Much of suffering can be tied to some deeply conditioned notion that we have some fundamental baseline of “happiness.” When some event, stimuli, or phenomenon is interpreted as “bad,” “unpleasant,” or “painful,” we almost instinctively engage strategies to obtain something we interpret as “good,” “pleasant,” or “pleasurable,”
Read more →Mindfulness
Mindfulness can be described as an intuitive awareness of present-moment experience as distinguished from thought-driven judgments or interpretations about that experience. Mindfulness refers to a state of being, and as such can only be described, not defined. Definitions reduce phenomena to static “things.” Insofar as mindfulness refers
Read more →For most of us, feelings of “happiness” or “well-being” are to some extent a function of life situations more or less conforming to preconceived notions of how life “should” be. Such notions often include ways in which people behave towards us, together with thought-driven notions of how we
Read more →To a significant degree, our counterproductive reactions to most situations involving conflict are a function of the extent to which we cling to inaccurate views of the nature of life. A primary Buddhist teaching relates to the truth of suffering and the inherent unsatisfactoriness of existence. This
Read more →One of the basic tenets of Buddhist psychology can be distilled down to a single basic teaching: That which we frequently ponder and think about becomes the inclination of the mind. Many life situations that people would term “legal problems” involve some recognizable loss or threat of
Read more →Mindfulness in general, and meditation practice in particular, serves to more firmly ground one in present-moment experience apart from thought-driven notions of how things need to be different than how they are in order to be “happy.” It is the very thought that things can be any
Read more →Mindfulness is especially valuable in conflict situations, or other situations that present challenges to central components of one’s perceived safety, self-concept, etc. One recent study by Natalia Karelaia, Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD in France, suggests four central ways in which mindfulness can foster improved
Read more →The mind seems to incessantly scan the environment for problems to solve. This active intellectual engagement with our environment likely served to ensure our survival as a species over millions of years as immediate physical dangers routinely confronted us in more primitive times. The mind seeks problems
Read more →The issue of spousal support, especially when involving highly disparate incomes of a separating couple, is one of the most challenging areas of the divorce process. Underlying the complexity are fundamental notions of “fairness” that may significantly differ for each spouse. To successfully deal with the issue of
Read more →On a surface level, most disputes revolve around some discreet event in the past that an individual has come to view as having violated his or her standards of “right” or “wrong,” or some more nebulous concept of “justice.” But when the sense of violation arising from
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