The Second Arrow: Thoughts that Kill
Siddhartha Gautama, or simply the Buddha as he would later be known, lived in eastern India somewhere around 400 BCE. The Buddha, meaning, “awakened one,” spoke of a Middle Way, or halfway point, between...
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Neuroscience of Mindfulness: Default Mode Network, Meditation, & Mindfulness
“Ipsa scientia potestas est.” ~ Sir Francis Bacon Translated as, “Knowledge itself is power,” this quote by Sir Francis Bacon appeared in his 1597 essay, Meditationes Sacrae (“Sacred Meditations”). Bacon has been credited as...
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Drowning in the Future
Most of our lives are spent holding our breath. We are submerged underwater, swimming for the surface. We grasp and pull towards the sunlight but never seem to get any closer. Recycled oxygen cycles...
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Down the Rabbit Hole
I placed my Zafu (meditation cushion) on the floor and sat facing the wall. I set the timer on my phone for twenty-five minutes and took my seat. I relaxed my gaze and focused my attention on my breathing.
In, out, in, out. The gentle rhythm of my breathing lapped against the shore of my mind like small waves born from a quiet ocean. I sat on the shore and looked out across the water as a seagull lazily circled before settling down to bob peacefully on the tide.
“Matt!”
I whipped around to see a Buddhist monk running down the shore towards me, his saffron robes billowing behind him…
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When Mindfulness Meets Life
From the chair of my desk it can be all too easy to make life seem like a paper tiger when viewed through the lens of mindfulness practice. However, what happens when the real...
The Science of Personality: From Hannibal Lecter to Peter Parker
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines personality as, “the set of emotional qualities, ways of behaving, etc., that makes a person different from other people.” As a social species, early humans relied on the ability to accurately...
Neuroscience of Mindfulness: Sugar, Drugs, & Dopamine
Let’s imagine that you were to give up sugary sweets for a month like I recently did as part of a requirement for a nutrition class. The first few days might be relatively easy...
Take a Deep Breath: The Physiology of Slow Deep Breathing
Take a slow, deep breath. “I am large, I contain multitudes.” ~ Walt Whitman The physiological mechanisms that make up a single breath could fill an entire book. And yet, for an event that...
Animal Consciousness: Can Animals Think?
Dig, dig, dig, bite! Dig, dig, dig, bite! Like an inmate who chips away at the same square foot of floorboard day after day with the hope of tunneling to freedom, Otis returns to...
The Opposite Game: A Practical Exercise to Alleviate Troublesome Thoughts
Modern man favors the book to the garden. The modern mind prefers intellectual discourse to mechanical practice. Instead of putting a philosophical tenet into action, we too often choose to simply intellectualize the doctrine....
Risk Perception: From Ebola to Airplanes
As our therapy session came to a close, I handed General Public (or “the General” as he liked to be called) a claim receipt for submission to his insurance company. The receipt listed the...
The Newtonian Consciousness
To understand the nature of a city we must study its occupants. In much the same way, today I wish to explore the mind by studying its constituent parts. Until now, my articles have...
The Neuroscience of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
OCD, not surprisingly, is defined by the patient’s experience of obsessions and compulsions. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the current standardized method of classifying mental disorders. The DSM-5 defines...
The Neuroscience of Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety is a native language to all humans. Let’s imagine anxiety as a 100-floor skyscraper with a metaphorical elevator capable of containing the entire world’s population (sorry if you’re claustrophobic or afraid of heights)....
Neuroscience of Mindfulness: How Do We Know What We Know
“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.” ~ Confucius We have thus far examined The Neuroscience of Mindfulness & Anxiety and The Default Mode Network, Meditation,...
