Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder...as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. -- Eugene Ionesco

How to Awaken Joy in Kids

--by James Baraz, Michele Lilyanna, syndicated from Greater Good, Oct 22, 2016

Can joy be cultivated? And, if so, can we teach our kids how to be more joyful in their lives?

In our experience, the answer to both of these questions is yes. But it takes knowing what kinds of practices bring true happiness—and not just momentary pleasure—to your life. Once you’ve mastered that, it’s not too hard to introduce those practices to kids in a way that they can understand and appreciate.

This essay is adapted from Awakening Joy for Kids by James Baraz and Michele Lilyanna ©2016. Reprinted with permission of Parallax Press.

Our new book, Awakening Joy for Kids, is a resource for parents, teachers, and caregivers who want to give their kids the gift of authentic happiness. Filled with practices you can integrate into your day at home or at school, our book is designed to be a guide to helping your children increase their well-being and enable them to meet the stresses of the world with presence, self-compassion, and openness. We offer practices for adults as well as kids, since your own well-being is the best prescription to passing it along to younger people.

Many of our practices are rooted in science. For example, we suggest helping kids to set intentions for happiness because paying attention to the good things that happen in life rather than focusing only on the bad can help rewire their brains for happiness. We teach mindfulness meditation because mindfulness has been shown to decrease stress and increase happiness. And we teach the practice of compassion because caring for others is key to better relationships, health, and emotional well-being.

These practices and the others outlined in our book come from our experiences as meditation practitioners and as teachers of adults and children. The two described below—cultivating gratitude and building resilience in difficult times—are some of the most powerful.

1. Gratitude

Why practice gratitude? Because gratitude has been found to increase happiness and social supportin kids, both crucial for long-term well-being. It also seems to benefit adults.

Paying attention to what you’re grateful for can switch the channel of your negative thinking and help you appreciate what is here in your life right now. To deepen the effect, though, it’s important to let yourself fully experience gratitude when it’s here and take time to savor the moment, particularly in the body. Even just a few seconds of registering the positive feelings of gratitudewhen they arise help to strengthen their impacts.

Here are a couple of ways we encourage the practice of gratitude, first in adults, then in kids:

Gratitude meditation for adults

To experience a taste of gratitude, try sitting quietly in a relaxed posture and focusing on your heart center. As you inhale, visualize breathing in kindness; as you exhale, allow negativity to be released. Then reflect on some blessing in your life—any person or thing that you are grateful for. It could be as simple as having eyes to see, food to eat, and air to breathe; or it could be thankfulness for having love in your life or a good job or kind friends. Whatever it is, take time to say a quiet “thank you” and then to mindfully experience the good feelings in your body.

Other gratitude practices we’ve found helpful are writing a gratitude letter, listing three good thingsin a journal before going to bed at night, or just sharing your appreciation for others when you encounter them in your everyday life. Whenever you do a gratitude practice, you deepen your feelings of joy and increase the joy around you. Here’s the key: Don’t miss it!

Gratitude exercises for children

To help instill gratitude in your own children, try starting a gratitude practice at the dinner hour. Perhaps you can hold hands with your children and all share something that you were grateful for that day. It can be something as simple as noticing a flower or the kindness of a friend. Just sharing in this way helps parents and their kids to get a better idea of what’s happening in each other’s lives and is a simple way to build deeper family bonds.

At school, a practice we suggest is to have children gather in a circle and pass around a special stone, sharing what they are grateful for. With a little encouragement, children will come up with many ideas, like “having Mom make my lunch” or “snuggling with my cat” or “living on such a beautiful planet.”

Teachers can encourage kids to write in a special journal about what they are grateful for or to make “gratitude flags”—small pieces of fabric where they write down what they are grateful for—and then hang them from a string in the schoolyard. That way, kids can remember and show their friends what they are thankful for whenever they are outside playing.

2. Help in difficult times

Gratitude and other skills we write about—like intention, mindfulness, and compassion—can be cultivated over time through attention and practice, and they all lead to greater happiness and social-emotional well-being.

But that doesn’t mean that life is always joyful—nor should it be. One of the great truths is that life also brings challenges. It’s important for us to breed joy in our lives not to avoid the inevitable difficulties, but to meet them with strength and compassion.

