Personal Development with Gray Miller
I used to hate meditation. Raised with a particular version of by-your-bootstraps Judeo-Christian work ethic that idolized “pioneers” (in quotes because they were actually colonizers), I had a real problem with the idea of just sitting there, doing nothing, for any amount of time. Worse, when I forced myself to do it I kept on …
Things have been kind of rough chez Gray. It’s not unexpected. I made a deliberate career pivot a few months ago, deciding to forego the traveling facilitator gig to try and find more stable and localized work. I had a set amount of money and time to build the skills, and I spent serious thought …
In the “How you like me now?” Series, I take a blog post from the very beginning of Love Life Practice seven years ago and see how well things have held up. This post comes from November of 2011 (so it’s not quite exactly a year) but it is the earliest “practice” post I have …
One of the themes that has always fascinated me is the idea of “self-sabotage”. Everyone has done it to some extent, but some of us are more…talented at it than others. There’s “I’m going to just have this one pizza” versus “I’ve just invested my parents’ life savings in Enron stock.” When I’m talking about …
…they are spending their time in pursuit of things that don’t make them happy so much as they serve as a temporary relief from what makes them sad and exhausted.– from a “Pep Talk” via Kameron Hurley’s excellent Patreon Is there anything scarier than being alone with your own thoughts? Little in my life has ever been …
I welcome Natasha Bounds from Intention at Home to the Love Life Practice team, and this is the first of what I hope will be regular contributions! No, this is not a post about setting up time in your schedule or doing certain exercises for the next 30 days. It’s not that kind of challenge. …
"Shifting from mindful to mindless work gives the brain time to process complex problems in a relaxed state and also restores the energy necessary for the next round of mindful work. … you need to challenge the worries that keep you reacting compulsively instead of engaging consciously… From “Managing Your Day-to-Day”, edited by Jocelyn Glei …
Recently my partner and I were startled by a tweet, popularly reposted by several of our friends, that suggested that there needed to be an article along the lines of 18 Ways to Punch the Next Person Who Suggests I Try Mindfulness. While I was aware that there was some critique of businesses that were …
I’ve talked a lot about the many benefits – both personal and reported – of meditation. It’s one of the few lifehacks that both lives up to the reputation and has been relatively simple to do consistently. Soto zen meditation, as I’ve mentioned, is not very fancy. You don’t get to chant, you don’t get …
There’s a conflict that rages every morning the moment I first drift into waking consciousness. It first manifests by my social media (aka the Gravy Hose) craving, when I wonder What have I missed in the last seven hours? My hand reaches almost automatically towards the bedside table – where my phone isn’t. No, my …