Posts tagged as:

mindfulness

A Thought From My Hero

by David on March 11, 2010

the path

A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of your sick, or return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph [...]

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Chop Wood, Carry Water

by David on December 21, 2009

chopping

When the mind is not crowded
By imaginary things,
It is the best season of your life.
-Kabir
I just chopped twelve hundred needless words from this article, which is fitting, because the point of all that blathering was to warn against getting lost in abstractions.
I think too much. Virtually all of us do, it’s no secret. Anyone who [...]

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Things We Said Today

by David on November 30, 2009

Post image for Things We Said Today

There was a moment last week when I found myself standing on a beach I never could have imagined. Bookended by two cliffs was a great, smooth expanse of the most otherworldly sand. It was like a Neapolitan ice cream of fine golden sand, exotic black obsidian grains, and clear, saltlike crystals.
In the distance, perhaps [...]

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What Five Days of Silence Taught Me

by David on November 5, 2009

Just before flying to Thailand, I spent five days at a retreat community called Hollyhock. It’s a humble, rootsy little hamlet on the relatively remote Cortes Island. I knew very little about the program I’d signed up for, only that it was about Buddhism.
It turns out that it was a rather intense regimen of meditation. [...]

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handwriting

When I was taking French classes a few months ago, we were each asked to write a composition in French and pass it to another classmate to read. It struck me then that I very seldom write more than a Post-It note’s worth these days. By the end of a paragraph, my hand is cramped [...]

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light meal

Another experiment has come to an end, but as usual, I’m not going right back to what I was doing beforehand. Just like my last experiment, 30 Days Without Drugs, one of the habits in my life has been permanently renegotiated.
To recap, a month ago I decided I’d go thirty days eating defensively. That means [...]

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Defensive Eating – Raptitude Experiment No. 4

by David on September 3, 2009

pastries

So I get on one wagon and fall off another.
My third official Raptitude experiment, 30 Days Without Drugs, was a resounding success in my eyes. I accomplished my goal and dismantled a persistent problem in my life. I’m now much less inclined to compromise my state of mind with the offhanded use of alcohol and [...]

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alcohol shot

On July 6, 2009, David began an experiment in which he resolved not to use any sort of drugs for 30 days. View the full experiment log here.
Day 22
Well I’m down to little more than a week left, and it really has not been difficult. There have been a few brief moments where I felt [...]

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donuts

If I told you to sit in the corner of the room, and get up whenever you want, how long do you think you’d stay?
Chances are, not long. From my meditation experiments I’ve learned that it takes about ten seconds of sitting still before one feels an impulse to do or change something. Wants begin [...]

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Moments Can’t Be Captured

by David on July 16, 2009

Deer tracks

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
~Cesare Pavese

By six o’clock on a Sunday night, the streets of Invermere were deserted.  It was early fall, the middle of dead season for a skier’s town, and I was trotting down to the highway to hitchhike back up the mountain, to the resort where I lived and [...]

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