Dr. Ali "Victor" Binazir, Happiness Engineer

Modern Science and Ancient Wisdom for Living the Good Life

  • The Compassionate Brain by Dr Rick Hanson and some superstars of neuroscience

    I have some excellent news for you. There is this free online seminar series that you should take advantage of. It’s called:

    Rick Hanson’s The Compassionate Brain – Free Video Seminar Series

    I’m really excited about this one, and every one of you should sign up for it. Why? Because it’s being put on by renowned psychologist and author Dr Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom and Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time. And he has assembled an all-star cast of speakers on the topic of ‘The Compassionate Brain’. If you don’t know who all of them are yet, that’s okay – I don’t either. But the few that I do know are teachers so wise and so inspiring that just an hour with them can change the course of your whole life: (more…)

  • How much excess is enough?

    A couple of days ago I went to the Albert Cuyp street market in Amsterdam. They have a great selection of fresh produce, including all kinds of tropical fruits that have no business being in northern Europe. But there they were, so I got a bunch of mangoes and pineapples for less than a song.

    I peeled and chopped up both fruits and took my time to thoroughly appreciate their fresh, juicy, sticky goodness. The pile of pineapple was on top, so I had some of that first.  Mmmhmmmm. As I slowly bit into each piece, the little stacks of wet, sugar-impregnated pineapple fibers yielded to the pressure of my teeth, releasing their inner nectar. Ripe, flavorful, luscious. How could the universe improve upon that perfection?

    After a few chunks of pineapple, it was time for the mango. This ripe mango was a deep shade of yellow, and had a texture like lightly-sauteed foie gras – so barely-solid as to be almost liquid, waiting for the tiniest provocation to release itself into an (more…)

  • Taoism in three simple concepts

    It must have happened to you hundreds of times.

    There you are at a cocktail party, holding a mojito in one hand and holding forth on everything and nothing with the other, eliciting nods and knowing chuckles from your audience. You look good. Life is good. Then someone asks out of the blue, “So what the hell is this whole Taoism thing about?”

    Aw man. Not that again. I mean, is it Taoism with a T, or Daoism with a D? And what’s that yin-yang symbol thingie anyway? Not your area of your expertise, not your bowl of porridge, not in your wheelhouse. End of your cocktail party mojo.

    This is a pretty common condition, as I recently found out. A friend who was intrigued by Eastern philosophy but hadn’t the occasion to study it yet asked me what Taoism was all about. Mojito in hand, three basic principles came to mind which I thought you would find useful as a quick introduction, so you’re properly armed for next time it comes up:

    First concept: No-Name

    The first is the no-name principle. The Tao Te Ching opens:

    The tao that can be named
    Is not the eternal Tao.
    The name that can be named
    Is not the eternal Name.
    The unnamable is the eternally real.
    Naming is the origin of all particular things.

    What is true and real has no name. Once you step outside of the Earth’s eggshell-thin atmosphere into outer space, you reside in the nameless vast. It’s just there. No name tags, no labels, no logos, no brands, no rank. So anytime you see a name or label, it’s not real. And we’re not just talking about (more…)

  • Mailbag: On handling players, touchy questions & how to ask a guy out

    Well well well. After that last ‘Mailbag, Uncensored’ piece that I sent out, I found myself inundated by your letters. Deluged. Flooded. Well, to the extent that bits and bytes can flood an office, that is. Still relatively dry around here.

    Now, of the dozens of letters I got, not one of them adhered to the length guidelines of 5-10 lines. Novellas and full-length sagas all around.

    People! The story doesn’t have to begin in the 5th grade, when little Johnny teased you about your frilly pink shoes and you’re still not over it. Summarize. When you put in the effort to summarize the situation, you actually figure out a lot about what’s going on, what matters and what doesn’t. Otherwise you’re just putting all the onus of figuring out the situation on me, which is not helpful. Same with the perennial “What should I do?” non-question.

    So the new guidelines: explain your situation and formulate your specific question in 250 words or less. Otherwise there’s no human way for me to get to all of them.  Awright, let’s start: (more…)

  • The Mailbag: On unavailable men, heartache as creative inspiration, cheating, neediness and timing

    I get a lot of letters from you guys (and by ‘guys’, I mean ladies). And if you’ve ever written to me, you know that I almost always write back — unless your letter is 5 feet long, riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes or internet-speak (bcuz it makes U look like a doofus, that’s Y, and I got no time for doofi), or if you don’t put a space after commas and periods, making your letter look like money transfer spam (“My name is Hamilton Adeyemi,from great city of Abuja.I give you 5 trillion$.Please give bank account.”). See? No space after a comma is just Sketchville.

