For as long as self-aware humans have occupied this planet, they've been busy attempting to understand and improve themselves. In this post, we'll look at vision quests, which actually lends itself to other aspects of personal development, including meditation, mindfulness, silence, and self-inquiry. Although there is evidence vision quests have been practiced for thousands of [...]

Genuine, lasting happiness is an internal state of being. Finding it outside oneself is a fool's errand (and, unfortunately, what a majority of humans practice). This was the verdict of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose observations of people's struggles during and after World War II led him to a lifelong study of what, exactly, happiness is [...]

Flow is an ecstatic state of being first studied and later codified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His pioneering work has since been corroborated by neuroscientists, who have discovered that brains in a state of flow power down the prefrontal cortex, which establishes the sense of self and the memories that go with it. In other [...]

Ask the typical individual to describe meditation and they'll likely picture robed monks seated lotus-style in a shroud of incense smoke. Or, Lululemon-clad influencers gazing across a picturesque landscape next to their infinity pool. Or, a hall full of New Age types uniformly chanting 'ohm.' Any of these could be accurate. But if your understanding [...]

The French polymath, Blaise Pascal, said all of humankind's problems were tied to one behavioral deficit: our inability to sit quietly in a room doing nothing . What about you? How often on a given day or week do you sit in silence? If you're like most, your answer is rarely if ever. And that, [...]

The journey inward, if earnestly pursued, begins to reveal a hideous truth: that I, and all others, are one and the same thing. There, just at the edge of my perception, I begin to see that aside from the window dressing each of us calls 'my life,' there is nothing. All of the characters and [...]

Most of us are so busy living our lives - often feeling as if we can barely keep our heads above water - that there is little if any time left for contemplating what matters most: ourselves. Which is a tragedy, really, because there is a growing body of research demonstrating that self-awareness - and [...]

In the beginning was the word. And ever since there have been so many words. Our world drowns in words. So too does our inner world. Words, words, words. How many spoken, shared, loved, fought over? More words than atoms in the universe maybe? And in the end, what do all those words signify? Nothing. [...]

Seek and ye shall find. When the student is ready the teacher will appear. I will go before you and make the crooked places straight. What all of these statements (and countless others) point to - at least to me - is this: seek God and God will ensure you find It. What I've found [...]

There are two well-known psychological phenomena that illustrate just how difficult it is for humans to properly understand themselves and the world around them: confirmation bias and its cousin, the backfire effect. Confirmation bias speaks to our habit of cherrypicking information that supports our previously held beliefs and rejecting any evidence that runs counter to [...]