MindBodyGreen | 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. Posture Matters: Cute Animated Video Reminds Us to Get Off Our Butts During the Day from Yoga Dork.

2. A really good question from Justine Musk,

Pretend that a messenger from some great cosmic all-knowing sort of entity — I like to think of it as a giant punk unicorn, myself — has come to you and informed you that you have within you two gifts. The first is the message that you absolutely must get out into the world. The second is the way/talent/means for you to do it. What are those gifts?

3. Good stuff from MindBodyGreen: 10 Foods That A Nutritionist Always Has In Her Freezer and Forget Dairy! Your New Best Friend Is Cashew Cream.

4. Beyond Flour: A New Kind of Gluten-Free Cookbook, another good Kickstarter Project.

5. Confessions of a Serial Memoirist from the Opinion Pages of The New York Times, in which the author says,

I was born to be a serial memoirist: compulsive, self-absorbed, narcissistic, bossy and a know-it-all.

My books so far have been old-fashioned memoirs, the hero’s journey: Falling into disgrace or despair, struggling through the fires of hell to rise, graced with a new life or at least more peace. This classic dramatic arc is not superficially imposed, but the way I think; identifying and tracing the arcs in my own life helps me find meaning and purpose.

I keep trying to improve my identity by evolving into a kinder, more loving, wise, spiritual and compassionate woman, daughter, mother, friend. This is taking a lifetime. Not a bad thing for a serial memoirist.

Word.

6. Our crystal palace from Seth Godin.

7. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön,

Meditation begins to open up your life, so that you’re not caught in self-concern, just wanting life to go your way. In that case you no longer realize that you’re standing at the center of the world, that you’re in the middle of a sacred circle, because you’re so concerned with your worries, pains, limitations, desires, and fears that you are blind to the beauty of existence. All you feel by being caught up like this is misery, as well as enormous resentment about life in general. How strange! Life is such a miracle, and a lot of the time we feel only resentment about how it’s all working out for us.

8. Do It Because It’s What You’re Here To Do from Jonathan Fields.

9. Good stuff from Scoutie Girl: Permission to Rest and Throwing In the Towel.

10. the one thing you must do from Sas Petherick.

11. 26 Reasons Kids Are Pretty Much Just Tiny Drunk Adults on BuzzFeed.

12. 21 People Having a Really Bad Day from Pleated Jeans.

13. A Simple Relaxation Technique to Connect Your Heart & Mind from Deva Coaching.

14. 10 Characters You May Encounter in Yoga Class on Elephant Journal, (I am a combination of 5 and 10). Also from Elephant Journal, Dear Drunk Girl.

15. I’m Finally Thin — But Is Living In A Crazymaking Food Prison Really Worth It?

16. Dani Shapiro’s Provident Move to the Country on The New York Times. I want to go to there.

17. Mortified Nation, a “documentary about adults who share their most embarrassing, private childhood writings… in front of total strangers,” which makes me wish I hadn’t destroyed all the awful poetry I wrote in my tween years.