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…)
Perfectionism as a disease
“Hi Dr. Ali,
I enjoyed your article in HuffPost and reading through your blog. I am a 29yo woman with very little (basically no) dating experience. To provide you context, I received a BS in engineering and MBA, both from Ivy League institutions.
I would say over the past 2-3 years, I have tried to be more open, vulnerable, and transparent when I go on dates. I am by no means perfect, and I don’t pretend to be. I worry however, that the areas in my life in which I am a ‘damsel in distress’ aren’t particularly feminine. I’m a horrible (more…)
Are you a miracle? On the probability of being born
A little while ago I had the privilege of attending TEDx San Francisco, organized by the incomparable Christine Mason McCaull. One of the talks was by Mel Robbins, a riotously funny self-help author and life coach with a syndicated radio show. In it, she mentioned that scientists calculate the probability of your existing as you, today, at about one in 400 trillion (4×1014).
“That’s a pretty big number,” I thought to myself. If I had 400 trillion pennies to my name, I could probably build a decent-sized penny fortress with it.
Previously, I had heard the Buddhist version of the probability of ‘this precious incarnation’. Imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in some ocean and there is exactly one turtle in all of these oceans, swimming underwater somewhere. The probability that you came about and exist today is the same as (more…)
