By MeditativeRelaxer on 3/6/2009 12:51 PM

You may be thinking to yourself that this is a ridiculous blog post. After all, everyone knows how to breath, it's part of our autonomic nervous system, the part of the body that takes care of things like breathing and heart beats without our needing to consciously control it. That's a good thing. I don't know about you, my dear friends, but I would probably forget to breathe if I had to consciously think about it all the time.

But automatic doesn't mean it's the best. Sometimes it's necessary to take control of things to make them work better, and that's what this blog post is really about, learning a better way to breath. As I was pointing out yesterday, one step along the road to a less stressful life is conscious choices about how we react. This is another step of learning to apply wisdom to distinguish between what we can change and what we cannot.

Take a moment and consider your breathing. If you are like most...

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By MeditativeRelaxer on 3/5/2009 11:11 PM

If you listen to the news at all, it seems like things are bad. And, to be honest, things are not as good as they were 12 months ago, but all hope is not lost, my dear friends.

Yes, times are tough and probably will get a bit tougher before they start to improve, but that doesn't mean that it is time to abandon hope; rather it is time to take a step back and start the process of taking control of your life.

Reinhold Niebuhr is famous for the little prayer that he is credited with writing that you may have heard:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Regardless of which God you may believe in, it is a good way to life your life. Take just a couple of minutes and consider the following in light of that.

You're driving somewhere on the highway and someone whips around you, cutting you off and speeding away. If you are like many people,...

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