Earlier this month I asked you to share what you were grateful for. Now that Thanksgiving is upon us, what better time to tell the people in your life that you’re grateful for them? I’ve found that when you show acts of gratitude, you find yourself smiling more often. I know I do. Then people smile back at me, which…
I recently attended Omega NYC’s “The Neuroscience of Well-Being, Mindfulness & Love” workshop at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. It was led by Jack Kornfield, Ph.D., and Dan Siegel, M.D.—two people I’d wanted to hear in person for years. Kornfield’s Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, which he wrote with Joseph Goldstein, was one of the first books about…
For the first time in my life, I have an enemy. For a long while I didn’t even want to take a walk for fear of running into her. I had vivid images of her and her family coming to harm—being run over, maybe, or gunned down at close range. A therapist friend told me this was quite normal under…
Few things unleash memories as vividly as a favorite song from our past. We don’t just remember the tune; we can often recall exactly where we were, whom we were with, sometimes even what we were wearing when we first heard a tune on our personal Top Hits list. There are a number of reasons for this powerful recollection, including…
On a damp and foggy morning, I showed up for an all-day silent retreat at a glass-enclosed structure in the woods. I was three-quarters of the way through a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course. A small group of us had been meeting with two facilitators weekly in a time slot no one could make excuses for skipping: Sunday afternoons from 4:00…
It was a blustery winter morning when I packed the car, kissed my boyfriend goodbye, and headed off for the monastery. I needed alone time without the usual distractions of life so that I could reread the latest draft of a novel I’d been working on for too many years. I’ve always struggled to balance my two lives: the public…
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…
Many of us on the Rewire Me staff are what you might call neuroscience nerds. We love digging in to the latest research on the brain and thinking about how it could improve people’s lives. So we couldn’t resist listening in on the presentations at “Neuroscience 2013,” a conference that brought together 30,000 neuroscientists from around the world. Among many…
Anxiety easily becomes a lifestyle when your body and mind see threat and danger everywhere. What do you do then? Learn to live in The Worry Zone, or develop daily practices to rewire your body and brain. I spoke with licensed clinical social worker Guy Oberwise for some tips on how to reduce anxiety naturally. First, can anxiety and its…
