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What Is the Matter?

Ranking importance is critical to mental health What IS the matter? Matter is an interesting word. It’s a noun and a verb. The noun means something of substance and can be physical or metaphysical. The verb means for something to be important. There’s matter, and there is the matter. I like words like that, but the complication of communication and understanding. The idea of something mattering, as a verb, has been on my mind lately. The…

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Things We Could Care Less About

I couldn’t care less about that. How many times have you said that? We use this phrase as a euphemism to mean we completely don’t like, disagree with, or are opposed to whatever is being discussed.  There are things in life we don’t care about, and some things we care a lot about. We pay attention to and direct our energy toward the things we care about. These can be family, health, jobs, money, or…

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Mindfulness Practice Is the Key to Human Success

Are you familiar with Jon Kabat-Zinn? In short, he’s one of the people who has made meditation mainstream. While I generally don’t like words like ‘mainstream’ and ‘conformity’, anything that makes helpful tools more accessible to the masses is good in my book. Known as one of the creators of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Kabat-Zinn has written a bunch of books and helped teach meditation to all sorts of regular people. This article is inspired…

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Awareness. Cultivation and Growth. (KEW Episode 121)

I’m revisiting some of my favorite concepts in this episode. Awareness. Intent. Attention. Consciousness. Will. And how these things work together and facilitate growth. Being human. Underneath all of this, I believe that growing to be a ‘better’ human is a critical requirement of being alive. Or, if it is not a requirement, it is a meaningful element whose absence is a shame if not a failure. We are all humans, subject to the distractions…

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KEW Episode 86: Mind Control

You’re probably like, ‘mind control, what’s this guy talking about?’ Either he’s going to tell us how we need to get in our heads and understand what’s going on, or he’s going to talk about how the algorithm has us under its spell. It reminds me of this scene from Monsters, Inc: This week I’m taking about the first thing. Although I’m a huge fan of getting out from under the algorithms, I think that…

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KEW Episode 63: The Two Types of Shoulds

I recorded this episode after replying to a YouTube comment about good and bad types of change (Episode 61: Change is Hard, but Resisting Change is Wrong). The commenter made a good point that sometimes we change in a bad direction instead of making a positive change. I agreed but in doing so realized I had a bigger point buried under that. Perhaps another assumption I had failed to realize or express. Which is that…

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