How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a Whole Lot Happier by Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman
“I have all the time in the world,” a confident, aggressive, thirtysomething financial manager I’ll call “Mr. Endless Time” told me, his therapist, many years ago. “I have plenty of time to settle down and be more disciplined and responsible. For now, I’d rather have fun, play the field, and enjoy my life.” Yes and no, I thought. He…
Creativity is more complex than the maps we fashion to understand it. “There being no known method from the known to the unknown,” as the narrator of James Joyce’s über-imaginative Ulysses said, ascertaining what facilitates creativity might seem like a fool’s quest. Psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint, a neglected classic in the literature on the creative…
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you find Western secular culture a breeding ground for the worst human values and qualities, from unquenchable selfishness and greed to unconscionable meanness and hard-heartedness. You are disgusted by the moral free-for-all that profits no one except the insanely rich. You hunger for a saner world than secular culture fosters—one committed to enriching, rather…
We are what we consume. We thrive on a diet of inspiring ideas, deeds, and art, and languish when we lack emotional, intellectual, and spiritual nourishment. We are being polluted every day. And it’s not just the unhygienic water or the contaminated air or the nutrient-depleted food. It’s the unprecedented amounts of mindlessness and sleaze in media, entertainment, and politics. In…
