Addicted to Awe: Why Some People Turn Into ‘Wonder Junkies’

I read an interesting article titled ‘How Traveling Abroad in Your Twenties Will Ruin Your Life’ and the clickbait title dragged me into what I thought would be a rant on how travelling will ruin your career prospects. But what the author delivers instead is a tongue-in-cheek and extremely relatable sentiment about how travel obsession. For…

View Post

Why You Should Be Mindful of Always Reaching for the Camera

You can’t capture every exciting scene you see. Surely there must be some balance to strike between being fully attuned to new and interesting surroundings and capturing it to share with others and to look back on in the future nostalgic reminiscing. We often find ourselves with an inexorable urge to reach for the camera…

View Post

On Mindfulness and Depression

Analogies are often necessary to describe how depression can escalate; how a mild pain mutates into something more excruciating. This downward spiral process is a lot like adding heavier and heavier weights to your shoulders. The first weight may be unexpected. Perhaps a stressful situation triggers the onset of depressive symptoms, such as fatigue, hopelessness,…

View Post

Not Identifying With a Mental Health Issue Can Lessen Its Grip

The spiritual teacher Ram Dass often confronts the topic of suffering in his talks and in his writings. In this BBC interview from 1981, he addresses anyone who might be suffering from depression and offers a different way of approaching the condition. The default or commonly adopted response to depression – and towards mental states in…

View Post

What is Secular Buddhism?

Can you be an atheist and a Buddhist? At first glance, it seems like it would be inconsistent to be both, to be someone who does not believe in God but belongs to a religion. But there is now a growing form of Buddhism, in the Western world at least, which is based on humanism…

View Post