After reading John Medina’s book, Brain Rules, I started thinking about the implications of Medina’s brain rule and other information about sleep. Medina tells us that people fall into three kinds of sleepers: Larks, Hummingbirds and Night Owls. Larks often get up before 6 am and report feeling more alert and productive before lunch. Breakfast […]
What Social Style Is Your Child?
In ancient Greece Hippocrates defined four personality types: sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic. These were based on body fluids, or humors. Today we simply use questionnaires such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, MBTI, to define sixteen basic personality types. In Nurture by Nature, Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger explain the sixteen basic Myers-Briggs types and how […]
Less Is More
Wandering around the airport bookstore looking for reading material because, alas, I had gulped through all my books on an eight hour flight, I lit on a bright green book by Marc Lesser, with an intriguing premise, Less: Accomplishing More by Doing Less. Lesser, an entrepreneur and Zen teacher, asks us to examine five self-defeating […]
The Missing Element
In his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Ken Robinson, Ph.D. tells us that we each need to find that place where the things we love to do intersect with the things we know how to do well. Robinson calls this place of intersecting talent and passion “the Element.” Each person needs […]
Eat, Drink, Breathe, Think
A newspaper article written by a physician summarized a discussion on health with these words: It’s about what you eat and what you drink,What you breathe and what you think. What you eat. Putting the right food into our bodies is essential to good health, as well as physical and mental development. Today we understand […]
Please, Don’t Eat the Marshmallow
In the 1960’s, Walter Mischel conducted the now-famous “marshmallow study” at the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University. A researcher would let a four-year-old choose a treat from a tray and tell the child that he or she could eat the treat right away or wait until the researcher returned and have two. About one-third of […]
Bloom’s Taxonomy
As we watch our children grow and learn, how can we, as parents and teachers, help direct our children to the next step in learning? One helpful tool to help us think about the steps in learning is Bloom’s Taxonomy. Benjamin Bloom in 1956 described six levels of questioning that reflect a person’s mastery of […]
Five Hindrances to Enlightenment
Last week’s post discussed how seven factors in Zen Buddhist teachings might be seen as road signs to happy and healthy human development. These seven factors are universal virtues that are found in most cultures of the world, in different words and contexts, but there all the same. Mindfulness. Investigation. Energy. Joy. Tranquility. Concentration. Equanimity. […]
Seven Factors of Enlightenment
Zen Buddhist monks might be the last people you’d think would clown around. Laughing, though, is an expression of joy, and joy is one of the seven factors of enlightenment. Reading an article about a Zen Buddhist monk who teaches students to smile, laugh, and tell jokes made me curious about the other six factors […]
Holding the Paradox
Have you ever taken two magnets and tried to put like poles together? If you put the north and the south pole of a magnet together, there is attraction and attachment. Try to put two north or two south poles together, and you feel a repulsion. Push as you might, you can’t get the two […]