Health Journal Online

Tag: Helps

  • What’s Good About Being You: How Mindfulness Helps You Get to Know Yourself

    What’s Good About Being You: How Mindfulness Helps You Get to Know Yourself

    The Connection Between Presence and Knowing

    The sitting practice of meditation is a powerful means to get to know yourself, to introduce yourself to yourself. Meditation is a discipline, a technique to transcend technique. You sit down on a cushion or a chair and simply experience yourself: your body, your breath, and your thoughts. You just be there, very simply.

    There are several aspects to meditation that are part of establishing friendship with yourself. One is mindfulness. Mindfulness is keeping track, or keeping a pulse, of being here, in a nonjudgmental way. There is no good or bad. Everything is allowed to be. Among other things, mindfulness is a stabilizing or pacifying influence. The panic of everyday life and every expectation laid on life can subside. This is a huge relief. It is called the discovery of peace.

    Awareness is being in a bigger space, recognizing that there is always an environment around our thoughts and feelings. When you begin to sense that atmosphere, there is both intelligence, or sharpness, and relaxation.

    Finding peace in the practice of meditation involves slowing down. Physically, you call a halt. You park your body somewhere, and you stay put. Your mind may continue to race for a while, maybe for a long time, but you become aware of the mind racing. Awareness is being in a bigger space, recognizing that there is always an environment around our thoughts and feelings. When you begin to sense that atmosphere, there is both intelligence, or sharpness, and relaxation. You begin to see things much more precisely and your native intelligence begins to awaken.

    The Courage to Be Aware

    Becoming more aware is a very courageous thing to do. You allow yourself to look honestly at your experience. And that solid sense of self—of who you are—is revealed as being not so solid. You begin to experience gaps, holes in your suit of armor. You realize that you are really more like Swiss cheese than Cheddar.

    When you are there, just there, without trying to hold everything solidly together, you also begin to find that you don’t need to sustain a storyline about yourself and your life. Who is it for anyway?

    When you are there, just there, without trying to hold everything solidly together, you also begin to find that you don’t need to sustain a storyline about yourself and your life. Who is it for anyway? You can afford to relax with yourself, get to know yourself. You don’t have to put on makeup for yourself; you don’t have to put on a smile. You can leave the mental toupee on the shelf and like yourself just as you are.

    There is something genuinely good about being you. You may not like every little thing about yourself, but overall you have an honest heart and you can connect with it through the practice of meditation. You have the courage to face yourself. From that connection with yourself and from actually liking yourself without conditions, you begin to see how brilliant and available life can be when it is without preconceptions or adornments.

    As you open yourself to yourself, you become more aware of the world you’re living in. The development of awareness here is a bit like having cataracts removed, or getting a hearing aid: you didn’t know your vision was so obscured until you finally see a brilliant yellow daffodil in the field. You couldn’t hear the first bird of spring singing in the meadow. You couldn’t taste the bitter onion flavor of chives by the stream. You didn’t see the face of your beloved, until you ran right into him. Then suddenly you begin to feel your world. You begin to understand love in an entirely new way.

    Noticing the Hall of Mirrors

    At that point, as you become more open, you also may begin to see where you’re stuck, how you’re often living in a hall of mirrors that you create for yourself. You see your speed and how that has produced panic. We may actually recognize and experience ourselves as the monkey bouncing off the walls in our house of mirrors. What you’re bouncing off of is often simply the reflections that you project. When you bounce off yourself, this can take the form of self-hatred or it can be twisted into some kind of false arrogance and pride. Unfortunately, your dearest friends, lovers, relatives, and partners are often the mirrors you project your reflections onto most intensely.

    We demand a lot from intimacy, often more than it can possibly deliver. We ask ourselves and our closest friends to confirm us by reflecting some things and not others. Essentially, we ask, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?” And we expect the answer, “You, my love!” This a burden to others and to us, and ultimately it doesn’t work. The mirrors crack.

    If you want to live in a hall of mirrors, this is a disaster. If you’re willing to find a true relationship with yourself and others, this is welcome relief from your self-imposed isolation. It reveals the tremendous space that is there when the myth of satisfaction is seen to be a fraud.

    Facing reality is not creating something new. It’s allowing a barrier to dissolve.

    Over the course of time, if we are committed to meditation as an ongoing practice, then it can provide us with this honest feedback. Although we might try to filter information, if we sit long enough, reality wells up in us and breaks through. This is inevitable, because it is just discovering what is there and we can’t block what is there forever. Facing reality is not creating something new. It’s allowing a barrier to dissolve. It unlocks in us the power of loving-kindness and is the beginning of real warmth toward ourselves and others.



