abhyāsaYoga
Practice: steady, repeated, patient effort kept up over a long time, the doing side of yoga.
Glossary
48 terms the book uses on their own footing, each linking back to where it is actually explained.
adiaphoraStoicism
Things outside your own judgments and choices, health, money, reputation, that are neither good nor evil, only reasonably preferred or avoided.
also: adiaphoronread in context →
anattaBuddhism
Not-self: the observation that no part of what you call yourself is reliably under your command or lasting, not a flat claim that there is no you.
also: not-selfread in context →
aniccaBuddhism
Impermanence: the first of the three marks, the fact that nothing conditioned stays.
apatheiaStoicism
Freedom from the passions, the disturbances of excessive desire, fear, grief, and pleasure. Not an absence of feeling, but the absence of tumultuous feeling.
aponiaEpicureanism
Freedom from bodily pain, the other half of Epicurus's idea of pleasure alongside ataraxia.
aṣṭāṅgaYoga
The eight limbs of Patañjali's path, from ethical conduct through posture, breath, and concentration to absorption.
also: the eight limbsread in context →
ataraxiaEpicureanism
An untroubled mind, free of disturbance. For Epicurus, the summit of a pleasant life.
autarkeiaEpicureanism
Self-sufficiency: wanting little enough that what you already have is enough.
cittaYoga
The mind, taken broadly: the intellect, the ego, the part that processes what the senses bring in.
defusionThe Clinical Methods
Changing your relationship to a thought so it carries less weight, without touching its content or arguing about whether it is true.
also: cognitive defusionread in context →
dhikrThe Contemplative Religions
Remembrance: the Sufi practice of repeating a name or phrase of God.
also: remembranceread in context →
dukkhaBuddhism
Usually translated suffering, closer to unsatisfactoriness: the way conditioned things cannot finally hold the weight we put on them.
fascinationThe Transcendentalists
In Attention Restoration Theory, what catches attention without effort. Soft fascination (clouds, water, light) rests the effortful faculty; hard fascination (a fight, a screen) does not.
also: soft fascination, hard fascinationread in context →
fikaDesign Vocabulary
A Swedish coffee pause taken with someone else, a break made into a small shared ritual.
forest bathingThe Transcendentalists
The Japanese practice of slow, sensory time among trees, named by the country's forestry agency in 1982.
also: shinrin-yokuread in context →
hesychiaThe Contemplative Religions
A Greek word for stillness: not an empty room but a settled, attentive, present inner quiet, the goal of the hesychast tradition.
hishtavutThe Contemplative Religions
Equanimity understood as a genuine indifference to praise and blame, from the Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature.
hitbodedutThe Contemplative Religions
Secluded, spontaneous prayer, spoken aloud in your own words, as taught by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov.
hyggeDesign Vocabulary
A Danish word for warm, sensory, social coziness. Not moderation, atmosphere.
jhānaBuddhism
A series of progressively deeper states of meditative concentration, each shedding a coarser mental factor.
also: jhanas, jhānasread in context →
kaivalyaYoga
Aloneness: the seer resting in its own nature once even the subtlest fluctuation has stilled, Patañjali's final goal, one step past samadhi.
kōanZen
A paradoxical question or story used in Rinzai Zen to exhaust conceptual thinking and provoke direct insight.
also: koanread in context →
lagomDesign Vocabulary
A Swedish word meaning just the right amount, not too much and not too little.
maZen
The charged, meaningful interval, in space or time: the gap that gives what surrounds it its shape.
also: 間read in context →
menuchat hanefeshThe Contemplative Religions
Rest of the soul: a Mussar virtue, a settled center that meets the day's ups and downs without being thrown by them.
also: rest of the soulread in context →
mettāBuddhism
Lovingkindness: a deliberate, cultivated, unconditional good will, widened until it leaves no one out.
also: mettaread in context →
mushinZen
No-mind: a state of acting without the interference of a separate, deliberating self.
also: no-mindread in context →
niksenDesign Vocabulary
A Dutch verb meaning to do nothing, to loaf, lifted lately into the idea of doing nothing on purpose.
nirodhaYoga
A settling, a quieting: the calming of the mind's churn, not its destruction.
phantasiaStoicism
The initial impression an event makes on the mind, before any judgment is added to it.
also: impressionread in context →
prāṇāyāmaYoga
The regulation of the breath, one of the eight limbs.
premeditatio malorumStoicism
The premeditation of adversity: deliberately imagining a loss in advance so it cannot ambush you.
sakinaThe Contemplative Religions
A tranquility that, the Qur'an says, God sends down into the hearts of believers. Not generated by striving, but given.
samādhiYoga
Absorption so complete that the sense of a separate watcher drops away; the eighth limb.
samathaBuddhism
The cultivation of a mind that can rest, steady and unhurried, on one thing.
also: calm abidingread in context →
shikantazaZen
Just sitting: a Soto Zen practice of sitting with no object of focus and nothing to attain.
also: just sittingread in context →
shoshinZen
Beginner's mind: approaching something familiar as though encountering it for the first time.
also: beginner's mindread in context →
telosStoicism
The end or goal a life aims at. For the Stoics, virtue itself, with tranquility as a byproduct, not the target.
tetrapharmakosEpicureanism
Epicurus's four-line summary of the whole philosophy: don't fear god, don't worry about death, what is good is easy to get, what is terrible is easy to endure.
also: the fourfold cureread in context →
upekkhāBuddhism
Equanimity: the still quality that remains once the second arrow is set down, distinct from both indifference and numbness.
also: upekkharead in context →
vairāgyaYoga
Non-attachment: loosening the grip of craving and releasing your claim on how things turn out, abhyāsa's paired opposite.
vedanāBuddhism
The raw felt tone of an experience, pleasant, painful, or neutral, that arrives before any reaction is added.
also: vedanaread in context →
vipassanāBuddhism
Insight: the clear seeing of how experience actually behaves, samatha's partner practice.
also: vipassana, insightread in context →
vṛttiYoga
A turning, a ripple: any movement that passes across the mind.
wabi-sabiDesign Vocabulary
The Japanese acceptance of things imperfect, worn, and passing.
wu weiTaoism
Non-forcing, effortless action: not the absence of action but the absence of strain.
ziranTaoism
Self-so: the naturalness of a thing simply following its own grain, with no separate self straining against it.
also: self-soread in context →