Clear Skies And A Chance Of Joy, by Audrey Lin
Laura Lavigne, life holds the magic of a treasure hunt. A keeper of small moments, a spreader of joy, a mother, a dreamer, a doer, not to mention a French baker, Laura is a bright splash of color on any canvas. And she’s walked down quite a multifaceted road along the way. In this Awakin Call conversation with Afreen, she shares stories and lessons from her experiences working as a make-up artist to turning down corporate sponsorship, tossing out her well-rehearsed TEDx speech for spontaneity’s sake, and, time and time again, meeting strangers from the heart. Afreen: What drives you? Laura: I think it started when I was really little. I remember telling my parent... posted on Jan 11 2014 (28,761 reads)

The Contentment Habit, by Leo Babauta
admit I do it as much as anyone else: see the cool things that others are doing and wish I were doing something cool like that too. You see great travel photos on Instagram and other social media — people living amazing lives, creating cool things, going on adventures. And instantly, there’s the thought that you should be living a better life. But this is the wrong habit. It leads to a feeling that your life isn’t good enough, that you aren’t good enough. And the habit doesn’t end: if you pursue a better life, you will always feel that you should be doing more, partying more, creating more, learning more, reading more, traveling more. You can&rs... posted on Mar 9 2015 (40,837 reads)

10 Ways to Love Where You Live, by Ross Chapin
Avenue Cottages, Shoreline, Wash. Photo by Ross Chapin. Community is not just for extroverts. For thousands of years, our ancestors lived in barrios, hamlets, neighborhoods, and villages. Yet in the time since our parents and grandparents were young, privacy has become so valued that many neighborhoods are not much more than houses in proximity. Now, many activities take place behind locked doors and backyard privacy fences. The street out front is not always safe for pedestrians, and is often out of bounds for children. With families spread across the country and friends living across town, a person who doesn’t kn... posted on Jun 21 2012 (34,730 reads)

Resilience After Unimaginable Loss, by On Being
Sandberg + Adam Grant, Image by Christophe Morin / Getty Images The following is the audio and transcript of an onbeing.org interview between Krista Tippett and Sheryl Sandberg. Krista Tippett, host: Sheryl Sandberg’s name is synonymous with Facebook and Silicon Valley success, and she’s the voice of Lean In. Today, she joins us with vulnerability and frankness, together with the psychologist Adam Grant. He was there for her after the shocking death of her young husband, David Goldberg, while they were on vacation in 2015. Adam’s friendship — and his data — helped Sheryl find her way to what deep resilience might mean for herself and he... posted on Jun 17 2017 (17,709 reads)

4 Ways Sadness Can Be Good For You, by Joseph P. Forgas
are finding out how sadness works in the brain—and they're discovering that it can confer important advantages. Sadness is not usually valued in our current culture. Self-help books promote the benefits of positive thinking, positive attitude, and positive behaviors, labeling sadness as a “problem emotion” that needs to be kept at bay or eliminated. Evolution must have had something else in mind, though, or sadness wouldn’t still be with us. Being sad from time to time serves some kind of purpose in helping our species to survive. Yet, while other so-called “negative emotions,” like fear, anger, and disgust, seem clearly ad... posted on Aug 29 2014 (29,021 reads)

Three Ways to Bring More Kindness to Your Life, by Juliana Breines
of the best ways to increase our own happiness is to do things that make other people happy. In countless studies, kindness and generosity have been linked to greater life satisfaction, strongerrelationships, and better mental and physical health—generous people even live longer. What’s more, the happiness people derive from giving to others creates a positive feedback loop: The positive feelings inspire further generosity—which, in turn, fuels greater happiness. And research suggests that kindness is truly contagious: Those who witness and benefit from others’ acts of kindness are more likely to be kind themselves; a single act of kindness spreads through ... posted on Dec 12 2015 (21,449 reads)

