blame someone else than to be responsible for your feelings. Margaret Paul Ph.D. writes in Huffington Post, that it is our response to some else’s behavior that creates […]
How To Individuate | Step Two
This post explores how to individuate by taking the second step in the three step process. In an earlier post I wrote generally about the individuation process. I identified three stages: Declaring Separating Reconnecting I’ve written about declaring, and now I want to address the next step, separating. How To Individuate: Step Two To separate […]
Meditation and Psychotherapy
We recently had a gathering of Live Conscious graduates join us at our home for a discussion about meditation and psychotherapy and how to live without resistance, which I refer to as living with “Fierce Grace.” This expression comes from a movie about the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. It’s worth watching. We cause ourselves suffering […]
Becoming More of Who You Already Are | Psychology Today | Self Acceptance
What if we didn’t try so hard to be someone other than who we are? Ingrid Matthieu writes in Psychology Today that many of her clients believe that if they were “thin, pretty, enlightened, funny, smart, had a boyfriend/girlfriend, were richer, less anxious, less fearful, less of themselves, then they would be happy: forever.” She […]
The Social Animal by David Brooks validates Live Conscious
The Social Animal by David Brooks, NY Times columnist, intelligently explains and demonstrates what it means to be human. He helps us understand that our unconscious mind—more than our conscious mind—influences our emotions, decision making, perceptions and broadly speaking, the ways in which we make meaning. Brooks reassigns greater value—and appreciation—to our unconscious mind […]
Why Finding Your Peace Means Less Suffering for Others | Finding Peace |
Ed and Deb Shapiro, meditation teachers and authors of “Be The Change,” write that: “When we are unhappy or angry, then we are also angry with other people and increase the suffering in the world. When we are in pain, that pain gets projected onto others or blamed onto everything around us: “It’s your fault […]