Photo: Maks Karochkin
“The Buddha’s compassion is perfectly equal and impartial. The Buddha views all beings as his own children and strives to elevate them to attain his same enlightened state of life. It’s not that there are no differences among people. Rather, it’s that the Buddha, while fully recognizing people’s differences, does not discriminate among them.”
—Daisaku Ikeda Continue reading…
 THE UNDEFEATED MIND Fall 2012 |
 Photo: Anamorphic Mike In a previous post, The Three Realms Of Confidence, I told a story from my childhood (how I was bullied in seventh grade because I was Jewish) to introduce the concept that confidence exists in three separate realms. In response to that post, a reader commented (on the Psychology Today blog where my posts also appear): “I was periodically beaten up, but I ran away or didn’t fight back because I operated under the assumption that you should always ‘turn the other cheek’ and never fight back, regardless of the circumstances. The moral directive was to allow yourself to get beaten up…” Continue reading…  Photo: Josep Ma. Rosell When I was a fourth-year medical student, I once did a month-long rotation in the ER. One night a woman came in who we decided needed some lab work. When I let her know we needed to draw her blood, she began to tremble visibly. “I’m scared of needles,” she whispered to me. Continue reading…
Or so he’d described to me. Though he’d managed, over the years, to paint a clear picture of her personality and character, I couldn’t personally verify any of it. I’d never met her. Continue reading…
I left their apartment that night thinking about life stages and transitions and found myself wondering why I wasn’t married yet. I’d always felt I’d wanted to be and had certainly had a number of opportunities. But I’d passed them all up for one reason or another and at 34 remained single. Learning one of my brothers was going to be a father triggered something in me—a sense of urgency, a greater interest in moving my life forward, a need to shake things up—I’m not sure what. But the next morning I began a campaign to find my wife. Continue reading…
 Photo: pedrosimones7 In 2001, just as I was about to take over as Medical Director of Primary Care at the University of Chicago, I expressed reservations to a previous Director about my ability to run a clinic that included several clinicians who were not only older than I but who had actually been my teachers ten years earlier. What she said in response did more to shape my tenure as Director over the next seven years than any other advice I ever received: “What people really want,” she told me, “is leadership.” Continue reading…  Photo: tosaytheleast Twenty years ago, the first woman I ever loved broke my heart. Like many break ups, the end came in stutters and sine waves rather than as an abrupt but mercifully irreversible amputation. However, for reasons I couldn’t understand yet quickly began to resent, my ex-girlfriend continued to ask favors of me. And I continued to grant them. Then one morning while chanting I found myself ruminating about how inappropriate it was of her to keep asking, and the more I thought about it, the more irritated I became. My indignation continued to intensify after I’d finished chanting and began showering, finally reaching a peak as I rinsed the shampoo from my hair, causing me to make a sudden and angry determination that the next time she asked me for a favor, I’d refuse. Continue reading… |
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Several years ago, someone I know told me he was contemplating divorcing his wife. I wasn’t surprised. He’d been unhappy in the marriage for some time—and, in my opinion, with good reason: his wife was jealous to the point of being neurotic, often behaving in ways that were shockingly inappropriate, offensive, and stress-inducing.
Last week my 18 month-old son, Cruise, started Montessori preschool. The first three days my wife and I dropped him off he cried so hard he could hardly catch his breath, his chest heaving in great racking sobs. By the fourth day, however, we were listening to him repeat his teacher’s name every few minutes on the way over, and when we dropped him off and gently prodded him into the classroom, he entered, stood, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and stared curiously at all the other toddlers crying around him. When we came to pick him up at the end of the day, we watched him through the classroom’s observation windows sitting in a little toddler chair eating a piece of cantaloupe with the other toddlers, also in chairs, and drinking juice out of a plastic cup by himself for the very first time. Rather than burst into tears when he saw us realizing we’d been separated from him all day, he ran up to me, wrapped his arms around mine, and smiled. 