The practice of embracing the difficult is a vital part of awakening joy. The more we understand suffering and are willing to come to terms with it, the greater the possibility of developing a mind that is not afraid of the hard stuff when it comes—because underneath the pain lies wisdom, compassion, and love that can open to it.

RAIN: How adults can work with difficult feelings

When we suffer, we often experience pain, anger, fear, or sadness. The acronym RAIN can help us remember how to directly open to and work skillfully with these difficult feelings. Here are the steps to doing this practice:

Recognize what you’re feeling. Let yourself be open to your emotions of sadness, anger, or fear, and name it.

Allow it to be here. Let go of any agenda for it to change and, for a few moments, give it permission to be just as it is.

Investigate how it feels in your body on an energetic level without getting into the story behind it or trying to get rid of it. Bring a curiosity or interest that involves simply exploring the landscape of your emotion without needing to figure it out.

Non-identification—meaning, don’t take it personally; don’t assume the experience reflects who you are at your core. (For example, don’t say to yourself, “I’m an angry person.”) Recognize that everyone experiences emotions; they are part of the human condition. Open up to that truth and don’t let it define you.

If exploring difficult emotions becomes too hard, you can always practice a little mindful breathingor gratitude, and go back to exploring the emotions later. This will help you to be kind to yourself, while bringing more balance to your emotions.

Self-compassion for adults

When working with a difficult experience, the most important thing you can do is to be compassionate and caring toward yourself—to not beat yourself up about it and invoke more pain. Practicing self-compassion involves turning your caring attention toward yourself, remembering that your pain is something everyone experiences.

Researcher Kristin Neff suggests placing your hand on your heart and sending yourself positive messages, like “Suffering is a part of life” and “May I hold my suffering with kindness and compassion.” She has found that mindful self-compassion practices have the potential to increase calmness, decrease emotional reactivity toward others, and help us take setbacks less personally—all useful in difficult situations.

Helping children navigate difficult times

Many parents want to “be there” for their kids, to support their growth and well-being. But being there for them all the time, and not allowing them to experience difficulties and frustrations, can keep them from learning resiliency or the power of handling their emotions with wisdom and compassion. Over-protected children are often more anxious than their peers and have trouble bouncing back from setbacks.

To help children navigate difficult times, we still need to encourage joy practices with our kids. Practicing gratitude and mindfulness during the good times gives them the energy to really put in a concentrated effort when things are difficult—sort of like charging a battery.

But that doesn’t mean we ignore our sadness, anger, fear, or pain. We want to teach children to express their emotions in healthy ways rather than stuffing them down or exploding.

Reframing kids’ thoughts

One thing teachers can do in the classroom is to help children find antidotes to negative thinking—often a big source of stress for kids as well as adults. Children get a lot of negative messaging, and they need ways to counteract that so that it doesn’t lead them down a spiral of despair or helplessness. Reframing or correcting distorted thinking is one way to change negative thinking into realistic thinking.

One exercise involves giving children a sheet of paper that has been divided in two. On one side, the children write down one or more of their own negative thoughts—the kind that tends to run around in their heads, like “I’m not good at math” or “No one likes me.” On the other side, they write down the opposite or the antidote to those negative thoughts, like “I find math challenging, but I’m taking on that challenge and it’s OK if I don’t get every answer right; I’m learning,” or “Just because one person was mean to me doesn’t mean I’m not likable; I can keep being open and kind to others, because that helps me connect and be a good friend.”

Then teachers can ask their students to notice throughout the next day or week when the more positive antidotes run through their minds and encourage them to focus on these when a negative thought arises. By doing this, you are helping to rewire their brains to pay attention to the positive and make it their natural, default setting. This helps kids to be courageous when things get tough, and to not get bogged down in self-defeating thoughts.

Encourage compassion in kids

Another thing that helps is fostering compassionate action. When we learn how to help others who are going through hard times, it can help us to strengthen our relationships, an important resource in challenging situations.

Try this: Ask children to think of someone—a person or an animal or even “the earth”—who is having a hard time. It can be someone they are familiar with or whom they don’t know well.

