Benefits of living with purpose
Just in case you need scientific evidence on the benefits of living a life of purpose and valued-based action…
Values and what is important
How To Be Alone 101
Put down your cell phone and the constant quest for companionship with others, and open up to what life is like being with you…
What if the secret to success is failure?
“It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.”
The strength of vulnerability
Let’s face it, we all all imagine a time when we “have it together” and we are “on our game” and in control of our lives. However, Brene Brown’s research underscores that living a whole hearted life, is only as possible as our capacity for feeling vulnerable. She asks, “Is it possible to do a courageous act without feeling vulnerable?” Below is a wonderful radio interview and a video with this engaging woman.
Suspending the “self” and living from our essence
“We each have a self — but I don’t think we are born with one.” This is an eloquent and powerful 14-minute talk on the struggle with self-identity by movie actor Thandie Newtown, daughter of a white man from England and a black woman from Zimbabwe. But it is not just about racial identity. It is about the relationship between who we are, our essence, and the “selves” we have constructed, which she says are “projections our clever brains create”. “When the self is suspended” as when she is fully engaged in dancing or acting, she says, “so is divisiveness, and judgement.”
I honestly believe, that the key to my success as an actor, and my very progress as a person, has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure. I always wondered why I could feel others’ pain so deeply, why I could recognize the somebody in the nobody.It’s because I didn’t have a “self” to get in the way. The thing that was a source of shame, was actually a source of enlightenment.