Alyssa Luboff, PhD

Do you crave someone who has all of the answers? A teacher who will step in and tell you what to do? Or, at the very least, someone to offer guidance, to tell you when you have strayed from your path, and when you are back on? – I have often wished I had such a person. Indeed, sometimes in life we find them, at least for a time. It is wonderful to study under someone who has mastered a skill we are just learning, someone who can offer us guidance, who can support us on our pa

This picture is from 2004, the year our middle child was born. I am looking forward, and I am looking back. That is the essence of so much of my work: looking forward and looking back. What essential pieces of our humanity have we lost moving forward, and how do we recover them? How do we reconstruct them in new ways, in this society, in this lifetime?

Last month, I brought home from my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah reception three plants wrapped in foil. Since our apartment is small, I left them on the balcony. I thought it would be a good way to let Nature take care of the plants and not to have to worry much about them. After a few days, I noticed their leaves were drying out in the summer sun. No amount of water seemed to help. After a few more days, I realized the foil was directing the sun’s rays onto the plants and burning

One day in Tai Chi class, my instructor said something that surprised me. When you’re experiencing a lot of Yang energy and everything is going strong, he said, expect Yin to come along. In other words, when you’ve been flying high for some time, expect to come down. When life is easy, expect it to grow hard. Now, if you’ve ever heard of Yin and Yang, you’re probably wondering why this surprised me. I’m a healer and philosopher; don’t I know this? Life goes up and down. The p

The other day a reader on Facebook contacted me. He wanted to get a professional philosopher’s take on a question. “What do you think…,” he asked, “of the meaning of existence?” “Well, that’s a big question,” I could hear my own advisor answering in my head. In academic philosophy, we are trained to be very careful and precise in our thinking. It’s a great skill, but sometimes it gets in the way of really engaging with life.

There are those very dark and gloomy days, the ones where everything seems to fall apart. Absolutely everything. You’d go stick your head in a hole and stay there forever – if only you could find a hole, if only you could bear a minute more of the chaos. What do you do? How doContinue reading “When Life Comes Crashing Down – A Recipe for Healing”

Most people know that meditation calms the mind and relaxes the body; they are also aware of the tremendous health benefits of this practice. The problem is that many people find it hard to sit still long enough to meditate. One of the most commonly taught meditation techniques is to focus on the breath. If the mind wanders, we are instructed simply to notice this and to return the attention gently back to the breath. For people with a restless or racing mind, this technique

This post is for those who feel tortured by a thought. Maybe it is the thought of a person, the memory of an event, or a broken dream. The problem is, you can’t get it off your mind. The harder you try, the more it haunts you. You’d do anything to be free of it, but you just don’t know how. You feel tired and defeated. Here is an insight that can help: You are working too hard to push it out of your mind. Thoughts naturally flow. This is why we speak of consciousness as a str