If there's a next time I won't sing at the end.  I promise. And, the design of these gorgeous slides is thanks to the talented  Lindsay duPont. TEDxEDStudioCity was organized by Dr. Lee-Anne Gray with the Connect Group.  

This month my husband,  Seth Greenland, whose new book, The Angry Buddhist, just came out, pitched in and wrote this guest-post about how mindfulness ended up playing a large part in his life. One evening, in my single days, I found myself having dinner with an attractive woman who had been the singer of a band I had seen playing at a friend’s wedding. We were exchanging the usual palaver one does on a first date when she informed me she was a Buddhist. This was early in the Reagan years and back then American Buddhists were like bald eagles…

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. — Charles J. Sykes    No matter how powerful the hard-drive or current the software, computer programs get stuck sometimes and freeze.   When a computer program gets stuck, there’s an underlying problem that needs to be fixed.  But because the screen is frozen, you can’t see it.   No amount of clicking your mouse or hitting the escape key will release the lock on your computer.   Your only recourse is a reset button.   Parents’ and their children’s minds and brains get stuck sometimes as well.   With mindfulness, parents…

Dr. Seuss has demonstrated time and time again that, when it comes to teaching abstract concepts to children, it’s okay to set the bar high.   Tomorrow marks his 108th birthday and his books have informed my work in ways that I doubt he could have imagined. In his unique and playful style, Dr. Seuss translated big ideas, ones that adults often struggle to grasp, into language that even young children can understand.   For instance, in one of his most famous books Oh . . . the Places You Will Go, Dr. Seuss articulated two key, universal concepts quite simply:…

It's encouraging for me to know that mind-wandering is an important neural activity, especially since I  daydream all the time.

The term "Executive Function" may sound more relevant to business school than elementary school, yet it's crucial to your child's social and emotional development.

What if happiness was a habit that we could teach children? We can. Qualities that lead away from happiness (strong negative emotions) and qualities that lead toward happiness (ethical actions) are all rooted in habits developed in the past. Mindfulness helps children and teens recognize the habits that lead to happiness and break the ones that don't.

As a mom with young children there were times that life seemed to stand still and I wished it would get moving. I remember thinking that the day my kids would be toilet trained would never come, but it did. I remember worrying that my children would never learn to fall asleep alone in their own beds, but they did. I remember thinking life waiting in car pool lines was endless, but it ended. 

Some people think my author husband cultivates an 'edgy' persona and voice.   So this morning, when I saw him tear up watching a YOUtube video I worried that he had crashed head-on into a mid-life crisis.   But when I saw the video he was watching, of Paul Simon as an accidental Zen master, I stopped worrying.

My nephew Jacob was recently ordained as a Presbyterian minister.   I attended his ordination service in New York and was intrigued by a scripture passage that I interpreted to be a reference to 'beginner's mind'.   That passage inspired me, and reminded me, to learn more about the commonalities among contemplative traditions.