(Part 2) Best products from r/ZenHabits

I'm not sure if it was Charles Duhigg's "The power of habit" or an article, but it helped me accept that habits are not mundane or boring. The idea is that by making your wake-up routine a habit you don't have to waste willpower and energy on thinking about it. Instead of going "Where do I run, what do I eat, what do I wear, Where are my keys, Why am I doing this" you just do the routine and save this mental energy for more important questions or activities.

After this I changed my wake-up routine to 07:00 out and about, regardless. Subsequently I go to sleep a bit earlier... it's quite nice.

The Upright Citizens Brigade troop produced a bunch of great improvisers. Amy Pohler being one of them. They're also one of two accredited improv schools in the US. They wrote a book I found really useful to spice up my life. Hope it helps :)

I have pretty much eliminated anxiety thanks to mindfulness and meditation. Anxiety is a result of living in the future, so when you focus on the present moment instead of the future your anxiety will greatly diminish. The Power of Now is a great introduction to this concept. It contains some New Age woo woo that I don't really give into, but overall it's a great book.

old fasion tally on paper(a tick for every word and grouped in fives), but im sure there is an app for that. Maybe one of those counters that adds one after every click like this one could be helpful for some.

I agree. It's also the first agreement in one of my favorite motivational (audio)books of all time, Don Miguel Ruiz's The Four Agreements: "Be Impeccable With Your Words".

Unfortunately, The Goenka groups tend to be a bit exclusionary, which is a bit off the point of the Dharma. Hence, you are not aware of the extensive number of vipassana centers around the world.

"The" Dharma Organization? You may want to consider a very good book by Joseph Goldstein called One Dharma.

There are countless vipassana centers that are not Goenka based around the world. I cannot name them all, but here are a few:

Great Britian: Sharpham; Gia House.

New Zealand: Bodhinyanarama

Australia: Buddhist Society of Western Australia

Ecuador: Centro de Meditación

Germany, Netherlands, Singapore, etc: International Meditation Centres.

And here are more within and outside the US..

Thanks for the list. I also recommend Search inside yourself. It explores meditation, emotional awareness, mindfulness, attention and unlearning. It's from a Google employee who created their mindfulness program.

http://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-Achieving/dp/0062116932

I would recommend reading this for a full treatment of this feeling: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

There are people who stay in the monastery, or the cave their entire lives, trying to see if there is a spiritual peak even higher then the one they just climbed.

If you look for it, there will always be a higher peak. What is doing the looking?

While I may agree with her conclusion – taking time with things is definitely healthy – her premise is flawed.

> One flight was around 65$ at that time. I simply felt the urge to procrastinate with that task, so I chose to wait. [...] Some weeks later, I remembered I should buy those tickets after all. So I went online and found that the prices were close to 30$ per flight. I felt a very strong urge to buy them and I did.

Confirmation bias all the way. If you do this over and over, statistically, you will lose money. No way around it. I'm betting she's lost money herself this way, but that's not what she subjectively remembers.

> Because if the timing is wrong, then all efforts are in vain. He gives the example with agriculture: if you plant the seeds in winter, then you will get absolutely no crop, even though you may do the most amazing job at planting them.

This is not intuition. This is logic. You're quite stupid if you plant seeds in the winter, because it doesn't work. However, taking time with decisions, "sleeping on it", lets your intuition get a stab at things. That doesn't necessarily mean that now is never the right time, that you should always feel motivation when you work, or that just waiting will improve your results – as opposed to gaining more knowledge, for instance. Your intuition, or whatever we should call it, can work while you browse reddit, but only with what you already know. It definitely does not magically find cheap plane tickets or know when to plant seeds without looking outside.

Procrastinate all you want, and let your subconscious do the job for you. There's no reason to be voodoo about it, it actually works and it's well proven scientifically. But proper literature like Thinking Fast and Slow gives you a much better understanding of it.

I think You Can Be Happy No Matter What is great. I read it a long time ago, and its lessons about changing your perspective on your emotional reactions and the power they have over you have stuck with me to this day.

See books like Your Money or Your Life.

The story he references at the beginning gives examples of what you can do with that money. Invest in your own business(es), real estate, or a portfolio.

By choosing to live frugally, you can build up assets that generate income, until your comfortable living expenses are lower than your investments generate. At that point, you're financially independent, and can just keep investing a growing portion of the returns back into more investments.

it's also in Zen Shorts if yo want to share it with children of any age that way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Shorts

http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Shorts-Caldecott-Honor-Book/dp/0439339111/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

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Lol.

"Hey there kid, you're not walking well! Don't even bother."

You'll like this book (I'll go as far as say it'll be life changing): http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck/dp/1400062756/sr=8-1/qid=1158604938/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-1809568-4984946?ie=UTF8&s=books

Have you read Jay Rosen's book, "My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton Erickson"? Loved it.

I haven't read this yet but the idea of it sounds interesting. The book is called Bones of the Master.

I think Get a Life!: The Little Red Book of the White Dot is pretty much the definitive book on the subject. Obviously Netflix and streaming in general should be considered "TV" ... and I'd argue any aimless internet puttering as well (most of my own reddit time for example).

I found The Art of Power by Thich Nhat Hanh to be very beneficial, too.

Not sure if I agree with everything this article is saying or even if it is possible to "know" your subconscious. Biases "bubble up" from your subconscious that your conscious hardly ever notices. Unless your spending a gigantic amount of time rooting out and finding biases, your subconscious runs you and your conscious doesn't even notice. Source: Thinking Fast and Slow.