speaking, new year's resolutions are a losing game. A whopping 92 percent of people who set resolutions don't succeed, according to University of Scranton research. Still, that doesn't mean that the start of a new year isn't a good time to commit to working towards any goals or self-improvement projects that you've put on the back burner. Succeeding with your resolutions may simply be a matter of being smarter about them. If you are going to set some goals this year, maximize your chances of success by following some tried-and-true, science-backed guidelines. Here are six psychology-based insights to help you make better resolutions -- and to actual... posted on Jan 14 2016 (15,341 reads)

Padilla’s laugh cut through the air at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Fresh off an hour-long exhibit tour, she and 16 other friends sat in the zoo cafeteria, snacking on sugar cookies and mocking current bestsellers. The group could appear to be just another cluster of friends visiting the zoo. But they were there for another purpose, too: to provide joy as much as support. Part of a program called Momentia, more than half of the people in the group have dementia. The day was, in effect, an act of defiance for the 63-year-old Padilla, who was diagnosed with dementia two years ago. By living wholly in the present, Padilla is fighting a disease that threatens to rob her of h... posted on Jan 17 2016 (11,502 reads)

may have been the year of the "mindful revolution," but 2015 proved that mindfulness is here to stay. The more we learn about mindfulness -- the cultivation of a focused awareness on the present moment, most commonly through meditation -- the more health and well-being benefits we discover. This year, researchers delved further into the science of meditation and uncovered even more surprising evidence of the practice's powerful effects on the mind and body. Here are the five most incredible scientific findings on mindfulness of 2015. We figured out how mindfulness improves health. We know that mindfulness is linked to a number of physical and mental health ben... posted on Jan 25 2016 (23,235 reads)

excerpt is from the new book Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman and HuffPost Senior Writer Carolyn Gregoire. One of Frida Kahlo’s most famous self-portraits depicts her in a hospital bed connected by a web of red veins to floating objects that include a snail, a flower, bones, and a fetus. Henry Ford Hospital, the 1932 surrealist painting, is a powerful artistic rendering of Kahlo’s second miscarriage. Kahlo wrote in her diaries that the painting “carries with it the message of pain.” The painter was known for channeling the experience of multiple miscarriages, childhood polio, and a num... posted on Jan 27 2016 (31,707 reads)

arrived at meditation teacher Gina Sharpe’s house prepared to talk about what it means to live a beautiful life and more: I wanted to find a good story. The bare facts of Sharpe’s life were promising. Born in Jamaica, Sharpe moved to New York when she was eleven. She studied philosophy at Barnard College, worked in movie production (on the iconic 1970s movies Little Big Man, Paper Lion, andAlice’s Restaurant), and later became a successful corporate lawyer. I knew there had to be adventures. Undoubtedly there were villains and mentors, dark times that gave way to light. Best, there was the promise of a moral: In the midst of all her worldly wanderings, Sharpe began to ... posted on Jan 30 2016 (19,785 reads)

Ricard, also known as ‘the world’s happiest man’, spent the best part of 25 years in the Himalayas with barely any contact with the Western world he was born into. At 26-years-old he left behind his molecular biology studies and settled into a life of serenity and spiritual training under his Buddhist teachers, high up in the heavens on the other side of the world. However, he is now very much back on the Western scene. When I ask Ricard why he returned, he sighs and says: “When I was in my hermitage I thought, if I can do something useful, maybe I should come down for a bit”. He seems to long for the mountains, but the continued success of his proje... posted on Feb 20 2016 (27,021 reads)

Reyes Dialogues, originates at KWMR in Point Reyes Station, California. Host Jacob Needleman explores the great questions of life and our current condition with eminent friends from the arts, science and spirituality, politics and public service. Jacob Needleman is an internationally renowned author and philosopher whose many distinguished books include A Sense of the Cosmos, The Heart of Philosophy, The American Soul and Money and the Meaning of Life. One of the central aims of these dialogues is to reawaken the art of conversation as a practice of non-egoistic listening and thinking together. Our premise is that new territories of collaboration and creativity open with the inne... posted on Feb 22 2016 (12,483 reads)

Davis and her sister Fania Davis were working for social justice before many of today’s activists were born. From their childhood in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where their friends were victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, to their association with the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party, to their work countering the prison-industrial complex, their lives have centered on lifting up the rights of African Americans. In 1969, Angela Davis was fired from her teaching position at UCLA because of her membership in the Communist Party. She was later accused of playing a supporting role in a courtroom kidnapping that resulted in four deaths. The internation... posted on Feb 29 2016 (10,623 reads)

person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called the genes of the soul, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” And yet we are increasingly pressured to parcel ourselves out in various social contexts, lacerating the parchment of our identity in the process. As Courtney Martin observed in her insightful On Beingconversation with Parker Palmer and Krista Tippett,“It’s never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places.” Today, as Whitman’... posted on Mar 7 2016 (17,525 reads)

our entire lives are spent in a quest to gain control, security and comfort in our lives. Unfortunately, we never really get it, so we keep trying, relentlessly. This is the main activity of our lives. What would happen if we stopped? We could be less restricted by fear, less anxious, less driven by the need for comfort … and more in love with life as it is. You might be surprised by how much we strive for control. The Ways We Try to Get Control The basic nature of life is that it is everchanging, uncontrollable. When we think we have stability in life, something comes up to remind us that no, we don’t. There is no stability, no matter how much we’... posted on Mar 10 2016 (15,805 reads)

