Newsletters – 2021

I wasn’t always grateful for my body.Over the years, I have spent an incredible number of hours critiquing this place that has been my home throughout my entire existence.

The past two years, and even the past two weeks, have taught us that much of life is beyond our control. But we don’t have to feel stuck, writes Matthew Hepburn in this week’s Ten Percent Weekly.

In just the past five days, as the Omicron surge has engulfed New York City. Jay Michaelson writes about how to be resilient in the face of yet another wave of COVID.

In this excerpt from Ten Percent’s new podcast, Childproof, Yasmeen Khan and Yael Shy discuss how to recognize, and accept, the changes that come with becoming a parent.

Most of us, I think, want to feel fulfilled by whatever comprises our days and our lives. We may seek fulfillment through work, friendships, relationships, or family. Or we may seek fulfillment through inputs like art, curling up with a page-turning novel, meditating, enjoying a cup of tea, or gathering together with loved ones for the holidays.Yet experiencing fulfillment is, itself, a practice. We can watch all the entertainment in the world, we can work harder and longer, but if we don’t learn to experience fulfillment, we’ll never be satisfied.

Diets don’t work. Here, as part of Ten percent’s Anti-Diet Challenge, Christy Harrison talks with Dan about developing a more balanced, natural relationship with food.

Tim Hwang teaches meditation to public school students with autism, ADHD, and intellectual challenges. Here’s what he’s learned about the power, and limits, of mindfulness.

Reflecting on the blessings around us is an essential counterweight to negativity bias, and, ideally, an inspiration to ethical action.

One moment of mindfulness was good enough. And yet, if you’ve meditated, you know that this feeling can be fleeting.

Meditation isn’t just about measurable, objective benefits. It’s about “shelter from the storm,” to quote Bob Dylan, a space of solace and stability in an unstable world.

Loving-kindness meditation is deceptively simple: you focus on a person in your life and wish them well. But it can actually be a complicated meditation to integrate into your life. Not only do the details vary from teacher to teacher, which is confusing enough, but eventually you also have to make it your own.

Think of the best relationships in your life. What makes them so valuable, so enriching? What is happening for you when you are with one another?One of the hallmarks of exceptional relationships is the extent to which we each feel known by the other. We may feel intimacy, trust, familiarity, acceptance and support; we may feel love. We feel seen. We can be ourselves instead of spinning our image. And all of these depend upon knowing and being known. That’s true in our most precious personal relationships, but also, to lesser extents, in our work lives, family lives, and everyday interactions.

Needless to say, anxiety is on the rise right now. The continuing pandemic and the prospect of a Delta Variant winter; climate change; political uncertainty -- rates of anxiety have already been rising for decades, but in the last two years, they’ve skyrocketed.As a behavioral neuroscientist who’s been studying anxiety and addiction for many years, I believe the key to unwinding this anxiety is understanding what it is and what it isn’t.

We are to be undone and unraveled because life inevitably gets disrupted by a sudden death of a loved one, the loss of a home, or the arrival of a life-threatening illness. We face the unimaginable and think to ourselves, “I’m not who I thought I was” or “this isn’t where I’m supposed to be”. Although, it feels like destruction, to be undone is to be reminded that in nothingness, there is peace.

If you’ve ever meditated, you may have noticed that your mind likes to wander. In fact, many people who subscribe to this very newsletter tell us that they can’t meditate because their mind is always wandering.But this is a myth! And if it’s keeping you from meditation, please read on.

Cultivating radical kindness goes beyond just being “nice” or “doing the right thing.” It means that we consciously choose to live, speak, and act from a place of deep care and compassion for ourselves and others—especially when it’s the last thing we want to do. That's what makes it radical! And we can build this ability, bit by bit.

The delta variant caused a cascade of what meditation teachers often call “difficult emotions”: rage, fear, confusion, disappointment, and many more. Of course, mindfulness will not protect you from the virus. Nor will it banish all your difficult emotions so that you feel great about everything. But it does have three very useful superpowers.

A year of social distancing has created psychological distance as well. We’re all out of practice.

Many of us thought we were done with the pandemic. But we aren’t. What now?

Mindfulness can help you set boundaries around screen time, which in turn can help you and your family be more mindful.

It’s summer! The perfect time for barbecues, beaches, and, this year, remembering what it’s like to hang out with other human beings.Jay Michaelson shares four tips for meditating in the summertime. Even when you’re not meditating.

Kindness to others is at the center of the world’s spiritual and ethical traditions. When we cultivate kindness, we deepen our relationships with ourselves and others. We learn to be a good friend – even to strangers. And we're really wishing people well with genuine warmth and authenticity.But how do we do it? How do we cultivate more kindness?

