Dolphins are beautiful, playful and intelligent creatures.  People who have had the chance to swim with dolphins often describe it as an experience of spiritual communion.  Some have commented on how harmoniously a pod of dolphins lives together, and wished humans could get along so well.
But dolphins have a dark side.  They don’t exactly follow [...]

A common idea in personal development circles is that “what you focus on expands.”  For instance, if you’re feeling sad, focusing your attention on your sadness will only make you sadder.  Instead, you need to distract yourself from your sadness by visualizing rainbows, playing with your cat, or doing something else to take your mind [...]

(This piece is an “unofficial sequel” to my last post, “Why I Don’t Force Myself To Be Happy.”)
Do you feel like you’re only creative in certain moments?  I’ve worked with several people who said they only produce decent work at specific times of day, or when they’re in particular moods.  The rest of the time, [...]

The most effective inner work I’ve done on myself has been in the form of what’s often called “conscious suffering.”  This term comes from early twentieth-century mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, who “distinguished between unconscious suffering, which is without value, and conscious suffering, sometimes termed ‘voluntary’ or ‘deliberate’ suffering, through which we can self-perfect.”
By this, I mean [...]

Most of us look to the outside world to “give” us pleasure.  We believe that earning more money, having relationships with more attractive partners, watching more entertaining movies, and other similar activities would make us happy.  By the same token, we tend to assume events in the outside world “hurt us” or make us unhappy.  [...]

Many of us see the unpredictable and sometimes dramatic changes in our moods as a problem.  I, for one, used to get frustrated when a grumpy or lethargic feeling would overtake me at work and hamper my productivity.  “Why can’t my body understand that I’m trying to work?” I’d wonder.  “Can’t I wait until the [...]

A little while back, I wrote an article on the function guilt performs in our lives and the limiting ways we tend to perceive it.  Today, I want to expand on a particular point I made in that piece, which is that the amount of guilt we feel seems to depend on the time of [...]