 THE UNDEFEATED MIND Fall 2012 |
 Photo: Wonderlane In Nichiren Buddhism, the mentor-disciple relationship—the relationship between teacher and student—is considered essential for attaining happiness. How does Nichiren Buddhism envision this relationship works? First, in a true mentor-disciple relationship, the mentor, contrary to what many believe, is not intrinsically superior to the disciple. Continue reading…  Image: RavensHeart Web Studio As long as I can remember (so the cliche goes), I’ve wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first short story when I was five. It was called “Horse’s Birthday Party” and was, you won’t be surprised to learn, about a horse having a birthday party. I drew a cover (with a horse on it), taped the pages together, and handed it to my parents. They praised it to the skies, and I was hooked. Since then, no matter what I was doing (going to college and then medical school, trying to survive a medical residency, practicing medicine as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago), I’ve always thought of myself first and foremost as a writer—even though all throughout those years nothing of mine was ever published. Continue reading…  Photo: amyelyse How often do you become irrationally angry, and even though you fully recognize you’re overreacting, still find yourself unable to stop? Do you find yourself hurt by a careless word or gesture and find yourself acting petulantly in hopes the person who hurt you will recognize the damage they’ve done without you having to tell them how you feel? How about feeling jealous or insecure and showing off for someone you want to impress or make like you? Continue reading…  Photo: kretyen In the past, I’ve been humbled to discover things about myself I didn’t want to know: as I wrote in The Good Guy Contract, that I believed I needed other people to like me to be happy, and as I wrote in Keeping Romance Alive, that I was warm when in fact I wasn’t. As surprising as learning these things was, perhaps even more surprising was that learning them surprised me. Why wouldn’t I always have known these things? Why do the things we discover about ourselves so often run counter to our expectations? How is it our view of ourselves so often turns out to be entirely wrong? Continue reading…  Photo: Andrew Mason A few weeks ago at a staff meeting, I reaffirmed a policy to which several staff members objected. To be frank, the basis of their objection struck me as trivial at first. But later, after they asked to speak with me about it further and our conversation evolved, it became clear to me their reasons for wanting to change it were better than mine for wanting to keep it. Continue reading…  Photo: Katie Tegtmeyer My wife once told me she felt I wasn’t particularly warm. She rarely saw me hug anyone, I rarely took her hand spontaneously, or rubbed her back or nuzzled her neck. And she very much wanted those things, she said. She needed to feel a sense of connection between us, a sense that we were more than just two people co-habitating in a house or co-parenting a child. And she didn’t. Continue reading…  Photo: kaibara87 When I was a teenager, I was afflicted with terrible shyness. Not in every context or with all people—mostly just with girls. Not unlike millions of other adolescent males, when in the presence of a girl I found attractive, I would become tongue tied, awkward, and lose all self-confidence. As I grew older, this reaction gradually diminished, until (luckily) by the time I’d met my wife, it had largely vanished. I’d always explained this to myself as a simple function of maturation, but recently I realized that while growing older does indeed often result in increased self-confidence (we experience more, handle it, and realize we handled it), age wasn’t, in fact, responsible at all. Continue reading…  Photo: Tulane Public Relations I’m no expert in education, so I may be speaking out of school with this post (pun intended), but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how and what we teach our children. As I’ve perused the education literature, I’ve been struck by an important similarity between education and medicine: a significant gap exists between the leading edge of research and its implementation. That is, what we now know we should be doing is quite different from what we actually are. Continue reading…  Photo: prep4md “I don’t want to give them up,” my patient told me. “Why not?” I asked. “I’ve been reading some articles on the Internet that say they might cure me.” Tragically, he was referring to vitamin supplements, which he’d somehow come to believe would cure him of Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. Continue reading…  Photo: _rockinfree When I was originally introduced to the form of Buddhism I now practice, Nichiren Buddhism, one of the things I found most attractive about it was the concept that we’re all fully responsible for the entirety of our lives, a notion rooted in the principle of the simultaneity of cause and effect. In essence, this principle states that everything we experience in our lives today appears as an effect of causes we ourselves have made in the past, and that everything we’ll see in the future will occur as a result of causes we ourselves are making in the present. Continue reading… |
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