What are the best house plants for healthy indoor air? Which ones are easiest for beginners? What are the benefits to indoor plants? And how can we become more connected, calmer, and happier people through our co-nurturing relationships with these plants?
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Danielle Roberts is a visual artist, technologist, and meditator. She’s the creator of MeditationLab, whose mission is to support spirituality through technology, and AwarenessLab, which develops tools for awareness from a technological, artistic, and experiential perspective.
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I reached out to Bianca and Michael because I was turning into an asshole.
Specifically, I was full of rage and outrage and judgment at all the racists out there.
And the fact that I was right, and on the side of right, and standing shoulder to shoulder with people of color, and fighting against systemic oppression that has been going on far too long – just made me more of an asshole, to be honest.
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Dr Bojana Jankovic Weatherly is one of my favorite physicians, double board certified in internal and integrative medicine. She has also trained in functional medicine, nutrition and mindfulness.
Dr Jankovic Weatherly is a real stickler for evidence of efficacy, whatever modality she’s exploring or recommending. Which makes her a very reliable podcast guest, especially when talking about topics not fully embraced by mainstream medical practice.
And, she’s a mom struggling to homeschool two children in a New York apartment while working full time from home.
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Meditation apps have become a huge market. Headspace, Calm, 10% Happier, Insight Timer, and others promise stress relief, better health, and even spiritual contentment to users.
Gregory Price Grieve, professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, studies the nexus of spirituality and digital media. He recently published an article with Beverly Maguire, professor of East Asian religions at UNC Wilmington, titled, “Meditation apps might calm you – but miss the point of Buddhist mindfulness.”
In the article, the authors argue that the for-profit app industry has packaged Buddhist technology in a way that totally flips the underlying goal of Buddhism on its head.
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In these challenging times, we may think we have a lot of decisions to make. And we can agonize over those decisions and feel tremendous regret if they don’t work out the way we hoped they would.
But it’s almost impossible to make rational decisions when the future is so unpredictable. Past experience doesn’t provide a road map anymore.
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Don Larson died this month, at the age of 90.
He played baseball professionally from 1953 to 1967, and had a less than stellar career. As a pitcher, his lifetime record was 81 wins and 91 losses. He played five of those years with the powerhouse New York Yankees during their dynastic heyday in the 1950s; his record for lesser teams was a dismal 36 wins and 67 losses.
And yet he’s one of my favorite players of all time.
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So somehow my son and I ended up in front of his laptop with Hulu open. I don’t recall what he wanted to show me, but it ended up not being very interesting.
So, cultural rubber-necker that I am, I was drawn to a thumbnail of a show I had never heard of: My Strange Addiction. Apparently it ran for six seasons on TLC, starting in 2010. Apparently I had missed this cultural phenomenon entirely
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Jud Brewer is Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University, and a second-time guest on Plant Yourself.
I wanted to catch up with Jud to find out how his academic research and public writing had migrated into the world. What is the state of mindfulness-based health improvement? Does he have data on how his approach compares to current best practices, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for smoking and other addictions.
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Emily Lindsay, PhD, is lead author of an uber-important scientific paper on how to mitigate loneliness through mindfulness and acceptance training. Lindsay is a research scientist in the Psychology Department at University of Pittsburgh who studies how mind-body practices like mindfulness and meditation affect our physiology and ultimate health outcomes. It’s an important field of study, because negative mental and emotional states can be terrible for our health.
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