Anxiety runs in my family like a river and its tributaries, but until I met my own daughter, I had not fully believed that anxiety could be caused entirely by wiring rather than experience. Her father and I were intimately familiar with the heart-racing, dizzying awfulness of panic, yet we wondered: How could a much-loved baby suffer anxiety? She had…
I recently attended a lecture on “Unleashing Your Voice,” about recognizing who we are. It brought me back to the first time I met my Buddhist teacher, Dr. Joe Loizzo. He and I discussed the way people think they know who they are and what they want in life. Who are we, really? Do we robotically follow the standards that…
Just over a year ago, my 82-year-old mother was rushed to a hospital where they discovered that she had metastatic cancer. I flew from Moscow to Los Angeles and stayed with her until the end of her life, driving around the San Fernando Valley in my rental car, a midnight blue Hyundai Elantra. It is ironic that as an L.A.…
If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you know that I’m really drawn to the way Dr. Joe Loizzo teaches. He’s the founder of the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science and the author of Sustainable Happiness. So when I saw he was giving a lecture at Tibet House, I was excited to attend. Then I read the title of…
This week we will be featuring articles related to motherhood. I never felt that a person had to be a mother in order to celebrate Mother’s Day. I celebrated it when I became an aunt, before I had my own children, and now I even include my dog in the festivities. Mother’s Day is an opportunity to step back from…
Last week I wrote about starting Zen’tinis, a conversational salon. Maybe, like me, you’ve been to enough cocktail parties, networking events, and informal hangouts and you long for the substance of real stimulation. You wish you could have it in an environment where you can learn the thoughts of the folks around you and share one or two of your own.…
A few years ago, something struck me: our culture simply doesn’t offer many situations that are designed to support us in authentic dialogue. Most of the time, adults interact in ways that are either accidental or transactional. Cocktail parties are about transaction according to attractiveness; business-networking events are all about the elevator pitch. We rarely walk into those kinds of…