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  • Why We Wake Up At Night and How Mindfulness Helps Us Sleep Again

    Why We Wake Up At Night and How Mindfulness Helps Us Sleep Again

    You’re awake, and the time on your nightstand shows 3:33 a.m. There’s no reason to be awake, but your mind has other ideas. Some nights it could be an overactive mind; other times, you’re fighting a hot flash or the urge to scroll on your phone, hoping to fall back asleep.

    Regardless of what’s calling to you in the middle of the night, the message you really need to hear: You’re not alone.

    Nearly 18% of U.S. adults report trouble staying asleep, and 30–50% experience insomnia symptoms, including difficulty falling or staying asleep. And yet, our initial response to waking in the middle of the night tends to lean toward frustration or anger rather than curiosity.

    Dr. Jessica Shepherd asks her readers to be curious about the patterns and symptoms we experience around wakefulness instead of moving towards “fixing” our sleep problem.

    What would happen if we chose to investigate our feelings around wakefulness with self-compassion and mindfulness, instead of pushing against our own discomfort with what’s unwanted? Understanding more about why we wake up at night can help.

    The Nervous System and Sleep Disruption

    When did 3 a.m. become the new wake-up call?  If you’ve slept soundly for most of your life, only to be suddenly confronted with a nightly routine that involves struggling to get back to sleep, know you’re in good company. These “wakeups” happen across ages, genders, and all life stages. Some of us (ahhem, menopause ladies, we see you) begin having some of these issues as a result of hormone shifts (we’ll get into that later).

    What you need to know is that waking in the night is not a personal failure.  Oftentimes, your nervous system responds to cues your body sends, both internal and external. Here are a few reasons why we wake up at night, and why your sleep may be feeling more fragmented:

    • Hyperarousal: Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline can trigger micro-awakenings. Even while asleep, your brain is scanning for potential threats.
    • Racing or overloaded mind: Daytime to-do lists, worries, or plans can linger into the night, keeping your brain alert.
    • Environmental triggers: Neighborhood noise, light, temperature swings, or even screens can subtly wake the brain.
    • Aging sleep architecture: As we age, our sleep naturally becomes lighter and more fragmented.
    • Hormonal shifts: As I mentioned above, if you’re in perimenopause or menopause, changes in estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone can significantly affect your sleep cycles. They can disrupt sleep when you’re experiencing hormone imbalances. Still, these shifts are a small part of the overall picture when we consider why many people experience nighttime wakefulness.

    Why starting with curiosity helps

    OB-GYN and author of Generation M, Dr. Jessica Shepherd, asks her readers to be curious about the patterns and symptoms we experience around wakefulness instead of moving towards “fixing” our sleep problem. Here are four questions she poses to help guide reflection: 

    • Is this wake-up due to hot flashes or night sweats?
    • Am I waking repeatedly or having trouble breathing?
    • Is my mind racing too much to fall asleep or fall back asleep?
    • Do I need to use the bathroom frequently at night?

    While Dr. Shepherd is a go-to source for menopausal struggles and solutions, these questions can be used to assess your symptoms, regardless of your age. Typically, mid-morning wakeup calls fall into one of these four categories:  mental overactivity, changes in body or room temperature, repeated environmental disruptions, or physical cues. When we understand the causes and conditions for our experience, we can cultivate a mindful response.

    Why Are My Thoughts Awake at 3 a.m.?

    The main culprit for middle-of-the-night wakefulness can vary from person to person. No matter what time you’re waking up, if it’s before your alarm clock goes off, it’s likely to feel unsettling.

    For those of you in perimenopause or menopause, the shift of our hormones (feeling hot flashes/night sweats) can make us feel very stressed out. As our stress levels rise, so do our cortisol levels. Typically, this stress hormone rises around 3 a.m. to prepare us for waking, but if our stress levels are too high, it can shift that baseline and cause us to wake up earlier than usual.

    Mindfulness offers a different way to approach these interruptions. It nudges us first to accept what’s happening in the present moment, and then to gently turn towards curiosity and self-compassion.

    For those of you who have surpassed that hurdle of menopause or generally have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, this time of night can feel so much louder than usual. When we’re alone with our thoughts in the middle of the night, our fears can feel heightened. Sleep deprivation heightens amygdala reactivity, making even small anxieties feel intense. Mindfulness can help settle our nervous system by guiding us towards practical tools that help us eliminate spiraling narratives.

