Jamal Lloyd Johnson

  These are troubling times, to say the least. Jamal Lloyd Johnson | We are confronting the most widespread, extensive, global health emergency in at least 100 years. Our economy is staggering like a boxer battered into delirium. Opinions have become "facts." Social unrest is boiling. Political "discourse" (such as it is), centered around the removal or retention of arguably the most controversial, divisive, polarizing administration anyone can remember; has devolved to that of a couple of three-year-olds shouting "You're a poo-poo head!" "No, your face is!" It feels like we're together, untethered in a 1950s rusty, claptrap old school bus; sans seatbelts, careening down a potholed mountain roadway, out of control, hanging on for dear life while screaming in terror for someone to save us as we hurl towards a cliff on November 3. We're hoping we don't go over the edge; assuming all will eventually be okay. Yet, that grating, i...

  Happiness Is A Choice Jamal Lloyd Johnson | How To Be Happy? There are 2 types of happiness. There is the happiness that we feel in response to an external event or circumstance. An obvious example of this would be our reaction to winning the lottery! Then there is the happiness that is cultivated internally. This is the energy that arises as a conscious choice rather than the more ephemeral reaction to a piece of good news.   In this article we are going to focus on happiness as a choice. How To Be Happy - And How Things Are We all struggle and strive to attain health, wealth and personal happiness. Yet these three big areas: our health, our wealth and our relationships are where we all get hung out to dry - sooner or later. It is as though there is an inbuilt design flaw that ensures that we all suffer at some point - one way or another. In the Buddhist perspective, "seeing things as they are" (Sanskrit yatha-bhutam darshanam) basically means to see that a...

  Jamal Lloyd Johnson | During the 2020 Coronavirus lockdown we have all gone to great lengths to avoid this highly contagious virus and have experienced varying levels of state enforced social distancing.   With the phased lifting of the lockdown, and the resumption of social contact we are now increasingly exposed to another threat, another form of contagion. This renewed threat is known as emotional contagion, which is the effect and impact of other people's emotions on our own dominant emotional state. This matters, as many of our life experiences are created or attracted by our dominant emotional state. Because the means of transmission is via renewed and increasing social contact I reframe this as social contagion. The Tidal Swirl Of Other People's Emotional Turbulence In her highly regarded book " An Abbreviated Life - A Memoir " former Sunday Times journalist Ariel Leve paints a painful, poignant portrait of our vulnerability to the tidal swirl of o...