Then ask them to think of an action they could take to make things better. It’s important to encourage kids to take baby steps and not expect them to solve the whole problem. But they can do small things like write a get-well letter to a sick relative, make a quick phone call to a friend who fell down at school, give a hug to a pet that’s been home alone all day, or water the thirsty plants outside. Encouraging kids to notice others going through challenging times and to take positive steps helps them to stay attuned to the world around them. And it feels great!

We believe that sharing mindfulness and social-emotional practices are vital not only to the next generation but to the well-being of our planet. Whenever we teach our children—and ourselves—to shine a light on the good and to rest our minds on uplifting moments, we are strengthening the ability to empathize with others, feel more connected, build resilience, and be inspired to make this a better world. And that makes for a more joyful life for all!

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This article is printed here with permission. It originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). Based at UC Berkeley, the GGSC studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society. 

Be The Change: Experiment with using the practices in the article when interacting with children in your own life.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

A Soulful Poem ...

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.

For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.

For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.

For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day.

For poise, walk with the knowledge you’ll never walk alone.

People, even more than things have to be 

restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. 

Never throw out anybody.

Remember: if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm. 

As you grow older you will discover that you have two hands. 

One for helping yourself, and one for helping others.

At A Certain Point ...

At a certain point - Adyashanti

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them. They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.

What is most important is to come out of pretending. There is a time and a place for everything. There’s a time to make effort and to be disciplined. There is a time to let go and realize you cannot do it alone, that it is up to grace, that effort and struggling and striving play no part.

But understand one thing: the trajectory of our spiritual lives—no matter what our path, whether it’s a progressive path or a direct path, whether it is a devotional path or otherwise—the trajectory of our spiritual lives and of all spiritual awakening is toward surrender. Ultimately, that’s the name of the spiritual game. Everything we do spiritually is leading us to a spontaneous state of surrender—to letting go. That is where it all leads, no matter what the path is, no matter what the practice is. Once you know that, you notice that each step along the way is the next opportunity to surrender. It may take effort to get there; it may take effort to get you to the point where you are willing to let go into grace, but ultimately the whole of spirituality boils down to letting go of the illusion of the separate self, letting go of the way we think the world is and the way we think it should be

We need the willingness to lose our world. That willingness is the surrender; that willingness is the letting go. And each of us has to find what that letting go means for us, what we need to let go of. Whether it’s easy or difficult doesn’t matter in the slightest. It is the letting go that is ultimately important.

Have Patience And Faith ...

Take heart today. Be Blessed.

A certain gentleman walked into a hotel and after perusing through the menu ordered for some food.

After about 20 mins another group of gentlemen walked in and ordered for theirs.

To his dismay, he noticed them get served first.

He watched as they began to eat and laugh heartily. He even overheard one of them brag about how he knew everyone at that hotel and how things moved fast for him here.

He felt he was being mocked. He contemplated leaving. But he had waited so long. Unable to take it anymore, he called the waiter and spoke sadly of how unfair things were.

The waiter calmly told him, "Yours is a special order Sir, being prepared by the chief chef himself. Their orders were prepared hurriedly by interns because the top chefs are busy with yours. That's why they came first. Please have some juice as you wait".

Unknown to him the owner of the hotel { who happened to be an old long lost friend of his } had seen him coming and wanted to surprise him and had made changes to his simple meal to make it an exotic meal.

He calmed down and waited.

Shortly after his meal was served by 6 waiters and he was waited on hand and foot and being made very comfortable.

The gentlemen at the other table were shocked. They couldn't stop staring. Suddenly they were the ones murmuring, asking why they didn't get that kind of service and meal.

So it is with life!

Some people are ahead of you and eating now, laughing at you about how they know people and how they're blessed with money and how they're enjoying life because of it.

You have been waiting long wondering why it is taking so long to get your breakthrough, enduring mockery and humiliation. Maybe you have contemplated the unthinkable, gone through depression or suffered severe mental anxiety.

Do not worry!

The owner of the world has seen you. And doesn't want to give you simple meals like those laughing at you.

You've been waiting for long because yours is a special meal and  takes time. And only chief chef makes those!

Take heart today. Wait for your meal and relax. When it comes, the laughing party will be silenced for good.

Calm down. Have patience. Have faith. Stay blessed

Khoobsurti ...

🌹: खू्बसूरती :🌹

हर किसी को अपनी खूबसूरती पर घमण्ड होता है | मै आज आपको खूबसूरती की परिभाषा बताता हूँ

🌹खूबसूरत है..... ....वो लब जिन पर, दूसरों के लिए कोई दुआ आ जाए !!