Embrace Authenticity: How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Positivity, by Heleo Editors
David is the author of Emotional Agility, a leading psychologist at Harvard Medical School, and the co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. She recently joined Maria Shriver—award-winning journalist, bestselling author of six books, and former First Lady of California—for a conversation on why relentless positivity doesn’t lead to happiness, and how being emotionally honest can help us connect with our values and gain resilience. This conversation has been edited and condensed.  Maria: You are a counter voice to so many people telling us, “Be positive, be happy, have a great mood, and everything will be fine.&r... posted on Dec 11 2021 (31,101 reads)

The Business 9 Women Kept A Secret For Three Decades, by Lori Weiss
in West Tennessee, not far from Graceland, nine women -- or "The 9 Nanas," as they prefer to be called -- gather in the darkness of night. At 4am they begin their daily routine -- a ritual that no one, not even their husbands, knew about for 30 years. They have one mission and one mission only: to create happiness. And it all begins with baked goods. “One of us starts sifting the flour and another washing the eggs,” explained Nana Mary Ellen, the appointed spokesperson for their secret society. “And someone else makes sure the pans are all ready. We switch off, depending on what we feel like doing that day. “But you make sure to say Nana... posted on Jun 29 2012 (1,773,961 reads)

Linda Cruse: Marmalade and Machine Guns, by Awakin Call Editors
visited 40 countries in 15 years, with just one suitcase. Inspired by the "power of one," Linda Cruse's all-encompassing friendliness, explorer's spirit, and desire to serve has brought her to every continent amid its catastrophic moments of crisis-- from the earthquake in Nepal to the tsunami in Thailand, two super-typhoons in the Philippines, and the Pakistani earthquake. She's been described as a cross between Florence Nightingale and Indiana Jones. Yet her life didn't always hold such high sights and intentions. In 1996, while driving on a motorway in the middle of the night, Linda suddenly went blind. &... posted on Aug 3 2018 (4,608 reads)

7 Practices to Cultivate Compassion, by Leo Babauta
you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” - Dalai Lama I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks. The key to developing compassion in your life is to make it a daily practice. Meditate upon it in the morning (you can do it while checking email), think about it when you interact with others, and reflect on it at night.... posted on Aug 2 2011 (49,766 reads)

Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy": A Neuropsychology Reading, by Maria Popova
the lyrics of the iconic happiness anthem to find surprising science-tested insights on well-being. In 1988, Bobby McFerrin wrote one of the most beloved anthems to happiness of all time. On September 24 that year, “Don’t Worry Be Happy” became the first a cappella song to reach #1 on the Billboard Top 100 Chart. But more than a mere feel-good tune, the iconic song is brimming with neuroscience and psychology insights on happiness that McFerrin — whose fascinating musings on music and the brain you might recall from World Science Festival’s Notes & Neurons — embedded in its lyrics, whether consciously or not. T... posted on Dec 22 2011 (41,273 reads)

Creativity Blossoms in the Great Migration, by Lily Yeh
HERE to view the photo essay:  How students transformed a school in an industrial backwater into something beautiful. Photos courtesy of Lily Yeh and New Village Press, from Awakening Creativity: Dandelion School Blossoms. A chance meeting in 2003 brought me together with Zheng Hong. Zheng Hong, who holds a PhD in Paleontology, had just earned her Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Moved by the dire situation faced by migrant workers in her beloved city of Beijing, she recruited help from her friends and numerous volunteers to create the Dandelion School for childre... posted on Jan 20 2013 (8,828 reads)

Gardening and the Secret of Happiness, by Maria Popova
is happiness,” Willa Cather’s fictional narrator gasps as he sinks into his grandmother’s garden, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” A generation later, in a real-life counterpart, Virginia Woolf arrived at the greatest epiphany of her life — and to this day perhaps the finest definition of what it takes to be an artist — while contemplating the completeness and greatness abloom in the garden. Nearly a century later, botanist and nature writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, who has written beautifully about the art of attentiveness to life at all scales, examines the revelations of t... posted on Nov 18 2018 (7,965 reads)