    So, how can you shift your perspective when it comes to that mid-morning wake-up? Mindfulness offers a different way to approach these interruptions. 

    We’ve all heard the phrase, What you resist, persists, and you likely know from experience that it doesn’t work to fight sleeplessness or try to force yourself to go back to sleep. 

    Mindfulness nudges us first to accept what’s happening in the present moment, and then to gently turn towards curiosity and self-compassion. So perhaps the questions and phrases we could be engaging with might sound more like, “How can I offer myself compassion when sleeplessness makes itself known?” or, “What is this experience trying to show me?”

    Look for clues in your daily routines

    Sleep expert and author of Powerful Sleep, Shawna Robins, encourages people who have trouble navigating the “wide-awake” brain by taking a look at what they’re doing during the day.

    She emphasizes laying the groundwork for a healthy routine (meals, exercise, self-care) that supports hormone balance and your nervous system. For Robins, that begins with stress management, proper nutrition, and some form of physical activity. When we do these things, sleeping, and specifically “falling asleep” or returning to sleep after that three o’clock wake-up, can get much easier. Robins says, “Healthy sleep starts during the daytime with healthier habits. It’s not just about what happens when you get into bed at night.”

    Mindful Sleep Strategy

    What does a mindfulness strategy look like for cultivating good sleep? Think about all the tools you’ve developed over the course of your mindfulness journey and start putting them to use.

    Sleep supports the choices we make before bed.

    That means journaling, sitting regularly, mindfully eating and noticing the times you’re eating. It can also involve checking in with your physical body (think body-scan meditation or breathwork), coupled with daytime routines (yoga/gym workout, exercises you can do throughout the day at work/your desk, etc.) that will help create a stable space for you to reset your energy and recalibrate your nervous system. Sleep supports the choices we make before bed.

    If you find yourself up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, here are some different ways you can try to help yourself. 

    1.  30-Second Body Scan
       Redirect attention from racing thoughts to physical sensations, noticing each part of the body without judgment.
    2. Lengthened Exhale Breathing (4–6 breaths)
       Extending the exhale calms the parasympathetic nervous system, signaling the body that it is safe to rest.
    3. Thought Noting
       Label thoughts gently (“I’m worrying,” “I’m planning”) to create mental distance.
    4. Journaling
       Keep a notepad by the bed to externalize racing thoughts and reduce cognitive load.
    5. Gentle Somatic Grounding
      Release tension in the jaw, shoulders, or belly to help the body signal safety.

    Nighttime wakefulness often coincides with vivid or emotionally charged dreams. Sansan Fibri, founder of the app Wakefully.io, describes dreams as “our subconscious screenplay, where hidden narratives sometimes replay on repeat.”

    Wakefully is an AI-driven dream-analysis and journaling app that allows users to examine dream themes and emotions or reframe dreams with evidence-based techniques. For those who wake at night due to intense dreams or lingering emotional tension, incorporating tools like Wakefully alongside your mindfulness practice can help shift into a more reflective space, calming a reactive mind. With curiosity, gentle awareness, and practical tools, you can transform these moments into opportunities for connection with your body and mind.

    When we approach sleep with mindfulness,  we can meet moments of wakefulness with curiosity instead of frustration, helping us meet them in the middle of the night with presence and ultimately a sense of well-being.



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  • Why Mindfulness Helps Us Feel Good About Helping

    Why Mindfulness Helps Us Feel Good About Helping

    People often use the words empathy and compassion interchangeably—and certainly they share important qualities. But there is a subtle difference between empathy and compassion, and studies show that mindful attention might be key to making sure that our efforts to help are coming from a healthy, aligned place. Here’s a deeper look at how mindful qualities like present-moment attention can help us genuinely be of greater service to others, and how mindfulness can help us feel good about helping.

    People naturally tend to empathize with others, report C. Daryl Cameron and Barbara Fredrickson in the January issue of the journal Mindfulness. But empathy can go wrong when it leads to distress. We might help out of guilt, obligation, or co-dependence. Or, the help might cause resentment, which could lead us to avoid helping people in the future. Or sometimes, in the absence of strong boundaries, we might unknowingly absorb the feelings of someone in trouble, and if we can’t deal with those feelings of suffering, we might turn away altogether.

    There is another possible response: compassion, which leads people to try to alleviate distress in others.

