Flower Mandalas Project

I was 20 when I first encountered Baba Ram Dass’s square, purple-covered Be Here Now , the book that launched many of my generation on an Eastern-inspired journey. I was walking though the student center of the University at Buffalo when I ran into a high school friend sitting on the floor outside the bookstore, guitar at his side, leafing through it. He handed it to me. Be? Here? Now? More than 40 years later, I’m still asking what that means. One of my most important teachers is Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk whose simple exposition of Buddhist principles has been life-changing for thousands of people worldwide. Like Ram Dass, his most compelling observation is that we are already who we are, already in the only moment actually available to us. “The past is gone, the future is not yet here,” he says, “and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.” It seems so simple; yet being here now is not easy for most of us. We are inund...

  For the last several years, I’ve found myself attracted to the dead leaves I see on the ground as I walk, particularly those in late fall and winter. I’ve taken thousands of pictures of them. A friend’s mentioning to me the concept of wabi-sabi helped me understand why.     For the last several years, I’ve found myself attracted to the dead leaves I see on the ground as I walk, particularly those in late fall and winter. I’ve taken thousands of pictures of them. A friend’s mentioning to me the concept of wabi-sabi helped me understand why. Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese term for finding the beauty in imperfection, and accepting the cycle of birth, growth, aging, death, and decay. I’m 66. It’s about time.     The Buddhist teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh talks about this cycle when he speaks of seeing the garbage in the flowers and the flowers in the garbage. “When we look at garbage,” he writes, “we also see the non-garbage elements: we see the flower th...

A recent trip to Vermont reminded me that, although I’m still enamored of the mountains north of Santa Fe, NM, New England mountains also have their particular, softer charm. Some views of the Green Mountains, north and south             P.S. If you find what you read here helpful, please forward it to others who might, too. Or click one of the buttons below the blog entry. Comments always appreciated! Books : Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas 52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief 52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief Paths to Wholeness: Selections  (free eBook) Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder http://ift.tt/2oskRQ1 http://ift.tt/2ospoC2 http://ift.tt/2osp7Pj

The gaze of love is not deluded. Love sees what is best in the beloved, even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light. – J. M. Coetzee When I was 25, living in Manhattan, and trying to jump-start a career in writing and photography, I visited my parents and brothers in Buffalo two or three times a year. On those trips, I also saw my maternal grandmother. It was painful to witness Bubby’s decline. Though only in her mid 70s, by then she was legally blind, mostly deaf, unable to manage on her own. She had a room at a Jewish nursing home downtown, an institutional environment where I always felt uneasy. On one visit, as I was leaving I noticed two of Bubby’s former neighbors sitting in folding chairs on the lawn. I went over to them. Mr. Klein’s recent stroke had paralyzed one side of his body and frozen half his face; his attempts to talk were unintelligible. Mrs. Klein, however, seemed virtually unchanged since I’d last seen her, more than ten years b...

The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going beyond them to the impossible. – Arthur C. Clarke During much of my childhood, I lived in the realm of possibility: machine intelligences, aliens, mutants, future worlds, alternate pasts. Infinite possibilities. My first science fiction book was Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot . I was 10 when I found a copy at a Temple Sinai rummage sale. It opened the universe to me. Soon, I was wandering over to the adult section of the library every week, taking out as many science fiction books as the librarian would permit. I also haunted the local pharmacy’s rack of science fiction and mystery novels, trying to figure out how best to allocate my 50-cent allowance. By my early teens, I had amassed a collection of several hundred science fiction books and had read many more. Around the time I discovered Asimov, I decided I wanted to be a “space scientist,” a dream that carried me all the way through my first year of engineering school. By th...

NOTE : I’ve been working with an illustrator on the characters in my forthcoming book on balance and thought you might be interested in what we’ve developed. Here’s the cast of characters and a brief introduction to them. Know thy self, know thy enemy. – Sun Tzu , The Art of War This is a book about balance: What disrupts it, what restores it, and how to keep it going. It is also a story, and like any story, it has a cast of characters. Some are friends and fellow travelers. Some are enemies. In the pages of this book you will come to know them well. But first, some introductions.   Al/Alice   We are the heroes of this saga, an epic battle not only for balance but literally for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.   UnBalancer   The villain in our story is the nefarious UnBalancer . UnBalancer is a fearsome and sometimes deadly force. It strives single-mindedly to unseat us, and sometimes it wins the battle – but not, as we’ll see, the war. ...

