Making choices that improve things for all of us on the planet is an act of compassion, a simple act we can do any time we go shopping.

The book is a dialogue between The Dalai Lama and a group of scientists about how we can better handle our destructive emotions and how to overcome them.

Once shoppers become empowered, we will facilitate industries thinking in completely new terms; for example, making products that are totally biodegradable.

The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.

When the darkness is seen as a necessary prelude to the creative light, one is less likely to ascribe frustration to personal inadequacy or label it as bad.

Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.

For the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge of flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for low achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more often that not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their abilities...The low achievers found pleasure and flow in socializing, not in studying.