Around this time each year, many children have made a Christmas wish list that includes items like toys, games, crafts and electronics.
In a variety of teachings, unconditional love is the heart and soul of the spiritual life and the ultimate aim of the spiritual path – and by love is meant love in action of course (be it meditation or feeding the hungry), not discourses about love.
How many times have you sat down to watch TV or a movie, only to immediately shift your attention to your smartphone or tablet? Known as “media multitasking”, this phenomenon is so common that an estimated 178m US adults regularly use another device while watching TV.
The love of reading is one of the greatest gifts an adult can give to a child. Pragmatically, reading proficiently helps with school work. But it also widens children’s horizons. It can help readers to understand their own world better, and to explore other worlds.
- By Sam Keen
Sometimes what looks like a fight is only the fierceness of love. We have moved from a condition of silent hostility, buried resentment, and covert low-intensity warfare to open conflict. We are wrestling together, changing roles in the hay, engaging in honest intercourse, yessing and k(no)wing each other. And contact is the first condition of love.
It’s a question that’s reverberated through the ages – are humans, though imperfect, essentially kind, sensible, good-natured creatures?
Shortlisted for the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2018 word of the year, “gaslighting” has well and truly found its way into contemporary thought and vernacular.
- By Kara Gavin
A study of hundreds of brain scans sheds light on abnormalities common to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
We all have opinions, beliefs, preconceived notions, etc. And I've noticed, in myself and others, a tendency to discount anything that falls outside of what we've decided we "like". For example, when I discovered a...
If you’re anything like me, or at least who I used to be, my hunch is that when you are on the cusp of doing (and especially saying) something big, important, and paradigm shifting, you label what you are experiencing in your body as fear.
- By Les Jensen
I have been “cleaning out my karma” for a few decades now. When I first started paying attention to the feelings of the moment, there was a collage of easy to detect feelings.
Between 60 and 80 percent of people surveyed have not been forthcoming with their doctors about information that could be relevant to their health, according to a new study.
Most people are probably familiar with the classic fight or flight response to a feared stimulus.
The violent and senseless death of 11-year-old Luke Batty in Victoria has not only drawn attention to the serious problem of family violence but has also raised questions about the role that undiagnosed or untreated mental illness may have played in his father’s behaviour.
When people come together in a crowd, physical and emotional connections define their movement, state of mind and will to act. Understanding crowds can help us manage the panic caused by a terrorist attack
Many of our psychological traits are innate in origin. There is overwhelming evidence from twin, family and general population studies that all manner of personality traits, as well as things such as intelligence, sexuality and risk of psychiatric disorders, are highly heritable
When ACT released its latest test scores this past October, the results showed that average scores took a dip for every racial group in the United States except one – Asian-Americans.
Food critic William Sitwell has resigned as editor of Waitrose’s in-house magazine following a row over his astonishingly hostile response to a freelance journalist who proposed a series of articles on veganism.
‘Tis the season when the conversation shifts to what you’re thankful for. Gathered with family and friends around a holiday feast, for instance, people may recount some of the biggies – like their health or their children – or smaller things that enhance everyday life – like happening upon a great movie while channel-surfing or enjoying a favorite seasonal food.
The World Health Organization calls stress "a global epidemic". Stress may be as American as apple pie, but it is also as worldwide as bread pudding. It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, how much money you make, or how dysfunctional your parents were...
When we are unhappy, we often quite naturally begin to fantasize about how our troubles would end "if only". If only I could quit my job... If only I could leave this marriage... Unfortunately, all too often we quit that stressful job or leave that unhappy marriage, only to find...
Every day, people try to make sense of challenges in their lives, but sometimes their explanations get in the way of solving them, psychologist Gregory Walton says in a new paper.
It is the events that happen in our lives that determine the state of our mental health, rather than some inherent personal inadequacy or genetic flaw.