In her young twenties, writer and activist Eileen Flanagan spent two years teaching English in the country of Botswana, neighboring South Africa and Zimbabwe. She ate, lived, and slept in a 180 square-foot mud hut and was quite content. Then life got a tad more complicated … she married, had kids, and eventually found herself...

“Holding on to anger,” said the Buddha, “is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” I don’t know about you, but I feel the venom coursing through my veins when I’m ticked off, tightening all my muscles, activating the sympathetic nervous system to prepare for the gorilla that is not about to...

I have a theory: Many people who suffer from chronic severe depression and anxiety are allergic to sugar and foods like white flour that the human body processes like sugar. Like most of my theories, I have tested this one on my 13-year-old son, because his brain is most like mine in our family (poor...

According to renowned psychiatrist Peter Kramer, happiness isn’t the opposite of depression. Resilience is. I’ve always loved that reminder because the word “happiness” makes me uneasy. It’s not that I want to be unhappy, or I don’t want to be happy. It’s that every time I make happiness my goal, I become very unhappy. Like...

This year my husband and I have lost both of our Labrator-Chow mixes They were 14 years old, so we knew it was coming, but you’re never really ready for that feeling of emptiness or hollowness you feel when they leave your life. Only then do you realize how much they gave to you. Dogs, of course, are good...