Category: Advice for Difficult Times
How to Work with the Winter Blues
Perhaps these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what can only be seen in the dark.
5 Meditations to Calm Anxiety
Five easy meditations you can do to find calm, care for yourself, and ease your anxiety in any situation.
What to Do When Someone You Love Is Hurting
Psychiatrist Ravi Chandra on how you can support a loved one suffering from mental illness without minimizing or ignoring your own pain.
Healing the Scars of History
Retreats are being held at Auschwitz, a former plantation, and a site where Indigenous people were massacred. Lindsay Kyte reports on how retreatants are finding freedom from their ancestral pain.
How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked
Shenpa is the urge, the hook, that triggers our habitual tendency to close down. We get hooked in that moment of tightening when we reach for relief. To get unhooked we begin by recognizing that moment of unease and learn to relax in that moment.
How to Work With Anxiety: 3 Techniques For Lasting Change
Anxiety is a natural response to being human, says Lion’s Roar’s Chris Pacheco. When we try to control our anxious feelings instead of accepting them, we might end up exacerbating fear and worry. Here, he outlines three main strategies for moving through anxiety.
The Middle Way of Stress
Judy Lief on what Buddhist wisdom teaches us about stress — where it really comes from, how it manifests, and why we may need it on the spiritual path.
Savor the Joy
When you’re a parent your heart is always on the line, sometimes broken, sometimes full of joy. To help you get through the tough parts, says psychologist and Insight teacher Allyson Pimentel, you can learn to savor the good times in parenting—and in life.
How Endings Make Room for Beginnings
“When I recognize the pain I feel because of loss,” says Sylvia Boorstein, “I am respectful of its presence and kind to myself.”
Get Curious About Your Anxiety
Buddhism and psychoanalysis take the same approach to calming the anxious mind, says Dr. Pilar Jennings—look with friendly curiosity at your anxiety and what causes it.