One of the most powerful tools for living a well-regulated, mindful life is the ability to notice, to bring your benevolent observer into the present moment.
While we don’t have the power to control or even anticipate what the next moment may bring into our experience, we do have some say about how we meet these experiences internally. Within this website, I offer tools to support your present-day, benevolent observer and ways to return to a more centered and grounded daily experience.
Week 637: Celebrating Nature’s Intelligence – Generating Awe
Walking home through Central Park one evening, I found myself thinking about something I had read about a kind of tree whose name I can’t remember. It’s a tree that is from ages past, long past. It came into being during a time when trees required mates in order to reproduce and the powerful, and…
Week 636: Supporting Cooperation and Collaboration
Sitting in Central Park the other day, a whole crew of volunteers worked on the hill in front of me. They worked with wheelbarrows, rakes, and shovels, spreading a new layer of soil on the hill. As I watched them work together, my deepest response was one of gratitude that so many people showed up…
Week 635: Sharing Smiles
Sitting in Central Park the other day—one of my first leisurely days in the park during this new season of lush green—I found myself doing a lot of smiling. Often, I sit on a bench under a large tree near a walkway that a number of people use, even early in the morning. On this…
Week 634: Moving Beyond “Us and Them”
During this political season, there are constant and vivid examples of how we humans have a tendency to create categories of “us” and “them”. It seems to be a natural response to difference of just about any kind and often emerges from an underlying fear or discomfort in the presence of people, ideas, behaviors, and…
Week 633: Grappling with Preferences
Knowing that the one thing we can depend on in life is change is a very helpful orientation to have. Then, when change does come, we’re not as surprised when things aren’t the way we would prefer them to be.