Steven Jay Fogel's Blog

I’ve just finished a new book, Insights for a Happier Life: Shortcuts for Creating Positive Changes One Moment at a Time, and I’m happy to announce you can now order it as a Kindle book on Amazon or as a paperback from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or your local bookstore. Insights for a Happier Life

Stop and take a moment to “pause your machinery.” The concepts and techniques I present throughout my latest book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, require mindfulness to learn and master, and this brief written exercise will give you the opportunity to rest, step outside the pattern of passive reading, and

I mentioned earlier that I had the privilege of interviewing the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. At one point in our interview, he talked about his experience of how, through the mindfulness that he was developing through meditation, he was gaining a different perspective on his identity and all the other aspects of his program­ming that

When we’re on automatic pilot, we may complain about the experiences that we want and don’t currently have instead of mind­fully reflecting on the possibility that our disappointment is an out­come of our current wiring. The reality is that our current wiring enables us to do certain things very well and other things not as

Stop and take a moment to “pause your machinery.” The concepts and techniques I present throughout my latest book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, require mindfulness to learn and master, and this brief written exercise will give you the opportunity to rest, step outside the pattern of passive reading, and

Here are the most recent Wisdom Pages I prepared for myself as an example to help you create your own exoskeleton to support your practice of mindful awareness.   My Wisdom Pages We are reaction machines. We cannot not react; it is how we are designed. The choice we have is how we relate to

This meditation practice from the UCLA Mindful Aware­ness Research Center is very simple. Just follow these instructions. Sit straight on a chair in a darkened room. Close your eyes, breathe naturally, and relax your entire body, letting go of all the tension in your race, neck, legs, arms, and feet. Focus your mind on someone

Sit straight on a chair in a darkened room. Close your eyes, breathe naturally, and relax your entire body, letting go of all tension in your face, neck, legs, arms, and feet. When you feel your body is relaxed, start to focus on your breath. I do this by focusing my attention on my abdomen

Many years ago I was doing a research project on success in vari­ous fields, and I was fortunate to interview Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher who wrote, among other books, Be Here Now, a classic book for Western readers on spirituality, meditation, and yoga. As part of the book, Ram Dass wrote about his transformation

Gratitude, opening your heart in appreciation, is a wonderful feel­ing: It feels good physically, and it feels good mentally and emotion­ally. With its constant search for problems that may not even exist, my default programming is fabulous at making me worry rather than focusing on all the good things to be grateful about. Practicing feeling