Ed and Deb Shapiro

Are You Hanging Out With Fear?

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There are many things to feel fearful about these days. While anger is hot and loud, fear is more subtle and pervasive. It also has many different disguises. On the one hand, fear is a natural response to physical danger, but on the other it can be self-created, such as the fear of failure, of […]

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Taming The Dragons In Your Mind

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Soon after Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years in jail Bill Clinton asked him if he was angry about how he had been treated. “Tell me the truth, when you were walking to freedom, didn’t you hate them?” Clinton asked, referring to Mandela’s jailors. “You must have been so angry!” “Sure I was,” Mandela […]

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How To Get Your Motivation Going

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We watched as an eager young CNN television reporter asked the Dalai Lama what was the first thing he thought of when he awoke in the morning. We thought that this revered teacher and probably the world’s most well known meditator would say something deeply profound or insightful, such as along the lines of vowing […]

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Why We Look For Happiness In All The Wrong Places

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Our search for happiness becomes ever more urgent in our increasingly crowded and competitive world. An article on the HuffPost stated there are “over 75 million Google search results for the term and 40,000 happiness-related books available for purchase on Amazon… And it’s not necessarily helping us to become any happier.” Maybe that’s because happiness […]

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Are You Here And Now? If Not, Where?

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Do you live in your head? In your body? In your emotions? In your desires? Normally, we spend our time either living in what-could-have-been or what-might-have-been or if-only, or in the expectation of what-could-be or what-might-be, anywhere but here, constantly in either the past or the future. This is like being in a dream as […]

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Are You Happier Today Than You Were Yesterday?

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We were in Thailand, attending a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the middle of a coconut grove. Every day Ajahn Maha Dharma Tan, a Thai monk, would come to teach, and each day he would ask us the same question: “Are you happier today than you were yesterday?” As he said this, a wide smile […]

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Mindfulness & Meditation: What’s the Difference?

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“In any one day there are moments where there is nothing going on, but we link up what is happening from thought to thought without any space. We overlook the spaciousness that it’s all happening in,” Gangaji, from our new book The Unexpected Power Or Mindfulness & Meditation. Nowadays, mindfulness and meditation are often used […]

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The Unexpected Power of Mindfulness & Meditation

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There is a sanity and brilliance to mindfulness and meditation, from awakening inner strength, kindness and fearlessness to inviting radical change. As an activist in a Chinese jail, Kiri Westby used meditation to maintain her peace amidst the hardship. Seane Corn used yoga and mindfulness to work with teenage prostitutes in LA. Play therapist Megan […]

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Finding Your Sanity in the Midst of Chaos

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The question is, has the world gone nuts? It certainly looks like a lot of people are being driven by fear, hatred and greed. The protests in Chicago, the rising anger and animosity, is to the detriment of us all. Is it not time for some real sanity? Losing our sanity is about getting so […]

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Will The Real Deepak Chopra Please Stand Up

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The great Swami Satchidananda always said that we only need to have faith the size of a mustard seed. Such faith proved itself to us in an unusual way. We were teaching a weekend meditation program in Plymouth, a fairly rural town in Devon, England. On the Friday evening an excited student told us that […]

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