    The Way to Healthier Helping

    As the authors speculate, “Helping should be most common among people who are able to maximize compassion while minimizing distress.” Previous research has found that cultivating mindfulness—the moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, and surroundings—can lead to greater compassion. But what specific components of mindfulness predict real-world helping behavior? In other words, what skills could we develop that would make us more likely to help each other out?

    The study examined two mindful traits—a focus on the present moment (aka, “present-focused attention”) and a non-judgmental acceptance of thoughts and experiences (“non-judgmental acceptance”). Cameron and Fredrickson assessed the mindfulness of 313 adults, asking if, for example, they “pay attention to how my emotions affect my thoughts and behaviors” or often criticize themselves “for having irrational or inappropriate emotions.”

    The researchers confirmed their hypothesis: Present-focused attention and non-judgmental acceptance both predicted more helping behavior … Mindful participants were more likely to experience emotions like compassion, joy, or elevation while giving help. That could mean that they just felt better when helping others, which could lead them to engage in more helping behavior in general.

    Next, the survey asked if they had recently helped someone out. If they had, participants answered questions about how they felt while helping. Did they feel positive emotions like gratitude, hopefulness, inspiration, or joy? Or did they have negative ones, like irritation, contempt, disgust, distaste, guilt, or nervousness?

    In analyzing the answers, the researchers found that 85 percent of participants had engaged in some kind of helping behavior during the previous week, like listening to a friend’s problems, babysitting, giving someone a car ride, donating to charity, or volunteering. In the process, they uncovered some incidental but interesting facts:

    • Men were marginally less likely than women to report engaging in helping behavior;
    • Age did not predict helping; and
    • Participants with higher income were more likely to report helping others.

    However, the biggest predictor of helping behavior had nothing to do with these demographic traits. In fact, the researchers confirmed their hypothesis: Present-focused attention and non-judgmental acceptance both predicted more helping behavior. This link between mindfulness and helping might be traced to the fact that the mindful participants were more likely to experience emotions like compassion, joy, or elevation while giving help. That could mean that they just felt better when helping others, which could lead them to engage in more helping behavior in general.

    What Makes Us Want to Keep On Helping?

    The study also revealed a scientifically important nuance: Participants who scored higher in present-focused attention were more likely to experience positive emotions—and participants high in non-judgmental acceptance experienced fewer negative emotions, like stress, but weren’t necessarily more likely to experience more positive emotions. In other words, acceptance may only clear the way for helping; it’s the present-focus that could actually make the helping an emotionally rewarding experience. Together, the takeaway seems to be that approaching these situations with mindfulness helps us feel good, or at least better, about extending ourselves in service.

    Insights from this study have obvious practical implications for teaching helping behavior to children. This line of research could also help people in helping professions who are at risk for burnout, or people whose mental illnesses make it hard for them to connect with others.

    The study also carries hugely helpful implications for the rest of us, because anyone can feel worn down by helping other people. There’s an invitation to look at our motivations for stepping in, our boundaries and limitations and need for real rest. And there’s an opportunity to enter into opportunities for service with deeper compassionate attention and an open heart. Isn’t it nice to know there are ways we can help ourselves feel better when we do something nice for someone else?

    A version of this article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. To view the original article, click here.



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  • Arkangel AI Helps Physicians Reduce Up To 79% Of Their Time

    Arkangel AI Helps Physicians Reduce Up To 79% Of Their Time

    You’re a doctor, nurse, specialist, or hospital administrator—navigating a fast-paced, high-stakes environment every day. Between caring for patients, documenting charts, and keeping up with the latest research, your time is stretched thin.

    Yet, one challenge remains constant: quickly finding reliable, evidence-based answers when you need them most.

    Now imagine cutting down the time it takes to access clinical guidelines, systematic reviews, and trusted recommendations—empowering you to make faster, more informed decisions. Spend less time searching and more time selecting the best diagnostic and treatment options for your patients—without the overwhelm of information overload.

    Arkangel AI medical search engine, Medsearch, achieves this by streamlining your workflow.

    Physicians today face an overload of medical information that makes daily work difficult. In the face of complex diseases (such as Alzheimer’s or Cancer), keeping up to date with clinical evidence consumes valuable hours.

    At the same time, clinical decision-making remains manual, subjective, and slow due to the high variability of treatment responses. These inefficient processes increase hospital delays and reduce patient care time.