🌹खूबसूरत है ............वो दिल जो ,  किसी के दुख मे शामिल हो जाए !!

🌹खूबसूरत है.......... वो जज़बात जो, दूसरो की भावनाओं को समझ जाए !!

🌹खूबसूरत है........ वो एहसास जिस मे, प्यार की मिठास हो जाए !!

🌹खूबसूरत है............. वो बातें जिनमे, शामिल हों दोस्ती और प्यार की किस्से कहानियाँ !!

🌹खूबसूरत है.......... वो आँखे जिनमे, किसी के खूबसूरत ख्वाब समा जाए !!

🌹खूबसूरत है .........वो हाथ जो किसी के लिए .मुश्किल के वक्त सहारा बन जाए !!

🌹खूबसूरत है..........वो सोच जिस मैं, किसी कि सारी...... ख़ुशी छुप जाए !

🌹खूबसूरत है............. .... वो दामन जो, दुनिया से किसी के गमो को छुपा जाए !

🌹खूबसूरत है.......वो आसूँ जो, किसी और के गम मे बह जाए !!

Friendly Gestures

17 Friendly Gestures That Create Good Karma

When we create good karma in our lives today, we create more happiness and fulfilment for our futures tomorrow.

Karma is a universal law that affects everyone, all of the time.  It is the consequence of our actions.  Karma brings back to us what we are putting out into the universe, be it love, hate, humor, sadness, stress, excitement or anything else we chose to project.

Like the ripples in a pond that radiate out from a pebble dropping into the water, karma pulses out after each of our actions and choices, and it affects the future unfolding in front of us.

Offering kindness to others is a wonderful way to bring happiness to others, and it is also a way to create good karma in our own lives.  When we put kindness and love out into the world, the after-effects of these choices bring more kindness and love into tomorrow’s reality.  For this reason, offering a friendly gesture to another person is an action that is always worth the effort!

Here are a few friendly gestures that create good karma.  How many of these actions are a part of your daily routine?

1. Smile at people throughout the day.

2. Be patient with others.

3. Give a hug to someone you care about.

4. Pat someone on the back.

5. Offer a handshake.

6. Open a door for someone else.

7. Let a car in ahead of you while in traffic.

8. Use the words “please” and “thank you” habitually.

9. Share your knowledge and skills with others.

10. Be interested in what others have to say (ask questions, listen, etc).

11. Own up to any mistakes you make, and offer genuine apologies.

12. Give compliments freely.

13. Stop to ask someone “are you ok?” when they look distressed.

14. Help someone who looks lost or overwhelmed.

15. Stick up for someone who’s being made fun of or treated poorly.

16. Forgive people for their mistakes.

17. Focus on the good in others.

Which of these friendly gestures do you use the most in your day-to-day life?  Are there any other friendly gestures you would recommend for building good karma?  

One single gift acknowledged in gratefulness has the power to dissolve the ties of our alienation. --Brother David Steindl-Rast

Three Steps to Living A Life of Gratefulness

--by Brother David Steindl-Rast, syndicated from gratefulness.org, Jul 19, 2016

An act of gratitude is a living whole. To superimpose on its organic flow a mental grid like a series of “steps” will always be somewhat arbitrary. And yet, for the sake of practice, such a delineation can be helpful.

In any process, we can distinguish a beginning, a middle, and an end. We may use this basic three-step grid for the practice of gratitude: What happens at the start, in the middle, and at the end, when we experience gratitude? What fails to happen when we are not grateful?

Before going to bed, I glance back over the day and ask myself: Did I stop and allow myself to be surprised? Or, did I trudge on in a daze?

To be awake, aware, and alert are the beginning, middle, and end of gratitude. This gives us the clue to what the three basic steps of practicing gratitude must be.

Step One: Wake Up

To begin with, we never start to be grateful unless we wake up. Wake up to what? To surprise. As long as nothing surprises us, we walk through life in a daze. We need to practice waking up to surprise. I suggest using this simple question as a kind of alarm clock: “Isn’t this surprising?” “Yes, indeed!” will be the correct answer, no matter when and where and under what circumstances you ask this question. After all, isn’t it surprising that there is anything at all, rather than nothing? Ask yourself at least twice a day, “Isn’t this surprising?” and you will soon be more awake to the surprising world in which we live.