Time Management for Mortals, by On Being
by Heather Wang Krista Tippett, host:What is time? That’s a question for philosophers and physicists, and yet it is also an element by which each and every one of us experiences and orders our days and our lives. At this time of year, many of us are making plans and resolutions, treating time as we’ve been taught: as part taskmaster, part resource — something we could fit everything we want into, if only we had the discipline. In his longtime column for The Guardian, and books with subtitles like Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, my guest Oliver Burkeman has long interrogated the possibilities for absurdity in self-help... posted on Jan 31 2022 (5,345 reads)

Eight Verses for Training the Mind, by Geshe Langri Tangpa (1054-1123)
Prison Mindfulness Institute's mission is to provide prisoners, prison staff and prison volunteers, with the most effective, evidence-based tools for rehabilitation, self-transformation, and personal & professional development. In particular, they provide and promote the use of proven effective mindfulness-based interventions (MBI’s). Their dual focus is on transforming individual lives as well as transforming the corrections system as a whole in order to mitigate its extremely destructive impact on families, communities and the overall social capital of our society. The below text is available for download as a PDF on their website. Composed by the Buddhist Mast... posted on May 31 2020 (19,376 reads)

Nature, Joy and Human Becoming, by On Being
follows is the transcript of an On Being interview between Krista Tippett and Michael McCarthy: KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: I have rarely discovered a book that so delighted and galvanized me at once. The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy is written by the English naturalist and journalist, Michael McCarthy. “The sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us,” he writes, “may well be the most serious business of all.” We could stop relying on the immobilizing language of statistic and take up joy as a civilizational defense of nature. With a perspective equally infused by science, reportage, and poetry, he reminds u... posted on May 28 2018 (6,654 reads)

Love Leads Into Mystery: Raising A Child With Asperger's, by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
by Nara Simhan. We’re driving home around sunset, late summer. Daniel, age nine, says aloud, “Mom, what do you think is at the end of the universe? Dragonflies? Or just inky blackness?” I write it down. A good moment when what shines in him shines through, but there are plenty of bad moments, too. Daniel, as exquisitely creative, loving, and intelligent as he is, suffers from what experts label an invisible disability, a chemical imbalance, a little extra electricity in his system. To kids his own age he’s a nuisance. To the school district he’... posted on Oct 10 2012 (10,057 reads)

What is Gratitude?, by The Greater Good Science Center
Emmons, perhaps the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude, argues that gratitude has two key components, which he describes in a Greater Good essay, “Why Gratitude Is Good.” “First,” he writes, “it’s an affirmation of goodness. We affirm that there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we’ve received.” In the second part of gratitude, he explains, “we recognize that the sources of this goodness are outside of ourselves. … We acknowledge that other people—or even higher powers, if you’re of a spiritual mindset—gave us many gifts, big and small, to help us achieve the goodness ... posted on Nov 28 2013 (44,677 reads)

How To Bounce Back From Failure , by Carolyn Gregoire
is rough, no matter how you slice it. But it's also an inescapable fact of life, and our ability to deal with failure and rejection has a hand in determining how successful and happy we are. Happiness isn't the opposite of depression -- resilience is, according to psychologist Peter Kramer. Think of the people you most admire -- many of them didn’t get where they are just by sailing through life without any negative experiences or failures. Most of them distinguished themselves by their ability to get right back up every time they fall, a truism reflected in countless inspirational quotations on the power of perseverance (In the words of Winston Churchill, ... posted on Jan 2 2014 (163,697 reads)

How Good Habits Can Make You Happier, by Cassie Mogilner
more sleep. Stop procrastinating. Save more. Eat more healthfully. Many of us aspire to change our habits, but we often find current habits hard to break and new ones a challenge to make. In bestselling author Gretchen Rubin’s new book, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, she explains why habits can make us happier. Wharton marketing professor Cassie Mogilner recently interviewed Rubin when she visited campus as a guest lecturer in the Authors@Wharton series. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Cassie Mogilner: What drove you to write this book? Gretchen Rubin: I wrote The Happiness Project andHappier At Home. For years I had b... posted on Sep 6 2015 (20,099 reads)