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Meditation or Medication? Today’s Plague of Pill-popping

An estimated 80 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, according to the American Chronic Pain Association, but women experience pain more often and with greater intensity. Research also shows men and women respond differently to pain medications, and in fact use separate mechanisms in the brain to achieve pain relief.

Many Ways to Mother

I guess I have to come out with something. Even though I once taught children in grades 2-4 and trained elementary school teachers in the language arts, wrote articles for a children’s column for Plain magazine and am a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, have co-authored two books on children’s health, written articles on parenting and am the loving aunt of two and Godmother of three, I myself have never given birth to a child.

Don’t get me wrong. I really do love kids, which is why so much of my career and my social life is wrapped around them. But when it came to having our own, it seemed like my husband and I always wanted to wait until sometime in the future. There were real obstacles that I don’t want to go into here, but basically, I admit it—we didn’t want kids enough.

Liberty Enlightening the World: The Definitive American Icon

On July 4th 2013, the Statue of Liberty reopened after Superstorm Sandy had flooded Liberty Island in the middle of New York Harbor, making access to the public impossible.

The most iconic American symbol of enlightenment, a gift from France to the USA in 1886, the robed female figure represents Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom. The French name for the colossal neoclassical sculpture is La Liberté éclairant le monde which, when translated, is Liberty enlightening the world.

Yearning for More: The Quest for Enlightenment, Part Two

The Universality of TM and Transcendental Consciousness—the Basis of Higher States of Consciousness

The range of human life is not, as is generally thought, restricted to our various ways of living, sleeping, waking, playing, talking or behaving; these are only the gross levels of human values. The real, substantial value of human life is the bliss-consciousness that raises one to the high estate of eternal freedom while he is engaged in the day-to-day world of transitory values. —Maharishi

Our deeply felt “yearning for more in life” has its roots in the fact that our innate human capacity is so much more vast than our current experience. As an anxious, depressed teenager, when I first heard about the possibility of enlightenment, I was relieved, encouraged, inspired, and utterly fascinated. Since that time, the process of discovery has been extraordinarily rewarding. In this series of blogs on the quest for enlightenment, I will share my discovery of Maharishi’s teachings on higher states of consciousness.

On Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake and What We Missed between Birthdays

Anna Quindlen inspires, provokes with kindness, and makes her reader laugh and—more importantly—think. She is an expert on being self-aware, shedding light on subtle tendencies that women “of a certain age” share, and on giving us the comfort that sharing personal truths brings. She precisely and humorously captures and portrays every nuanced experience of mothers, wives, and women treated as second class employees on our emotional map between self-incrimination and self-congratulation.

Anxiety as a Way of Life?

Until recently I hadn’t known that there was more than one kind of anxiety, but there is. It turns out that there is one measure of anxiety named state anxiety, which is related to specific

Making Technology Safe for Your Kids

As we hear more distressing accounts of children using social media sites and other technology to cyber-bully other children, sometimes with shockingly tragic results, you can’t help but think that there’s got to be a way to make technology safer for kids.

Moms often try to control their children’s use of technology, but that can only go so far. As in the recent disturbing case of Rebecca, a 12-year-old-girl in Florida, her mother had taken away her cell phone and restricted her use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to protect her daughter from seeing nasty posts from a group of students who were targeting her daughter. But Rebecca later signed on to apps that the mother didn’t even know existed—such as ask.fm, Kik and Voxer. And the cyberbullying started up all over again, ending in a terrible tragedy as Rebecca took her own life.

Healing Your Two Hearts

Women are known to have a higher emotional intelligence (EI) than men, and that’s a good thing. In fact, for many of us, empathy, intuition, compassion and sensitivity to other people’s feelings are the beacon lights that guide us through each day.

Yet this emotional sensitivity and openness can backfire when we’re under stress. Researchers tell us that a woman’s brain is wired differently than a man’s, making women more susceptible to stress than men even when exposed to the identical triggers. As just one example, women in the military are twice as likely to develop PTSD than men.

Being a Woman First

Women in combat are facing enormous challenges as they return home. Reintegrating into family life, finding housing, finding a job, being a mom and figuring out how to be a civilian again can be daunting.

Yet underlying all of these seemingly disparate roles a woman plays in the world is the role of being a woman. If a woman veteran can nourish her most essential self, the subtle essence of feminine beauty, softness and pride, she has come a long way in finding her place in the world.

From the Blues to Bliss: Transcendental Meditation is Transporting Long Island Women

Let’s face it ladies: the statistics are grim. There’s a plague of stress in the United States. It’s in our schools, our workplaces and our homes. Studies show that one out of four visits by women to physicians involves a prescription for depression. Women today claim to be, on average, forty percent less happy than women forty years ago. There are now more women than men in the workforce, but we are more susceptible to stress at work. Heart disease, already the number one cause of fatality among women, is increasing.