Blog

Is it Selfish to Seek Personal Happiness?

When I was growing up, I distinctly saw two different approaches to life.

One: you work hard to get the job, the car, the house—and then once you have all those things, you’ll not only be satisfied and happy but you’ll have time to pursue the interests, family life and social life that you envision will actually make you happy.

Telling Stories that Touch the Heart: An Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Leigh Badgley

“I try to tell stories that show how much we can learn from Nature, from ancient cultures, indigenous people and each other. If you want to reach people, you have to touch their hearts. When

Flannery O’Connor and Praise of God

Flannery O’Connor was a twentieth century writer of essays and fiction. Her stories and novels were published in the mid twentieth century to some acclaim. She passed away before her fortieth birthday, but a journal she kept between 1946 and 1947 while she was a student in Iowa was preserved, recently found among her papers in Georgia, and published. The notebook was filled with a series of observations and entreaties to God, and is a stunning work that represents her devotion, humor, and exquisite intellect.

O’Connor held the conviction that the created world is charged with God. She wrote,

The Science of Creative Intelligence

The Transcendental Meditation technique is the practical aspect of the Science of Creative Intelligence. What is creative intelligence, and what is the science of creative intelligence? When we look around us in nature, we see

Living in the “Home” of All Knowledge

“Down between the grapevine trellises, which gave her always a still, ordered feeling…there the experience would happen. Mary would be watching the dew slip down the clover stems… and around her would steal a sense of innumerable bright events, of tingling and unattempted possibilities; there would be a sense…of billows coming and going…. As she grew older, Mary began to know the billowing sense…. It came up inside her, she was uplifted with it…there were times when she could discern within it, dimly, the shapes of specific knowledge—all the knowledge in the world….” (Mary Austin, Earth Horizon)

One intriguing phenomenon reported by those who have had glimpses of enlightenment is the experience of direct knowledge of reality that comes from within consciousness, as distinct from our usual modes of learning through the senses and intellectual concepts. The writer Mary Austin, writing above about herself in the third person, had such glimpses throughout her life.

Creativity, Transcendental Meditation and Brain Integration

Growing up, I was taught that creativity was a highly prized commodity. My father was a product engineer for International Harvester, designing plows and farm equipment, and earned 22 patents. When he retired from that, he and his brother designed a nifty cable-laying machine that laid wires in the ground while leaving behind only a tiny slit—and is still popular 40 years later. His most amazing creative achievement, though, was a passive-solar home that he designed in 1959 and built out of all-natural materials with his own hands. Our family dearly loved the magical and beautiful home he built for us.

My dad taught us that anyone can be creative. You didn’t have to be a famous scientist like Madame Curie or a famous dancer like Isadora Duncan to be highly creative in your everyday life, he said. He pointed out that the world is filled with people who create amazing things every day.

If You Don’t Have It, You’re Not Contagious: A Look at Stress Contagion

Ever walk into a room where people were arguing and suddenly find that you are getting tense? Did you know that the baby of a stressed mother could be in danger of rising blood pressure?

Stress, ADHD and Childism

I had never heard of the word “childism” before reading Claudia M. Gold’s review of the book Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children by the late author Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.

Young-Breuhl, an analyst, political theorist and biographer, calls attention to the way human rights of children are threatened in America today. Childism is defined as “a prejudice against children on the ground of a belief that they are property and can (or even should) be controlled, enslaved, or removed to serve adult needs.”

Winning on Wall Street: An Interview with Anita Warner

At the time, I was living in Pennsylvania and my friend recommended it to me. At first I thought it would be difficult because I had tried meditating in a yoga class. But then she said that what she was doing was quite easy and that is how I decided to learn TM. I had been working with special education students and was very tired and drained from work, and when I learned TM and then would come home to meditate after work I found myself completely rejuvenated. I liked it. And I started noticing in my day to day life that I feel better, more alert and balanced—everything that the research on TM states that you’ll experience.

Hedging Against Alzheimer’s

In January of 2009 both my parents were diagnosed with “dementia of the Alzheimer’s kind” on the same day. I was expecting such a diagnosis for my mother, who was suffering from short-term memory loss (and who had a history of Alzheimer’s in the family). But the diagnosis for my father? My siblings and I were stunned. At 84 he had slowed down, for sure, but we had attributed his sudden disinterest in yard work and taking care of his finances to an infection that he was fighting.

In the following months, as my father’s mental condition declined precipitously, my sister and I scrambled to rearrange our lives to give our parents the care that they needed. And as we talked endlessly about what had caused this, we found out that there was also Alzheimer’s in my father’s family—his mother had been diagnosed with what they termed then as “hardening of the arteries”—with symptoms that today would likely be classified as dementia of the Alzheimer’s kind.