Surprise may provide a jolt, enough to wake us up and to stop taking everything for granted. But we may not at all like that surprise. “How can I be grateful for something like this?” we may howl in the midst of a sudden calamity. And why? Because we are not aware of the real gift in this given situation: opportunity.

Step Two: Be Aware of Opportunities

There is a simple question that helps me to practice the second step of gratitude: “What’s my opportunity here?” You will find that most of the time, the opportunity that a given moment offers you is an opportunity to enjoy–to enjoy sounds, smells, tastes, texture, colors, and, with still deeper joy, friendliness, kindness, patience, faithfulness, honesty, and all those gifts that soften the soil of our heart like warm spring rain. The more we practice awareness of the countless opportunities to simply enjoy, the easier it becomes to recognize difficult or painful experiences as opportunities, as gifts.

But while awareness of opportunities inherent in life events and circumstances is the core of gratefulness, awareness alone is not enough. What good is it to be aware of an opportunity, unless we avail ourselves of it? How grateful we are shows itself by the alertness with which we respond to the opportunity.

Step Three: Respond Alertly

Once we are in practice for being awake to surprise and being aware of the opportunity at hand, we will spontaneously be alert in our response, especially when we are offered an opportunity to enjoy something. When a sudden rain shower is no longer just an inconvenience but a surprise gift, you will spontaneously rise to the opportunity for enjoyment. You will enjoy it as much as you did in your kindergarten days, even if you are no longer trying to catch raindrops in your wide-open mouth. Only when the opportunity demands more from you than spontaneous enjoyment will you have to give yourself a bit of an extra push as part of Step Three.

Stop, look, go.

The Review Process It helps me to review my own practice of gratefulness by applying to these three basic steps the rule I learned as a boy for crossing an intersection: “Stop, look, go.” Before going to bed, I glance back over the day and ask myself: Did I stop and allow myself to be surprised? Or did I trudge on in a daze? Was I too busy to wake up to surprise? And once I stopped, did I look for the opportunity of that moment? Or did I allow the circumstances to distract me from the gift within the gift? (This tends to happen when the gift’s wrappings are not attractive.) And finally, was I alert enough to go after it, to avail myself fully of the opportunity offered to me?

There are times, I must admit, when stopping at night to review my day seems to be the first stop on an express train. Then I look back and realize with regret how much I missed. Not only was I less grateful on those non-stop days, I was less alive, somehow numb. Other days may be just as busy, but I do remember to stop; on those days, I even accomplish more because stopping breaks up the routine. But unless I also look, the stopping alone will not make my day a truly happy one; what difference does it make that I am not on an express train but on a local if I’m not aware of the scenery outside the windows? On some days, I even find in my nightly review that I stopped and I looked, but not with alertness. Just yesterday, I found a huge moth on the sidewalk; I did stop long enough to put it in a safe spot on the lawn, just a foot away, but I didn’t crouch down to spend time with this marvelous creature. Only faintly did I remember, at night, those iridescent eyes on the grayish brown wings. My day was diminished by this failure to stay long enough with this surprise gift to deeply look at it and to savor its beauty gratefully.

My simple recipe for a joyful day is this: Stop and wake up; look and be aware of what you see; then go on with all the alertness you can muster for the opportunity the moment offers. Looking back in the evening, on a day on which I made these three steps over and over, is like looking at an apple orchard heavy with fruit.

This recipe for grateful living sounds simple–because it is. But simple does not mean easy. Some of the simplest things are difficult because we have lost our childlike simplicity and have not yet found our mature one. Growth in gratitude is growth in maturity. Growth, of course, is an organic process. And so we come back to what I said at the beginning: To superimpose on the organic flow of gratitude a mental grid like a series of “steps” will remain arbitrary. When I am grateful, I am neither rushing nor slouching through my day–I’m dancing. What is true in dance class is true here too: Only when you forget to think of your steps, do you truly dance.

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This essay first appeared on Beliefnet, Summer 2001.

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Syndicated with permission from Gratefulness.org A worldwide network dedicated to gratefulness as the core inspiration for personal change, international cooperation, and sustainable activism in areas of universal concern.  

