When we practice like this, we are shifting from our habitual patterns of self-concern and shutting out all possibilities, to openness and not-knowing, to unlimited possibilities and seeing the breath-taking beauty of the world in front of us.
Category: zen habits
The Best Things I’ve Learned About Raising Children
I don’t consider myself a parenting expert, but I have helped raise six kids (along with their mothers), and being a father has been one of the most rewarding things in my life. And while I’m not a perfect father, I think I’m pretty good at it. Mostly because I absolutely love it.
The Rule of the Edge
In all of my many challenges and habit changes and book writing and learning, I’ve found one thing to be the most powerfully beneficial to all growth, learning and training. I call it the Rule of the Edge. Here’s the rule: practice at your edge most of the time.
The Beautiful and Scary Practice of Moving Closer
Life is full of all kinds of stresses, and each of us has habitual ways of reacting to those stresses — we procrastinate, run to comforts, lash out or distance ourselves from others, try to exit from a stressful place, mentally complain about others. The sad effect of these habitual reactions is that they move us further away from others, and from the direct experience of the moment.
The Simple Guide to Creating Habits for a Great Year
It’s a new year, and many of us are looking to make positive changes in our lives. The best way to do that is not by making resolutions, but by creating habits that will stick for the long term. If you want to run a marathon, form the habit of running. If you want to write a novel, form the writing habit. If you want to be more mindful, form the habit of meditation.
New Year: The Beautiful Minimalism of a Blank Slate
Let’s imagine this new year as a blank slate. It’s like an empty house: what would we like to put in it? This is a kind of minimalism. We can start afresh, tossing out everything and only placing in this empty house what we find most important, and nothing more.
The Essential Zen Habits of 2018
As 2018 comes to a close, I have to say … it’s been a year of depth but also chaos and blessings for me and Zen Habits. I’m grateful for the wonderful readers I have had for more than a decade now (all of you!), and for the journey I’ve been on and will continue in the coming year.
Ego Dropping: The Magic of Breaking Free from Self-Concern
What happens once you drop the ego and drop into a wide open, gentle, loving awareness? Magic. You don’t have to run to comfort and away from discomfort, you don’t have to protect your self-image from others, you don’t have to defend yourself or worry about failure or being judged.
Training in Uncertainty
I’ve been training in uncertainty for a few years now. I realized that the people I coach and teach are just like me: we feel shaky, scared, anxious, uncomfortable when we are faced with massive uncertainty, when the ground is pulled out from under our feet.
Simplify Technology with Limits
The problem comes when we try to figure out how to get a grip on it all, to tame technology to do what we need and then let it go so we can be more present, go outside more, move more, be connected to each other in real life more. Wrangling the chaos into something that we use consciously isn’t always easy.