    Moreover, in low-resource settings, the problem is compounded: lack of access to expensive tests limits early detection of chronic diseases. Taken together, these operational and hospital management failures can lead to significant revenue losses and overburdening scenarios for healthcare professionals.

    Arkangel AI: New Tools At The Doctor’s Service

    To address these challenges, Arkangel AI, a company that develops digital employees, developed AI-based solutions that automate the search for clinical evidence and the interpretation of medical data.

    For example, they created Pandora, an AI system trained to read unstructured electronic medical records with up to 92% accuracy in extracting information and capable of assigning evidence-based treatments with 93% accuracy.

    In parallel, they designed Medsearch, a real-time clinical search engine that goes beyond simple summaries: it delivers clinical answers directly linked to relevant scientific literature, processes images and PDFs to provide evidence-based recommendations and clinical practice guidelines, and tailors results to the clinical context.

    According to published data, Medsearch responds with nearly 90% accuracy in real time and helps save up to 79% of professionals’ time. “Before, it took me three days to complete my clinical or research work—now, with Medsearch, it takes me just three hours,” says Dr. Luis from Portugal, a Medsearch user.

    Improved Diagnostics and Early Prediction

    Arkangel AI has applied its technology to several real clinical cases. For example, it developed DACA, a conversational agent trained with 17 national and international clinical guidelines to answer questions about Alzheimer’s disease.

    In validated tests, DACA achieved 100% accuracy, sensitivity, and agreement in answering complex clinical cases, exceeding the averages of many professionals.

    Another case is chronic kidney disease (CKD): they trained an ensemble learning model using simple data (age, BMI, hypertension, diabetes time) on Colombian and Peruvian patients.

    This algorithm achieved 91% sensitivity in diabetics (10% higher thanks to the ensemble approach) and 93% accuracy in non-diabetics, with an area under the curve of 0.948. These values indicate that the model predicts very well who will develop CKD without relying on complex tests, which is critical in hospitals with limited resources.

    They have processed 1.7 million patients. They are implementing this same approach for oncology, rare diseases, neurological, cardiometabolic, and respiratory conditions.

    In practice, this means enabling early detection and automated patient screening, optimizing healthcare institutions’ operations by unlocking 80% of the unstructured data. As a result, this solution “enables earlier detection, earlier treatment, and optimizes hospital operations—boosting revenue by up to 75% and improving patient care”. Arkangel AI innovations offer measurable improvements: from more accurate diagnoses to significant time savings in care.

    “We work to make the healthcare system more accessible, efficient, and optimal through new technologies”, says Laura Velásquez, President of Arkangel AI, who started the company after losing three members of her family to medical problems in Canada.

    That loss drove her to build tools for early disease detection. Now, Arkangel AI aims to impact one billion lives globally by 2030. Already, they’ve made 90 million predictions across 18 countries, proving their reach.

    How Arkangel AI Data Intelligence Strengthens Health Systems

    Hospitals today struggle to balance their budgets amid rising healthcare costs and limited resources.

    Pandora helps medical institutions make the most of every dollar through intelligent resource allocation. The substantial savings enabled them to purchase vital medical equipment and expand their services.

    Medsearch technology speeds up your diagnostic processes, research and clinical workflows throughout the entire patient journey and the healthcare professional’s work. Your daily clinical decisions directly impact the financial health of your healthcare organisation.

    Inefficiencies drain resources that could otherwise fund patient care improvements and clinical innovations. Financial officers from multiple healthcare systems will report significant return on investment within twelve months of Arkangle AI implementation. The cost savings compound as staff become more proficient with the analytics tools embedded in the platform.

    If interested in learning more or using these tools, visit MedSearch or explore their website.

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  • 4 Ways Mindfulness Helps Us Find Our Way Through the Dark

    4 Ways Mindfulness Helps Us Find Our Way Through the Dark

    No matter what your political persuasion is, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re living in a time of chaos, pain, and carnage—with many people saying it’s a “dark” time that has made them feel anxious and helpless. Many of us feel we want to do something, but we don’t know what to do on the larger stage and we’re not sure what to do for ourselves and those around us. Many people have raised the question of whether and how meditation, mindfulness, and awareness can help us right now. It can seem almost puny against such massive forces.

    If it couldn’t help us now, though, what good would it be?

    Before helping us with what to do, though, mindfulness first helps us with how to be. And it seems that’s where we need to start. When times are tough, we need to go back to square one.

    Before helping us with what to do, mindfulness first helps us with how to be. That’s where we need to start.