Be The Change: Practice the three steps of gratitude today. For more inspiration watch this short video on "A Good Day".

 

http://wc4.net/t?ctl=7117:4AE7957296E5B04AE0357A0BD228C5B8&

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

Rediscovering The Art Of Reverence

Rediscovering the Art of Reverence - John O'Donohue

 

What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.

 

When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace. 

 

In order to become attentive to beauty, we need to rediscover the art of reverence. Our world seems to have lost all sense of reverence. We seldom even use the word any more. The notion of reverence is full of riches that we now need desperately. Put simply, it is appropriate that a human being should dwell on this earth with reverence. As children we become aware of the word 'reverence' as used to describe the way a person is present in prayer or liturgy. When a priest celebrated the mass with a sense of reverence, you sensed the depth of his presence to the mystery. Though the church was full of people, he was absorbed in something that could not be seen. Ultimately, reverence is respect before mystery.

 

But it is more than an attitude of mind; reverence is also physical — a dignified attention of body showing that sacred is already here. Reverence is not to be reduced to a social posture. Reverence bestows dignity and it is only in light of dignity that the beauty and mystery of a person will become visible. Reverence is not the stiff pious posture which remains frozen and lacks humour and play. To live with a sense of reverence is not to become a prisoner of dull piety.

 

Playfulness, humour, and even a sense of the anarchic are companions of reverence because they insist on the proper proportion of the human presence in the light of the eternal. Reverence is also the companion of humility. When human hubris intrudes on or manipulates the sacred, the consequence is inevitably humiliation. In contrast, a sense of reverence includes the recognition that one is always in the presence of the sacred.

 

To live with reverence is to live without judgement, prejudice and the saturation of consumerism. The consumerist heart becomes empty and lonesome because it has squandered reverence. As parent, child, lover, prayer or artist — a sense of reverence opens pathways to beauty to surprise us. The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.

About the Author: Excerpted from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O'Donohue.

How Is Your Heart Doing?

How Is Your Heart Doing? - Omid Safi

 

In many Muslim cultures, when you want to ask them how they’re doing, you ask: in Arabic, Kayf haal-ik? or, in Persian, Haal-e shomaa chetoreh? How is yourhaal?

 

What is this haal that you inquire about? It is the transient state of one’s heart. In reality, we ask, “How is your heart doing at this very moment, at this breath?” When I ask, “How are you?” that is really what I want to know.

 

I am not asking how many items are on your to-do list, nor asking how many items are in your in-box. I want to know how your heart is doing, at this very moment. Tell me. Tell me your heart is joyous, tell me your heart is aching, tell me your heart is sad, tell me your heart craves a human touch. Examine your own heart, explore your soul, and then tell me something about your heart and your soul.

 

Tell me you remember you are still a human being, not just a human doing. Tell me you’re more than just a machine, checking off items from your to-do list. Have that conversation, that glance, that touch. Be a healing conversation, one filled with grace and presence.

 

Put your hand on my arm, look me in the eye, and connect with me for one second. Tell me something about your heart, and awaken my heart. Help me remember that I too am a full and complete human being, a human being who also craves a human touch.

 

I teach at a university where many students pride themselves on the “study hard, party hard” lifestyle. This might be a reflection of many of our lifestyles and our busyness — that even our means of relaxation is itself a reflection of that same world of over stimulation. Our relaxation often takes the form of action-filled (yet mindless) films, or violent and fast-paced sports.

 

I don’t have any magical solutions. All I know is that we are losing the ability to live a truly human life.

 

We need a different relationship to work, to technology. We know what we want: a meaningful life, a sense of community, a balanced existence. It’s not just about “leaning in” or faster iPhones. We want to be truly human.

 

W. B. Yeats once wrote, "It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a solider to fight on a battlefield."

 

How exactly are we supposed to examine the dark corners of our soul when we are so busy? How are we supposed to live the examined life?

 

I want us to have a kind of existence where we can pause, look each other in the eye […] and inquire together: Here is how my heart is doing. […]

 

How is the state of your heart today?

 

Let us insist on a type of human-to-human connection where when one of us responds by saying, “I am just so busy,” we can follow up by saying, “I know, love. We all are. But I want to know how your heart is doing.”