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The science behind “Centering for Wisdom” is discussed in very helpful article that appeared earlier this week in the Harvard Business Review, “Managing Yourself: Coping with Fatigue, Fear, and Panic During a Crisis”by Tony Schwartz and Emily Pines.  Since we’re…

https://youtu.be/_4PRjTca0Mk ———————————————- When you take the Centering for Wisdom™ Assessment your individual results are displayed in this kite graph.  You’ll see your average scores in each of four categories.  You can think of this…

In Centering Meditation, or in Centering Prayer (if you’re doing this as part of your spiritual tradition), you choose a centering word, and every time you notice that you’re distracted or engaged with your thoughts…

There’s a famous story told about Thomas Keating when he was first teaching Centering Prayer, the spiritual practice on which Centering Meditation is based. They were on a retreat, and a woman stood up and said…

Marty McFly can’t stand being called “chicken’!” Just when Marty has overcome every obstacle, and he’s about to escape “back to the future,” someone says, “what’s the matter, McFly? Are you chicken?” If he would just walk away, he could go back to his normal…

In case you missed it, here’s a recording of my recent workshop at the Blue Collar Speaker series at e3 Consulting.  In particular, I want to thank Chris and Mark Stone for the invitation and for the technical support! Take a moment now to check…

In a world desperately in need of wise leadership and decision-making that benefit all people and the common good—including our planet and natural environment—we hope that the CWA can make a small contribution to enhancing this virtue of contemplative practical wisdom. (Bushlack and Bock, p….

One of my favorite memories from my time as a college student at St. John’s University was the January-term of 2000, my senior year of college.  All of my roommates were gone for the month, I wasn’t taking any courses, and I set myself the…

As we are now full-swing into the Holiday Season, we’re all thinking about how not to eat too much, and gearing up our willpower for a New Year’s resolution.  Having dedicated myself to exploring the intersection between contemplative practices and ethics, a recent post from…

Have you ever noticed that when you make a commitment, set an intention, or begin to ask one of the big questions, that somehow you start to encounter a world teeming with responses?  I was amazed that after my post about creating a working definition…

While pondering the state of our current political and cultural world, I have also been reading Daniel Siegel’s most recent book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human. Siegel has been claiming for decades that integration is the heart of health, strength, and…

Tonia Bock (Professor of Psychology, University of St. Thomas) and I were recently fortunate to be able to present the initial results of our validation study of the Centering for Wisdom Assessment tool at the fifth annual conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and…

In a world desperately in need of wise leadership and decision-making that benefit all people and the common good—including our planet and natural environment—we hope that the CWA can make a small contribution to enhancing this virtue of contemplative practical wisdom. (Bushlack and Bock, p….

People engage in a spiritual or contemplative practice for lots of reasons.  And I am one who believes that there is no bad reason to begin a practice.  In doing workshops with professionals and teaching mindfulness to my college students, I have found that one…

Spiritual practices help us to become aware of the distinction between what we might call our “constructed self” and our “true Self.”  Or we might speak of the distinction between self and Self, or between what Tara Brach refers to as our real self and…

In the 2001 movie K-Pax, Kevin Spacey plays a character who claims to be an alien from a peaceful, nonviolent planet.  He seems baffled by the inability of humans to live peacefully with each other.  In one scene he is explaining to his psychiatrist, Mark…

On January 5, 2005, I stood in a private chapel in the crypt underneath the St. John’s Abbey Church and took vows as an Oblate of St. Benedict. These vows include “Stability, Obedience, and Conversatio Morum”  (usually translated as “fidelity to the monastic way of life,” implying an…

Here’s how Nora Speakman describes the “sacred space” she seeks to inhabit on her podcast, Liminality Life. sacred space, this liminal place of being. Liminality comes from the Latin word “limen” meaning threshold. It is the place where transformation happens if we will welcome it….