    4 Ways Mindfulness Can Help Us Right Now

    1. Be in the Body

    One of the first facets of mindfulness meditation practice to appreciate, especially in times of great stress and fear, is that it grounds us in our body. When we take in difficult news, either near at hand (a loved one dying of cancer) or from afar (such as news of war over the internet or on TV), our connection to our body can weaken. It can even feel like we leave our body. In such a condition, freed from the gravitational pull, our mind begins to race. We’re more influenced by what our mind projects than by our immediate perception of our surroundings. When our mind is galloping off, even just a little close attention to our breathing while feeling the weight of our body pulling us to earth can bring our mind back home.

    One of the phenomena that takes us away so easily, of course, is media. It’s worthwhile (as many of you probably already do) to go on a news diet. Oliver Burkeman, author of Meditations for Mortals—who explores the relationship between how we spend our time and our well-being—counsels us to pay close attention to the time we spend digesting “news.” News, often in the guise of social media nowadays, is designed to activate our emotions more than inform us of need-to-know information. When we start to leave our body in response to “news,” it’s worthwhile to return to the perception of our body, and to appreciate our surroundings. As we notice a bird alighting on a branch, we can absorb a different sense of time: the tree and the bird are not part of the next news cycle. In terms of keeping up with things, Burkeman counsels being “news-resilient” by returning the news to a place where it’s just something you dip into rather than wallow in, and keeping up with what’s going right as well as what’s going wrong. I would add to engage in mindful reading: searching out reading, listening, and viewing that is reflective and thoughtful, that can generate insight, not just fear and panic.

    2. Rest in Choiceless Awareness

    The grounding quality of mindfulness—noticing the details inside and out—opens us up to our innate awareness, a more panoramic view that’s not caught up in chasing down every stray thought. As a result, we can be less reactive, and take a bigger view of space and a longer view of time. This deep kind of awareness is said to be choiceless: we couldn’t be rid of it if we tried.

    Awareness sees our anxiety but is not itself anxious. It manifests a mountain-like settledness, as well as confidence or courage that knows that no matter what happens, awareness goes on. We can rest in it.

    Being grounded in awareness is not about being detached, unfeeling, and uncaring. In fact, it’s awareness that allows us to truly feel—to have a natural reaction to something unpleasant or off-putting, such as a raving egomaniac talking about taking chain saws or wood chippers to things that help vulnerable people—and yet have space and sense of humor around the feeling. Awareness sees our anxiety but is not itself anxious. It manifests a mountain-like settledness, as well as confidence or courage that knows that no matter what happens, awareness goes on. We can rest in it.

    3. Feel the Wonder of Not Knowing

    When we’re sure that we know something, our awareness becomes clouded. Fresh perceptions are filtered through our fixed knowledge. Instead, like the great Zen masters, artist Maira Kalman, one-time Mindful contributor and author most recently of Still Life with Remorse, abides in “not knowing.” It is the source of her artistic practice. As she said to me in an interview, “At the end of the day or the end of a life, everybody ends up saying, ‘I don’t know what I know.’” Rather than responding to “the noise we’re bombarded with every day by those who are trying to unnerve us for our money, forcing us to form reactions and opinions,” we can rest in not knowing. When we allow ourselves to question what we know, and shy away from clinging to fixed opinions, the inquisitive quality of our awareness takes over and we perceive the world more freshly. We can be awestruck by the world’s magic.

    4. Cultivate Compassion and Community

    We can also be awestruck by the world’s pain and horror, and this is where the doing part comes in. Precisely what we do and how we do it naturally varies greatly depending on circumstances. Just as awareness is inherent, so is the basic warmth of compassion, our fellow feeling. It can be obscured, but it’s there for us all.

    Just as awareness is inherent, so is the basic warmth of compassion, our fellow feeling. It can be obscured, but it’s there for us all.

    As we become grounded in our body and rest in awareness, touching in with that warmth can guide us to what we can actually do, where we might have some agency. Not knowing brings with it a humbleness that tells us we can’t fix everything. Since we can’t be sure how things will turn out, we don’t cling to certain outcomes. The great heroes who have championed the causes of the oppressed tend to come from this stance, willing to plant seeds in a garden whose harvest they may never see and committed to—as the popular African-American expression goes—Making a Way Out of No Way.

    Whatever we do, one thing we do know in the deep fiber of our being is that we’re connected unavoidably to others, so finding community is never a bad place to start.



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    Rare “Gorilla Cherry” Secret Helps Support A Healthy Prostate

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