There are two ways to live: You can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle. – Albert Einstein I am a miracle worker by trade. Or more precisely, a facilitator of miracles. I state this with humility. My powers are as ordinary as those of the Wizard of Oz, whose only real magic was tricking Dorothy, the Tin Woodsman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion into beginning a journey out of their self-limiting beliefs. The best trick I’ve found to facilitate miracles is deceptively simple. (Like the Wizard, I, too, sometimes need to be a little deceptive). It’s called the Miracle Question and it goes like this: Imagine that after you finish this essay you do whatever you would normally do with the rest of today. But tonight, while you’re asleep, a strange thing happens: A miracle occurs. This miracle is just for you, and it’s that all your problems and concerns are solved. Wonderful, right? However, there’s a catch. Because the miracle happened while...

NOTE: This article first appeared on lifehack.org , where I am now a columnist. In  P art I  of this two-part series, we looked at what anxiety is and how to tell if you or someone close to you is suffering from an anxiety disorder. Now let’s explore the causes of anxiety disorders and the treatments for them. We’ll also delve into the best self-help strategies anxiety sufferers can practice themselves and how their friends and families can help. Types of people who are prone to anxiety disorders The causes of anxiety disorders are not completely understood, but most people I’ve worked with seem to have one or more of the following: a more sensitive temperament, to have suffered events that felt traumatic to them early in life, and to have endured a period of stressful situations. The combination of these factors brought them to a tipping point that created an anxiety disorder. Specific risk factors for anxiety disorders include: Childhood trauma, such as abuse, neglect...

NOTE: This post first appeared on lifehack.org , where I am now a columnist. “Anxious” is a word with two faces. Sometimes it means eager excitement. “I’m anxious to see you!” we say, as we get off the phone with a friend who’s coming to visit. The other side of “anxious” is a bit darker: “I’m anxious about that test,” we say, when we’re worried about the results. We call the second meaning “anxiety,” and most of us experience it from time to time. In common usage, both meanings of “anxious” describe our responses to fleeting, time-limited events. But  anxiety can also have a much more powerful grip on many of us. Without the right kind of attention, it can rule our lives. I’m a psychotherapist in private practice north of Boston, Massachusetts, and I’ve worked with many clients who have anxiety. In this, the first of two articles on a psychotherapist’s views on anxiety, I’ll describe what anxiety is and how you can tell whether you or someone close to you is suffering from it...

For many years, people have pointed out that my Flower Mandalas must have been influenced by the flower paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe – which, of course, was not lost on me. But it was not until I traveled to Santa Fe and then north to Abiquiu and nearby Ghost Ranch that I understood how deep that influence was. I feel more at home and at peace (and at the same time, as the Brits say, gobsmacked ) in this painted landscape than anywhere I’ve been on the planet, and I can see why O’Keeffe kept coming back, year after year, until she was finally able to put down a permanent stake there. Here are a few more of the images I shot on a too-brief journey up Route 84 into Georgia O’Keeffe country after attending the Creativity and Madness conference in Santa Fe.         More anon, David P.S. If you find what you read here helpful, please forward it to others who might, too. Or click one of the buttons below. Books : Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Manda...

I’ve just returned from an incredible week at the Creativity and Madness conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico , and I wanted to share a little about the conference itself and what I presented there. The conference is the creation of psychiatrist Dr. Barry Panter and Mary Lou Panter and is currently run by Dr. Panter and his wife, Jacqueline Berz Panter. Barry began it 35 years ago as a way for health and mental health professionals to receive and to present ideas on how artistic creativity and mental health are connected. This conference and the companion conference Women of Resilience  happen twice a year in the U.S. and twice a year in other parts of the world. The conference has been held in Santa Fe, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Washington, Hawaii, all of the major cities in Europe, as well as in South America, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Bali, and China. MDs, PhDs, Social Workers, MFTs, and other therapists and medical professionals can obtain continuing e...

A man cannot step into the same river twice. – Heraclitis of Ephesus I came of age in the late ’60s , the era of the first man on the moon, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, free love, civil rights marches, and the assassinations of iconic figures including Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. It was a time of reinventing the mores, values, and attitudes of the Depression-era parents who raised us. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” was our anthem – and our hope. We believed we could “change the world”: end war and poverty, achieve racial equality, bring literacy to the illiterate, and recreate the Paradise from which we felt we had fallen long ago. We could do it. My generation. Us, not them. I finished high school in 1969 and that year discovered the poetry of William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Bly. These poet radicals became my role models. Much of my first year in college I spent attending concerts by topical protest singers, encircling draft boards, dem...