From ‘My Pilgrimage Towards Gratefulness‘: [In his book Man’s Search For Meaning] Viktor Frankl described how conditions of extreme deprivation and cruelty enabled the prisoners to attain incredibly high levels of gratitude…
If you can get through this entire video, it could change your life. When I watched this entire video I was tempted about 12 times to fast-forward it to the end, but…
From ‘Hollowing Out the Habits of Attention (part 3)‘: For relationships to be healthy, we need to know how to suspend what we think and put ourselves in the mind of our…
Throughout this year I’ve been doing an ongoing series of blog posts on the topic of gratitude. I want to continue that discussion by looking at one of the main barriers to…
When presented with the challenges of Islam, it seems that the tendency within Western culture is to continually vacillate between trying to make the Muslim a community completely beyond critique, on the…
In their book The Teaching Gap, James Stigler and James Hiebert discuss the differences between how math is taught in American classrooms vs. Japanese classrooms. Their observations were based on extensive video…
From Dorotheos of Gaza: Discourses & Sayings, pp. 152-153: “There is a way of rendering evil for evil not only in actions but also in words and in attitude. A man may…
I read in the news today that U.S. military Army Secretary, John McHugh, said earlier this week that there is a likelihood that women will eventually have to register for the draft…
One of the fascinating things I’ve been reading about is that the wiring of our brain, even among the middle-aged and elderly, is not fixed, but is malleable, flexible, and constantly adapting…
In Chade-Meng Tan book Search Inside Yourself, he explains the stages a person passes through before a new state of mind becomes habituated and therefore natural. Meng’s observations are consistent with what…
From my blog post ‘Viktor Frankl on Reframing Suffering‘: “Only when we accept that life is difficult, only when we come to terms with the fact that we have no right to…
A pervailing notion is that suffering and gratitude cannot co-exist. According to this way of thinking, gratefulness and suffering exist in a type of zero-sum relationship, so that once our sufferings reach a…
