And whenever I’d complain or was upset about something in my own life, my mother had the same advice: “Darling, just change the channel. You are in c… - Arianna Huffington

just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don’t replay the bad, scary movie.

Those who do contemplative retreats in hermitages are far from doing nothing, since they are constantly engaged in training their minds, but there is no ‘noise,’ no ‘waste’ to eliminate, no stress to cure, no chaos to reorganize. This means that there is less to repair during sleep and the sleep quality of meditators is deeper.

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius did not sugarcoat life: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

As in our own lives, the story’s outward form must track the inner journey of the hero. When we disconnect from our inner selves and identify exclusively with our ego, that’s when we lose our connection with life’s meaning and purpose and are left facing a void that we try to fill with more money, more sex, more power, more fame. And as we see in all modern literature, when the ego separates itself from the self, the end is always frustration and destruction — whether in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. We can use the power of story, and our primal need for it, to redefine our own narrative. We’re all on a journey, a voyage, a quest to slay the monster, free the princess, and return home. But too often the goals we seek — those that the conventional notions of success tell us we should be seeking — take us down dead ends, searching for the meaning of our lives in all the wrong places. Mindfulness helps us become aware of our own story.