Posts Tagged ‘mindfulness’

Wu Wei: The Power of Spontaneity

Tuesday, December 4th, 2018
I’ve often written here about the concept of ‘Flow’ as it relates to creative process and our overall sense of well-being; that there is a higher intelligence at work regarding a formula for creativity that we can trust as an organizing principle not only in the creative process, but more importantly in our day to day […]

Aspects of Visual Discernment

Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
Everyone is a photographer now. Yet despite the ever increasing number of photographs being taken, we seem to be suffering from what I like to call a poverty of visual discernment. The reasons are varied, beginning with the preoccupation of sharing images on social media, which generally short circuits the process of true seeing, let […]

Empty Your Cup

Thursday, May 10th, 2018
When we’re full of ourselves, art cannot flow through us, neither can our richest experience of life. Often when I’m teaching a photography workshop, there is an initial discomfort among participants around ’emptying their cup’. Everyone has brought expectations, preconceived ways of seeing, established ideas about photography, themselves, and often a serious agenda for the […]

The Zen of Seeing: The Mindful Eye

Wednesday, April 11th, 2018
I’m most excited to be developing a new workshop entitled The Zen of Seeing. It’s been several years in the making, and is an offshoot of my Good Eye workshop, where I hone in on the aspects of visual discernment. Here I introduce how we can use our cameras as a mindfulness tool: “The second […]

The ‘Good Eye’

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017
Like many who have built a career around being a photographer, I’ve often been told I have a ‘good eye’. It’s more or less a necessary job skill. A question that has come up throughout my career  is whether or not having a ‘good eye’ is something that can be learned, or is it some […]

Gut Punched

Wednesday, November 16th, 2016
The Election of Donald Trump. This is what change feels like. The ground shifts beneath you. Chaos is all around you. Suddenly uncertainty about everything prevails. Core beliefs are upended. What you once were sure of, you no longer are. It’s very scary; you suddenly feel immensely vulnerable, unsure how to act, what to say, […]

Ideas are the Easy Part

Sunday, September 25th, 2016
I wake up every morning saying to myself  ‘I should write a blog post today‘. The closest I get most days is simply jotting down more ideas for posts. This is the thing—for many of us ideas are the easy part. They come unbidden; most often not the result of concentrated effort, spontaneously rather, usually […]

What is Your Ikigai?

Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
I first came across this term a couple years ago in a TED talk by Dan Buettner on “Blue Zones”—communities (there are 4 in the world) whose elders live with vim and vigor to record setting ages. Okinawa is one of them. Ikigai proved to be one of the core factors contributing to life expectancy. […]

Tip#5: How to have Lots of Ideas

Tuesday, April 26th, 2016
The last ‘Tips’ post spoke to the importance of having lots of ideas whenever we’re trying to solve a problem or move our lives forward in some unprecedented way, as our first ideas are most likely perpetuating old ways of thinking. There are numerous tactics floating around out there. Some are more specific than others, […]

Beauty as a Core Value

Tuesday, March 8th, 2016
Krista Tippett, who is the host of NPR’s OnBeing speaks to this aspiration in her new and resoundingly inspirational book Becoming Wise An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. She states the book’s purpose as offering “a grounded and fiercely hopeful vision of humanity for this century—of personal growth but also renewed public […]