Newsletter Articles

A few years ago, I signed up for something called a 360 Review, which is an anonymous survey of your friends and colleagues to get a panoramic sense of your strengths and weaknesses. I opted for the colonoscopy version, which also included my wife, my brother and two of my meditation teachers. 

Why?  Because after three years of meditating regularly, I wanted to get a sense of whether my inner work was having outer results.  Was meditation making me a better person, or just helping me feel less stressed inside?

Well, I got a big surprise. 

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The next several weeks, as we in the United States enter a highly contentious election season, will ask all of us some challenging questions: How do you remain engaged in civic life, even if you’re tired or frustrated? How can we connect to something larger than the small-minded views the world may be pulling us toward? How do values of compassion and mindfulness impact the actions we take in the public sphere?

I’ve spent the last four decades working to help people cultivate the inner capacities of mindfulness and lovingkindness through meditation and other practices, so naturally I think these practices have some answers to those questions.

Meditation saved my life when I was a teenager. I was bullied for six years for being perceived as queer in my small mountain town in Colorado. I wasn’t out yet, even to myself, but I was taunted, physically harassed, teased, and manipulated by peers who perceived something different about me. Beginning meditation in high school taught me focus, revealed an inherent goodness in me regardless of what was happening around me or being said about me, and showed me a spaciousness inside that could never be taken from me.

When was the last time you had a thoroughly satisfying conversation? A conversation where you felt really in sync with the other person—where you thought they really got you. And maybe they even told you they felt the same.

Dan Clurman and Mudita Nisker share how mindfulness can enable more satisfying, authentic conversations by helping you balance talking and listening.

For twenty years as a clinical psychologist and researcher at Harvard, Dr. Luana Marques has helped people build a healthier relationship with anxiety, from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to single mothers in poverty and individuals coming out of jail. In this week’s newsletter, Dr. Luana shares a simple, self-assessment process she calls the TEB cycle.

Recently, we asked Ten Percent Happier app subscribers what topics they most wanted to hear about. One of the responses we received the most, in various forms, was “how can I be more accepting of life’s ups and downs?”

To me, this simple-on-its-surface response says quite a lot about the relationship of meditation to, well, just plain advice. And why, at least in my experience, meditation has a lot more to offer.

In this moving personal essay, meditation teacher Emily Horn recalls a time recently when she felt that she couldn’t take any more sorrow or stress – but then more came her way.

There’s a human tendency to assume the worst about other people, one that seems particularly prevalent today. But, as Jay Michaelson explores, mindfulness can help us see how little we really know.

Zoom Fails: we’ve all been there. Here, psychologist Dr. Susan Pollak shows how to deal with these embarrassing incidents with grace, self-compassion, and humor.

There’s a myth that people who meditate shouldn’t get angry. That is not true, says meditation Mushim Ikeda, but meditation can help us transform our anger into effective action.

All of us have capacities for generosity or selfishness, love or hate. The question is which ones we work to cultivate.

In the Buddhist tradition in which I trained, cultivating compassion is the whole point of meditation. As we have experienced this past week, compassion can also hurt.

To face suffering in the world, and allow yourself to feel pain in response to it, requires a kind of fierceness and bravery that is very different from how compassion is often depicted.

Meditation master, Sharon Salzberg, shares her reflections on aging wisely as she’s about to turn 70 years old.

In this exceptionally fraught time for women’s and #LGBTQ rights, he writes that it’s been helpful to remember what meditation does and doesn’t do.

Many parents struggle to create healthy boundaries in their lives, and sometimes feel guilty for trying. But Yael Shy writes that boundaries can be an expression of love.

What happens when we’re faced with fear and discomfort? We often avoid it at any cost because we’re biologically wired to protect ourselves from any perceived danger. This automatic reaction would keep us safe when confronted by a lion, but does it serve us when we’re confronted with a difficult conversation? Dr. Luana Marques walks us through how to rewire our brain to stop avoiding difficult - but not life-threatening - situations today.

Saleem Reshamwala has a question for you: are emotions more than just a feeling?

Jay Michaelson writes that meditation teaches “a healthy kind of self-doubt” — the skepticism of the stuff our minds constantly tell us about ourselves, others, and the world around us.

A lot of sleep experts have advice on how to get better sleep. But in this provocative essay, Dr. Lauren Whitehurst says that sleep loss is also a societal problem and the result of societal choices.

Meditation teacher and minister, Lama Rod Owens reports that many of his students have begun asking an unsettling question: Is this the apocalypse?

His answer is even more unsettling: Yes.

With war raging in the Ukraine, how can meditation help us to work through despair, anger, and anxiety while keeping us engaged with the world around us?

Recent events may have you feeling anxious or weary. But psychologist Sona Dimidjian warns that your “automatic thoughts” can quickly spiral into depression. Here’s how to stop that from happening.

Covid cases are declining. And yet, there aren’t as many fireworks as there were last summer. Maybe you’re feeling a little “once bitten, twice shy” yourself. That this is a sign of wisdom – and that you are wiser than you were two years ago.

So, it’s February – a month when, for a lot of us, the resolutions we may have set a month ago start to fall apart. There are two big reasons for this: making changes is hard, and willpower doesn’t work.

Meditation can help you recognize anxiety a little bit faster, and develop a more intimate relationship with it, rather than simply wishing it would disappear.