Dans cet article récemment publié sur le site de l’entreprise Thrive Global, créée par Ariana Huffington pour lutter contre le stress au travail, l’auteure Sarah Wilson conseille à ceux qui souffrent d’anxiété en cette période difficile de l’affronter pour la faire disparaître, plutôt que de la fuir.
« Instead of fearing the fear, we see it for what it is, and do it once, skipping the anxious-about-being-anxious spin cycle. »
Sarah Wilson est une journaliste, auteure et activiste australienne. Elle a notamment travaillé pour Cosmopolitan Australia et fondé le site IQuitSugar.com. Son livre First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety est paru chez Dey Street en 2018 et sortira en traduction française chez Eyrolles sous le titre Joli monstre courant 2020. Son prochain livre This One Wild Precious Life est prévu pour septembre 2020.
If you’ve tried mindfulness before and failed, we get it. Likely you were told to sit on a pillow in a dark room, meditate, or count your breaths. But mindfulness isn’t about separating ourselves from the problems in the world. Instead, it is about re-learning how to get out there, connect with the suffering of every living being and in so doing, embrace your own personal suffering to heal, transform, grow, and finally find peace. 
In today’s fractured world we’re constantly flooded with breaking news that causes anger, grief, and pain. People are feeling more stressed out than ever and in the face of this fear and anxiety they can feel so burnt out and overwhelmed that they end up frozen in their tracks and can’t do anything. In REAL CHANGE Sharon Salzberg, a leading expert in Lovingkindness meditation, shares sage advice and indispensable techniques to help free ourselves from these negative feelings and actions. She teaches us that meditation is not a replacement for action, but rather a way to practice generosity with ourselves and summon the courage to break through boundaries, reconnect to a movement that’s bigger than ourselves, and have the energy to stay active.
Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse. It doesn’t have to be this way. In this groundbreaking book, Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that we can all strengthen through effort. Drawing on both classic and cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, Zaki shows how we can harness this new mindset to overcome toxic cultural divisions. He also tells the stories of people who are living these principles—fighting for kindness in the most difficult of circumstances. We meet a former neo-Nazi who is now helping extract people from hate groups, ex-prisoners discussing novels with the judge who sentenced them, Washington police officers changing their culture to decrease violence among their ranks, and NICU nurses fine-tuning their empathy so that they don’t succumb to burnout. Written with clarity and passion, The War for Kindness is an inspiring call to action. The future may depend on whether we accept the challenge.