10% Happier

...I had read the research showing that regular churchgoers tended to be happier, in part because having a sense that the world is infused with meaning and that suffering happens for a reason helped them deal more successfully with life's inevitable humiliations.  p. 49

While I had never really thought about it before, I suppose I'd always assumed that the voice in my head was me: my ghostly internal anchorman, hosting the coverage of my life, engaged in an unslicited stream of insensitive questions and obnoxious color commentary.
Per Tolle, even though the voice is the ridgepole of our interior lives, most of us take it completely for granted.  He argued that the failure to recognize thoughts for what they are--quantum bursts of psychic energy that exist solely in your head--is the primordial human error.
...The ego is never satisfied.  No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete... p. 57

The route to true happiness, he [Buddha] argued, was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires througha  wider lens.  p. 90

The whole game [meditation] is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath, over and over again.  p. 100

To apply mindfulness to acute situations:
R: recognize the feelings
A: allow--lean into the feelings
I: investigate--check to see how they're affecting your body
N: non-identification--see that just because you're feeling ____ does not make you ____

"The Way of the Warrior"
1.  Don't be a jerk
2.  When necessary, hide the zen
3.  Meditate
4.  The price of security is insecurity
5.  Equanimity is not the enemy of creativity
6.  Don't force it
7. Humility prevents humiliation
8.  Go easy with the internal cattle prod
9.  Nonattachment to results
10. What matters most?