"How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful. How can we do it? It's a very simple method."

"Employers should really embrace people taking power naps at work. But it's going to have to be more grass roots. More organic. But sometimes that's what it takes: a wake-up call."

~ Dr. James Hamblin

What does this word attention mean?

"Wearing a futuristic headset embeded with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, Lisa Park moniters her own brain activity during meditation and transposes this energy onto dishes of water to reveal zen-like vibrations."  

First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week

~ W. S. Merwin

"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality."

~ Ursula Le Guin

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,
most intense when the wind blows through it
and the sound it makes equally strange,
like the sound of the wind in a movie—

Louise Glück

"Gratitude encounters interruptions as invitations, deepens and expands horizons for re-envisioning reality, and cultivates depth perception for how we see other people."

~ Laura Russell

What happens when, just for a moment, we stay with our pain, our fear, our doubt, our discomfort, our grief, our broken heart, even our numbness, without trying to change it, or fix it, or numb ourselves to it, or get rid of it in any way? What happens when, even when we feel like leaving, abandoning the moment for the promise of a future salvation, we stay, sitting with the raw, unfiltered, boundlessly alive life-energy that is simply trying to express right now?

~ Jeff Foster

Have Judson Brewer and his colleagues finally found a clue to how the reduction of suffering looks in the brain? Not the activation of a specific region, but a more general deactivation, a neurological letting go that parallels the experiential one?

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
such an oracular fever!

~ Mary Oliver

"What I find very strange is this. That I think what's magnificent about Bach is that when you listen to this music, and it moves you so much, I mean, it's just a bunch of sound waves crashing into your ear, and you have to contain — you see this emotion bubbling up, you start seeing, like, tearing up, and saying, well, what's going on? These are just sounds crashing into my — what's going on in here?"

~ Bernard Chazelle 

"The only way I've found to try to keep my balance in a globe permanently on the move—and ever more cluttered with stuff—is to step out of the world on a regular basis, and to step back from my life, so as to see what's truly inside them. Otherwise, I can feel I'm standing two inches away from a vast and constantly shifting canvas, terminally unable to make out the larger picture."

~ Pico Iyer

Broadcaster, meditator, and author Dan Harris engaged mind scientist and renowned sceptic Sam Harris about his new exploration of spirituality recently released book, Waking Up.

"When I close a book / I open life...I learned about life / from life itself"

~ Pablo Neruda

"So much of what we live goes on inside–"

"Bad things are going to happen."

"One of the first, knockout exercises that you can do with actors, which is used in lots of theater schools where they use masks, is putting a plain, blank, white mask on someone.The moment you take someone’s face away in that way, it’s the most electrifying impression: suddenly to find oneself knowing that that thing one lives with, and which knows is transmitting something all the time, is no longer there."

~ Peter Brook