stinks. Although people tell me all the time they like feeling busy—perhaps because it makes them feel important and significant—I’m not buying it. Would you ever choose busyness over a more relaxed form of productivity? When life starts to feel hectic, here are a few ways to dial back the overwhelm. 1. Give yourself a shot of awe When researchers induced feelings of awe in people—by showing them video clips of people next to vast things like whales or waterfalls—it altered their perception of time such that the people felt like they had more time on their hands. So much time on their hands, in fact, that awestruck people become likely to give ... posted on Mar 11 2016 (38,542 reads)

live in a loud and distracting world, where silence is increasingly difficult to come by -- and that may be negatively affecting our health. In fact, a 2011 World Health Organization report called noise pollution a "modern plague," concluding that "there is overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population." We're constantly filling our ears with music, TV and radio news, podcasts and, of course, the multitude of sounds that we create nonstop in our own heads. Think about it: How many moments each day do you spend in total silence? The answer is probably very few. As our internal and external env... posted on Mar 14 2016 (81,349 reads)

find ourselves in turbulent and unpredictable times. From the horror at the Bataclan, to the upheaval in Syria and the senseless bloodshed in San Bernardino, we live in a time of great confusion and pain. As an artist, creator and dreamer of this world, we ask you not to be discouraged by what you see but to use your own lives, and by extension your art, as vehicles for the construction of peace. While it’s true that the issues facing the world are complex, the answer to peace is simple; it begins with you. You don’t have to be living in a third world country or working for an NGO to make a difference. Each of us has a unique mission. We are all pieces in a giant, flui... posted on Mar 16 2016 (17,515 reads)

article originally appeared on The Body Is Not An Apology and is reprinted by permission. More of Cody Charles’ writing can be found here. This is a follow-up to my previous piece entitled Ten Counterproductive Behaviors of Social Justice Educators. The latter was written for folks who consider equity work as their core life purpose. I wrote Ten Counterproductive Behaviors of Well-Intentioned People for the folks who consider themselves good people invested in social justice and conversations around equity, but who may show up in the ally role most often. Well-intentioned people make mistakes, lots of them. Mistakes must be expected and being held accountable has to be expected... posted on Mar 18 2016 (40,144 reads)

Lawrence Bloom. His team invented today’s ubiquitous hotel cards that promote towel reuse. But the businessman turned earth guru doesn’t plan to stop there; he’s on a lifetime mission to save us from ourselves. Alicia Buller reports. One day, many years ago, Lawrence Bloom sat in his luxury Mercedes, parked outside his seven-bedroomed, three-bathroomed house in London’s wealthy Hampstead. “Is this it?” he asked himself, as a familiar charge of fear coursed through his veins. “I had reached that material place where everybody aspires to be and, for me, anxiety was like a coat hanger: the jacket that I had worn before that moment was &lsq... posted on Mar 19 2016 (12,179 reads)

my wish is to be more whole—more wholly myself—I will have to include more of the complexities of my nature. Yet my behind-the-scenes hope has often been to get rid of what I don’t like in myself, so I go about my conscious life denying certain disagreeable features or squishing them into more acceptable traits. Yet there are other aspects that I approve of and freely lay claim to. If you too seek wholeness, you might want to join me as I try to look at the whole picture, warts and all. Ugh! That means we’ll have to include the wimpy self we’re ashamed of, the angry self we revel in but hide from others, the confused self we re ashamed of, and even the dow... posted on Mar 26 2016 (16,713 reads)

organization has souped up the traditional soup kitchen. Kansas City Community Kitchen in Kansas City, Missouri, serves food restaurant-style to homeless people, a process which includes greeters, waiters and a side of respect. "They're treating me good, like they don't know I'm homeless." YES. #KCCK #NotJustASoupKitchen  — Episcopal Community (@ECS_KC) February 11, 2016 “We are trying to flip the photo of what a soup kitchen looks like,” Mandy Caruso-Yahne, director of community engagement at Episcopal Community Services, which runs the kitchen, told Upworthy. The Kansas City Community Kitchen has been serving the community for... posted on Mar 27 2016 (10,518 reads)

that he takes into his thinking about living and dying and medicine was galvanized by a freak accident while he was a college student in which he lost both of his legs and part of one arm. MS. TIPPETT: So many of the ways you talk about and seem to think about and just approach what you do, palliative care and hospice, is also completely interwoven with this design sensibility that we’ve been talking about all the way through, and these aesthetics and the language you use and the images you use. For example, you say, “Our shared mortality is a source of great beauty.” What do you mean when you say that? DR. MILLER: The fact that we have these bookends of birth a... posted on Apr 4 2016 (26,214 reads)

virtues go, patience is a quiet one. It’s often exhibited behind closed doors, not on a public stage: A father telling a third bedtime story to his son, a dancer waiting for her injury to heal. In public, it’s the impatient ones who grab all our attention: drivers honking in traffic, grumbling customers in slow-moving lines. We have epic movies exalting the virtues of courage and compassion, but a movie about patience might be a bit of a snoozer. Yet patience is essential to daily life—and might be key to a happy one. Having patience means being able to wait calmly in the face of frustration or adversity, so anywhere there is frustration or adversity—i.e., ne... posted on Jun 28 2023 (24,231 reads)

a prison menu is a bleak task. Common food items range from nutraloaf—a mishmash of ingredients baked into a tasteless beige block—to, rumor has it, road kill. The substandard quality of food at some correctional facilities has led to protests and hunger strikes, as in summer 2013 when nearly 30,000 California state prisoners refused food to demand, among other things, fresher and more nutritious meals. But some states, along with correctional authorities and prison activists, are discovering the value of feeding prisoners nutrient-rich food grown with their own hands. Prison vegetable gardens, where inmates plant and harvest fresh produce to feed the larger ... posted on Apr 20 2016 (11,693 reads)