Daily Reflections 2025 Archives - Madhu Bazaz Wangu
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Daily Reflections 2025

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Though this post feels like it is meant only for seniors (Mindful Creators Group at Ashby Ponds), go ahead and read it anyway. I feel it would be beneficial for younger, middle-age generation (Mindful Writers Groups) as well, albeit in future. Different phases in life bring different transitions. It just so happens that we all are in the final stage of our lives. Some of us living here at Ashby Ponds are comfortable and at peace. But some others with a major health issue or death of a spouse may feel thwarted or terribly lonely. Some may experience sadness/relief after years of caregiving to a spouse with dementia who passes away. Yet some others may dislike being dependent as they are no longer physically fit and thus unable to live on...

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Tuesday, April 8, 2025

Whether reading for pleasure or personal growth, what you enjoy depends on your interests and experiences. What you choose to read is as unique as what you enjoy eating or wearing. When you select a book to read, what are you seeking? Pleasure, growth, transformation? It is not what you choose to read but what happens to you when you are absorbed in reading – that pleasurable feeling of forgetting who and where you are, temporarily experiencing life through someone else’s perspective! I read to be entertained, to learn, to adventure into unknown worlds where my heart is slashed, where my guts are punched, or a brick falls on my head. With each book I read, my emotional and intellectual sensibilities emerge and deepen. In 2003, a group of doctors in Wales...

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Thursday, February 27, 2025

In The Happiness Project: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, bestselling author Gretchen Rubin writes that she had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places – a city bus. “The days are long, but the years are short,” she thought. “Time is passing, and I’m not focusing enough on the things that really matter.” In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her own happiness. Reading her musings, I remembered how many decades ago it occurred to me that I could not change the world but I could change myself. But how? I reread the world wisdom books, researched new scientific literature on meditation and mindfulness, and read tons of...

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Thursday, February 20, 2025

Can we do something, anything about the happenings going on in our country and around the world—wars, fires, famines, floods? Darkness everywhere!  Or as the activist Valarie Kaur says, “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?” And what is going to birth is something wonderful.  “The place to start is within ourselves,” writes Bhante Gunaratana in his book Mindfulness in Plain English. He goes on to say, “Look carefully inside yourself, truthfully and objectively and see what role I have to play in all this. If you do this and as soon as you make such a change within yourself, change will...

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