    But usually, I write back. If I don’t answer your question directly, I’ll ask for clarification, such as “Um, there actually wasn’t a question in there – what did you want to ask about?” Some of the really good ones I turn into blog articles. Anonymized, of course.

    But you know what? That can take forever, especially when the perfectionist streak in me wins out and says Oh, it has to be really good, otherwise I can’t put it up.

    As an antidote to this perfectionism, I’m going to put in this post a bunch of mostly unedited, unfiltered exchanges with you, my dear readers. (more…)

  • How to get over a breakup

    This month, no fewer than three of my friends have pressed me into service as a breakup counselor. And if three of them are actually telling me about it, that means there are another 300 out there who are not.

    So in the interest of helping out all of those suffering in silence now or in the future, I’m compiling a list of interventions that many have found useful in handling such matters of the heart. Let’s start with the non-negotiable one first:

    1) Break contact completely.

    We’ve all heard of drugged-out celebrities going to rehab, but ever wonder what actually happens there? The first thing rehab does is to keep the patient away from his drug of choice. His brain’s been so lit up by his habit that neuronal receptors for the drug are now screaming for another fix like a million hungry chicks.

    Well, your ex-lover operates on your brain just like that drug, so now you need to detox, too. You need to give your (more…)

  • Partial Continuous Ecstasy: how to reside in bliss around the clock

    I want you to stop what you’re doing right now and really pay attention to… your breath.

    Slow down your breath, and make an effort to feel the air as it enters your nose.

    Maybe even pinpoint a particular molecule of air, and follow its path as you feel it move along your airways, as you become conscious of every part of your body it touches.

    First, feel it slide into your nostril. Then, slowly, it caresses the inside of your nasal passages, up and over into the back of your throat, down into your trachea. Slowly now – become aware of and really feel every little bit of your airways that it touches.

    Now it’s going down into a bronchus, a bronchiole, all the way into your lung, into an airsac. Feel it moving through all of these parts of you, as if it’s all lined with plush velvet, and the molecule of air is sliding its hand along the (more…)

  • The book reviewer vs the autograph-seeker: the secret to consistent success with women

    I like books. A lot. So I go to book readings whenever a good one pops up in the neighborhood.

    Now book signings have straightforward protocols. You find a seat. You listen to the author talk about his book. Then you buy a copy, stand in line, and get 14.8 seconds with the author while he scrawls your name in there – make sure you have the yellow sticky note lest ‘Ali’ become ‘Holly’ – and autographs it.

    Considering how authors create some of the longest-lasting artifacts of a culture, hey, they deserve to have groupies. And it’s fun to be a little starstruck by Michael Chabon, James Watson or Oliver Sacks. And it’s not like these people get recognized on the street, so it must be fun for them to feel like a celebrity for a half hour, until they walk out of Barnes & Noble bookstore back into relative anonymity.

    But let’s make things clear here: when you’re the autograph-seeker, you’re in the position of the (more…)

  • Accessing your own bottomless well of beauty: a personal account

    A couple of weeks ago, I attended a yoga festival conveniently located right down the street from me in Santa Monica. On the first day of this Tadasana Festival, the co-founder (and yoga instructor) Tommy Rosen was conducting a provocatively titled class – Getting High: Yoga and the Infinite Pharmacy Within.

    Well then. Lord knows this happiness engineer isn’t one to pass up a non-pharmacological psychedelic experience, so I was in, baby. What transpired was novel, literally electrifying, completely unexpected, and potentially transformative.

    In my 12 years of yoga practice, I had never experienced (more…)

  • Happiness Engineering: 3.5 ways to boost your mood instantly

    A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to speak at a friend’s monthly event. It’s a casual, friendly series of informal talks modeled after the TED Conferences, so he calls them FRED Talks (y’know — like a friendly TED). Oh, and you only get 5min to speak.

    Now, by now you may have gathered that, unless I’m underwater, I have a lot more to say than just 5min. So what could I possibly convey to this attentive crowd in 5min that’s potentially life-changing?

    Ah yes — happiness engineering. In those 5min, I taught 3 exercises to the audience, each taking less than a minute to do, which measurably boosted their mood. And in the extra minute, I managed to squeeze in another exercise.

    Increasing happiness and engineering it in our daily lives is a topic I’ve been studying for several years now. In fact, you could say it’s the main focus of the Tao of Dating books for men and women. So expect a lot more on this topic coming from me in the near future.

    And now, the video. If you find it useful, make sure you ‘Like’ it on YouTube, leave a comment so I know you’re alive, and share it with your friends via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, smoke signal and carrier pigeon. Thanks!