So how do we tap into the creativity and energy of ambition without getting swallowed up by negativity, greed and delusion? For me, the key has been to lean into ambition and then, over and over again, release any attachment to the outcome.

You may have heard meditation called a “practice.” As in, “I practice mindfulness.” “I practice Zen.” And so on.But this alone is a very narrow understanding of practice. Really, the point of practicing meditation is to practice being human: the way we see ourselves and the world, the way we form intentions and ideas, the way we speak to each other, the way we act, the way we make our living, the way we apply ourselves. Practice involves far, far more than just meditating.

True freedom may come from a much-misused word: morality.While the term ‘morality’ may have connotations today of prudishness or judgment, in fact, a commitment to morality is a commitment to living life in the most free, most loving, and most expansive sense. It means living a life that reflects our love and compassion for ourselves and others.

As we in the United States explore the many feelings of pandemic transition – delight, awkwardness, anxiety, and everywhere in between – I want to make a plug: Enjoy some gratitude!

I came out to the world as queer when I was 21; I came out to my ultra-conservative parents when I was 38.The reason was clear: I never thought that they would understand or accept me. In fact, I always had this fear that they would actually disown me.

There’s a funny thing about anxiety: all of us experience it, and all of us think we shouldn’t be experiencing it.

According to the World Health Organization, "burnout" means emotional exhaustion, plus depersonalization, and a reduced sense of efficacy. But chances are, we don’t need that formal definition. All of us have experienced it, especially over the last year.

We have a little secret. Mindfulness complements any approach you take and what issue you’re addressing.

It’s difficult to even try to summarize the range of challenges that we as a society and individuals have faced.No wonder so many of us feel such a range of emotions: tired, anxious, numb; hopeful, grateful, eager to re-enter ‘normal’ life. Perhaps you even feel all of these things at once!

Forget meditation. External circumstances are the key to happiness. Or are they?

Many of us have spent over a year being unable to be with family, travel freely, or socialize with friends as we’re accustomed to. So it’s understandable, even though we’re gradually getting vaccinated and transitioning to a new normal, that many of us are hesitant and uncertain.

It can be frightening to hope.On the one hand, with vaccinations increasing and Covid deaths decreasing, we all want to feel hopeful. Hope encourages us to look forward toward a brighter future ahead.On the other hand, all of us are scarred by the last year, and many uncertainties remain. We don’t want to have our hopes dashed yet again.

With vaccines becoming widespread, the present moment is pregnant with possibility. How can we both embrace whatever comes up—the fear, the pain, the frustration, the love, the compassion—and at the same time generate hope and create a vision for the future?

The pandemic is changing again. And for once... maybe?... for the better.

With vaccines becoming widespread, the present moment is pregnant with possibility. How can we both embrace whatever comes up—the fear, the pain, the frustration, the love, the compassion—and at the same time generate hope and create a vision for the future?

No one likes stress, but according to numerous scientific studies, many of the things that people do to reduce it are actually ineffective, or worse, counterproductive.

Invincibility is a paradox.On the surface, the word may conjure up ideas of a stoic, “no pain, no gain” mental toughness, or even reckless teenagers acting like they’re invulnerable.But true invincibility comes from vulnerability.

One of the more annoying meditation clichés is the familiar tautology “It is what it is.”The phrase is at once ubiquitous and, seemingly, meaningless. It can literally apply to anything that exists. It sometimes functions as a spiritual merit badge, meant to display the pseudo-wisdom of the person who says it. And yet, I’m here to defend it.

It felt like stepping on the wrong end of a rake.My relative had asked for my opinion, but when I gave it, he launched into what sounded like a well-rehearsed argument, taking issue with each thing I had said and critiquing my character. I felt like I’d walked into a trap.

It’s often hard to love the people we love.Fortunately, the qualities we cultivate in meditation are also essential to a healthy, loving relationship: our capacities to feel, and act, with greater care, and to be with our experience as it arises, dips, soars, crashes, and re-arises.

The pandemic has been especially hard on the elderly. Even though, at last, many are now receiving vaccines, people over 70 remain at increased risk not only of Covid-19, but also of anxiety, depression and loneliness, due in part to social isolation. I have seen this firsthand.

Lately, some of us have felt something we haven’t felt in a long time: hope.

Why are we like this? And what can we do about it? In an evolutionary framework, anxiety is adaptive.

If we can change our relationships to ourselves, not only will be happier, but we will be able to find more sustainable paths to success.

Studies show that up to 95% of new year’s resolutions just don’t stick. Why? First, we often pick goals that don’t end up making us all that happy. And second, we’re confused about how to go about getting towards those goals.