“When I was a kid, our family used to watch Bonanza. I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.” —Anne Lamott My family’s TV ritual centered around Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In on Monday nights. I learned a lot from this time spent together—about our values and our sense of humor. It helped define who [...]
“Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.” —Hermann Hesse Life can often feel like an act of survival. It’s a hyper-connected, multi-tasking, texting-tweeting-downdogging-180-degree-latte kind of world, and it’s easy to get so caught up in the juggle that we forget we [...]
From the Covered California home page, www.coveredca.com. Those outside California, see healthcare.gov, the national site. When you start looking into it, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) actually seems fairly straightforward and not that complicated. In a recent presentation sponsored by California Lawyers for the Arts, someone from the Actors Fund gave a [...]
Yoga to Promote Sound Sleep When asked of the Buddha “Are you a man, or a God?” the Buddha replied... “I AM AWAKE.” I’ll start with the bad news—in some cases, chronic insomnia has no real cure. While there are many types of insomnia and many reasons for sleeplessness and sleep difficulties, for some of [...]
Brought together by crisis, reunited by gratitude The space between life and death is tenuous. No one knows, from one minute to the next, what might befall them. I don’t remember exactly how I felt on the morning of September 17, 1986. I do know that it felt special because it was my fourteenth birthday. [...]
They say follow your bliss but I say follow your pain. Because I’m starting to notice that when I follow my pain, then my bliss follows me. This happened recently with my arm pain. The pain had become so bad that at the end of class, sitting in final cross-legged position, instead of [...]
We all want to be happy. It’s something that we’ve even written into the Declaration of Independence, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Evidence reveals that collectively, we are anything but: Current statistics state that one in ten Americans are taking antidepressant medications. This pervasiveness suggests that something far beyond a simple state [...]
You get stuck in traffic, you can’t find a parking spot, or you just plain lost track of time. This does not make you a bad person, nor does it make you a bad yogi. And just because you are running a few minutes late to class doesn’t mean that you should ditch the [...]
If you ask people on the street where their mind is most of the time, they will probably think you are really odd, but then they will answer, “My mind is right here.” Is it? Most of us spend a great deal of time lost in thoughts about the past or the future. Many of [...]
How The Desire To Lose Weight Created A Desire For Wellness Change was needed. I had recently retired a multi-decade tobacco addiction and gained twenty pounds in two months when my metabolism came to a screeching halt without the nicotine. A friend of mine had dropped twenty-five pounds in twenty-six days on the Jennings’ RealMecleanse. Cautiously [...]