Meditation | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

1. Loving Your Perfect Self, Before Improving It and Comfort Foods Gone Awry from Eat 2 Love.

2. Good stuff from MindBodyGreen: 30 Things To Do Before You Die, and Gluten-Free Maple Granola (a recipe), and 5 Tips To Ditch Needless Pressures & Let Feeling Good Be Your Guide, and It’s Monday! Make These Gluten-Free Autumn Cookies! (I don’t care that these are supposed to be “good for you,” they look delicious), and Gluten-Free & Dairy-Free Mint Chocolate Superfood Snack Balls (same goes here), and 13 Small Choices That Can Change Your Life In Great Ways, and 21 Bad Habits To Avoid If You Want To Be Happy.

3. Family stories: The ones we claim, and the ones that claim us from Christina Rosalie, in which she says,

More than ever I can feel the way certain embers in my ribcage flare up with the unavoidable heat of this: to write is everything. And increasingly, the only thing. Over and over again I find my way to this truth, even as discovering what it truly means for my everyday life is still an act in progress.

Word.

4. 20 Funny Sidewalk Signs from Pleated Jeans.

5. Cinnamon Roasted Sweet Potato recipe from The Healthy Chef.

6. 19 Adorable Ways To Decorate A Light Switch Cover from BuzzFeed DIY.

7. Perfect Day from Jeff Oaks.

8. Actually, you’re the guru. Notes on resonance and respect. from Danielle LaPorte.

9. Are You Buying The Healthiest Frozen Veggie Burger? on Food Babe, which led me to Think Twice Before Buying This Type of Burger.

10. Feed Your Roots With Roots from Meg Worden.

11. Good stuff from Elephant Journal: 10 Tips for Teaching a Larger-Bodied Yogi, and The Power of Self-Worth, and What’s the Most Important Question We Ask?

12. Everyday Objects Turned Into Imaginative Illustrations by Javier Pérez on Bored Panda.

13. The 24 Most Hipster Things That Have Ever Happened from BuzzFeed.

14. Me, the overly sensitive child, by Anne Lamott on Salon, in which she says something that made me have to stop reading and weep,

As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, “Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you’re not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on.”

15. Unchaining Creativity: Thirty Ways to Say I Love You on Scoutie Girl.

16. Should is a Warning Sign from Shauna Niequist.

17. Present Tense: Allie Brosh, Donald Glover, And Hurting Right Now.

18. The 19 Most Relatable Tweets From Mindy Kaling on BuzzFeed. There is just nothing more glorious and valuable than a funny woman.

19. Wisdom from Elizabeth Gilbert on Facebook.

20. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön,

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves. By “cessation” we mean the cessation of hell as opposed to just weather, the cessation of this resistance, this resentment, this feeeling of being completely trapped and caught, trying to maintain huge ME at any cost. The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather—the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that.

21. On Owning It from Seth Godin.

22. Wisdom from Norman Fischer,

To simply be present with our lives at the depth that meditation practice can take us to is a profound accomplishment. To inhabit our lives in this way is to meet and become the Buddha, to be touched by and to touch the divine. Cutting through our entanglements without denying them, we reach the ultimate, not by an act of transcendence, but simply by living with full awareness.

23. Meditation For Those Of Us Who Can’t Sit Still from Get to the Good.

24. 105 Action Steps to Make You Bold, Brave and Successful from The Bold Life.

25. Wisdom from Martha Beck,

You are never required to do more than you can do in peace. Right now, take a breath, return to peace, and refuse to leave.

26. 12 Simple Strategies to Create Space Each Day from Becoming Minimalist.

27. Does Life End at 35?

28. 38,445 Miles by Rachel Cole.

1. Fears and Flashbacks from Sas Petherick.

2. your daily rock : do what you love and your daily rock : please don’t judge

3. Good stuff from MindBodyGreen: In Defense Of Highly Sensitive People, and 10 Questions To Ask Yourself Every Day, and If You Do Nothing Else To Be Healthy, At Least Do These 5 Things.

4. Good stuff from Elephant Journal: 8 Ways to Make Every Day Your Best Without Pretending You’re Happy or Letting Go, and 10 Ways to Be a Human Being, and Why God Made a Dog. {Video} (*sob*), and Top 10 Photos: Outdoorsy Tiny Cabin Porn, (if you like that sort of thing, make sure to go to the Cabin Porn website).

5. I am obsessed with learning to make Kitchari: How To Cook Kitchari, and How to make Kitchari using the Banyan Kitchari Kit, and My Favorite Kitchari Recipe.

6. Prints with poetry from Maya Stein. I’m hoping she makes a book of these someday.

7. Opening the Creative Channel from Superhero Life, in which Andrea Scher talks about the retreat I was lucky enough to attend.

8. Sweet dog asks cat for his bed back on Dog Heirs and in related news, this Cats Stealing Dog Beds Compilation.

9. 10 Life Lessons You Should Unlearn, Martha Beck on Huffington Post.

10. My Art Was Stolen for Profit (and How You Can Help) from Lisa Congdon. And a whole bunch of other articles related to this situation: a Flickr page of other indie ripoffs, and Is Giant Folk Art Company Cody Foster Stealing From Small Artists?, and We Love Authenticity, and How A Company Gets Away With Stealing Independent Designers’ Work, and Drawing the Line on Design Theft.

11. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön,

Not acting on our habitual patterns is only the first step toward not harming others or ourselves. The transformative process begins at a deeper level when we contact the rawness we’re left with whenever we refrain. As a way of working with our aggressive tendencies, Dzigar Kongtrül teaches the nonviolent practice of simmering. He says that rather than “boil in our aggression like a piece of meat cooking in a soup,” we simmer in it. We allow ourselves to wait, to sit patiently with the urge to act or speak in our usual ways and feel the full force of that urge without turning away or giving in. Neither repressing nor rejecting, we stay in the middle between the two extremes, in the middle between yes and no, right and wrong, true and false. This is the journey of developing a kindhearted and courageous tolerance for our pain.

12. Good stuff from Marc and Angel Hack Life: 10 Truths You Will Learn Before You Find Happiness, and 10 Risks Happy People Take Every Day.

13. “I don’t get it” from Seth Godin.

14. The 2013 Holiday Gift Guide – Part One from Rachel Cole, who has very good taste.

15. You are not in control from Christina Rosalie, in which she says,

What is yours is the way you meet the turbulence as it arrives: with grace or terror, with gratitude or anger, with openness or clenched fists, with focus or distraction. Your life will find you, no matter what you plan. Be here then. Be of this wild, brilliant new day. Respond as truly as you can, and know this life is made both of your breath, and of the wind you breathe.

16. Oprah Tells An Atheist She Believes In God. The Atheist Responds Like A Christian. Or Any Human on Upworthy. Confession: I am kind of annoyed with Oprah right now, how she doesn’t let people say what they have to say, how she seems to sometimes use them simply to say what she’s already decided to say. Case in point, Dani Shapiro on Super Soul Sunday yesterday. Oprah would not let her finish, not let her speak, kept interrupting her. It was so hard to watch.

17. Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming on The Guardian.

18. Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime on Scientific American.

19. Watch A Student Totally Nail Something About Women That I’ve Been Trying To Articulate For 37 Years on Upworthy. Amazing.

20. Seven Unusual Tips to Stir Your Creative Juices from Judy Clement Wall.

21. Why Oreos Are As Addictive As Cocaine To Your Brain on Forbes.

22. Man overhears sad tale in diner, secretly pays for meal, because people are good.

23. 30 Of The Happiest Facts Ever from Bored Panda.

24. Piktochart looks really fun. I first saw an example on Create as Folk, in this post, (which is also something good): Get the Bleep off Craigslist.

25. 4 Reasons I Don’t Believe in the Law of Attraction on Always Well Within.

26. 7 Things To Look At When You Feel Bad About Your Body on Huffington Post.

27. Why I’m Infatuated With October on Scoutie Girl.

28. Wisdom from Franz Kafka,

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

29. Scientists Discover One Of The Greatest Contributing Factors To Happiness — You’ll Thank Me Later a Soul Pancake video on Upworthy.

30. Charlie the Dog Is the World’s Worst Recycler on Jezebel. An empty plastic water bottle really is one of the best puppy toys ever. Reminds me of Sam when he was a puppy, and I’d hide a ball under a tupperware bowl and he’d try to get it out. (P.S. Dexter was the best big brother).

31. 7 Life-Changing Benefits of a Surprisingly Simple Meditation Technique on Tiny Buddha.

32. From Susannah Conway’s Something for the Weekend list, A freebie 2014 calendar template for your photos (such a cool idea!), and What People Really Look Like from Portland Home Massage, in which masseuse Dave says,

Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow.

I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.

33. My Most Meaningful Decision on Design Sponge.

34. One Question (plus a few more) from Julia on Painted Path.

35. More Bat Dad, who was also interviewed on TODAY.

36. From Positively Present Picks, free desktop downloads from Design Love Fest.

37. Clever cat helps dog escape from kitchen (VIDEO) from Dog Heirs.

38. whatthefuckshouldibeforhalloween.com

39. Wisdom from Anne Lamott on Facebook.

40. Wisdom from Geneen Roth on Facebook,

When you stop warring with yourself, when you end the shaming and judging and blaming, when you stop the pushing and pulling and feeding the desire to be someone else with a different life, the war with food ends as well. Maybe not all at once, but soon. It couldn’t be any other way.

41. Amazing Secret Dungeon discovered under my new apartment…

42. Childish Gambino Explains Instagram Notes, in which he says,

“If I’m depressed, everybody’s depressed, I don’t think those feelings are that different from what everybody’s feeling. Most people just don’t tell everybody. I was just tired of telling people I was tired. It felt like every day someone would ask, ‘What’s wrong. Are you OK?’ “And I would say, ‘I’m tired, I’m tired.’ I didn’t want to do that anymore. I guess sometimes not telling the truth is just as bad as telling a lie.”

43. From Brain Pickings: Humans of New York: A Vibrant Photographic Census of Diversity and Dignity and Fail Safe: Debbie Millman’s Advice on Courage and the Creative Life.

44. The photographer behind ‘Humans of New York’ on CNN.

45. Read this when you’re feeling unwanted + rejected. (You’re not. This will help.) from Alexandra Franzen.