thinking thursday : a buffet of links beyond your usual fare

Mind

Did you know that happiness is an arm of resilience?

American society by and large can be suffering-phobic. We are taught to be ashamed of our pain, our fear, or our difference. We are taught to avoid the suffering of others as though we will somehow become tainted if we witness it too closely. We’re taught that we’d do better to hide the suffering away.

For the sake of resilience, we not only need to learn to relate to suffering with compassion instead of disdain; we also need to be able to accept and absorb pleasure

When Family Stories are Hard to Tell and why it’s important. The bottom line? “When stories are difficult, tell them anyway.”

In his new book, “The Secrets of Happy Families,” and in his recent This Life column for the Sunday Styles section, “The Stories That Bind Us,” my colleague and friend Bruce Feiler described the way telling family stories matters to our children. He brought up a recent study, in which psychologists asked children a battery of questions about their history, ranging from “Do you know where your grandparents grew up?” to “Do you know the story of your birth?” The conclusion:

The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

Body

I was honored to write the foreword for Dr. Martha Jo Atkins’ new book, “Signposts of Dying,” which is now available on Kindle and also in paperback, and should be a must-read for not only those of us caring for someone who is dying, but all of us who will ourselves die (i.e., everyone). It’s time to walk toward death, not run from it, in order to embrace this very real and necessary part of life. In this book, Dr. Atkins helps us do just that.

You look like you need a spinach smoothie. Here are 37 of them.

I am creating my own list of indispensable tools for you, but in the meantime, here’s someone else’s list of tools he uses “to learn, work, and travel anywhere in the world.”

Soul

According to Angeles Arrien, there are four ways to wisdom: the warrior way, the way of the healer, the visionary, and the teacher.

To maximize well-being and to be adaptable to change, indigenous peoples consider it important to be equally balanced in the areas of leading, healing, visioning, and teaching work.

If you numbered these archetypes from one to four, with one being the most developed in your nature and four being the least developed, what would you discover? Most cultures recognize optimum health as having a balance in the expression of all four of these ways. Independent of the culture we come from, we can follow the warrior’s way to access power, the healer’s way to access love, the visionary’s way to access vision, and the teacher’s way to access wisdom.

Through the resource of power we are able to choose to be present. Through the resource of love we are able to pay attention to what has heart and meaning. Through the resource of vision we are able to give voice to what we see. Through the resource of wisdom we are able to be open, not attached to, outcomes.

Speaking Up

My latest essay on The Huffington Post spells out how I feel about LGBTQI rights. Can you put into words what you stand for?

Word

“Life isn’t something you possess. It’s something you take part in, and you witness.”  -Louis C. K.