Being Idle As a Sign of Success

A friend and I were discussing what it means to have success the other day and she was telling me how difficult it is to demonstrate success in her profession, a clinical psychologist. I had thought about that myself a while back when I realized that success to a mental health professional means that a patient no longer needs their services. It is a quiet affair to end one’s therapy; it is something private between clinician and the patient. There are no awards, promotions, publications, or other signs of success that might accompany positions in business or academia.

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How Mindfulness Can Beat Coffee Addiction

I’ve been a big coffee drinker most of my life. In fact, I can say my relationship to coffee was (is) an addiction. I couldn’t go a day without it. My early morning ritual centered upon it and even when I traveled I figured out my coffee situation well in advance. So as with many addictions, I attempted to stop many times and would suffer through withdrawal headaches for a week or so then relapse again.

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When Kindness Is a Mark of Success

My family attended our son’s graduation over the weekend at the University of Vermont where the commencement speaker was Eric K. Shinseki, United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Aside from delivering a short and rather entertaining speech, he got across a pretty simple message to the emerging graduates: the real mark of success is kindness, and sharing that with others.

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There’s a Different Way to ‘Meditate’ For Everyone

The other night a husband and wife were asking me about meditation; the wife was a mediator and the husband was not. She clearly reaped great benefit from it and must have trying to get her husband to do it, but to no avail. I told the husband that I’ve been working to bring meditation to UCLA, in the medical school where our center is located (www.marc.ucla.edu), with a goal to teach meditation practices in a secular way, particularly in light of emerging research supporting its benefits on health and well-being.

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