Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.

Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as cognitive ability and technical skill combined.

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.

Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity.

But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.

If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.

There are a host of surprises among longer-term meditators, like a boost in the immune system from a day of practice, which is not seen in beginners, and a rapid recovery from stress or pain. At the "Olympic level" we find there is no anticipatory anxiety when the stress of pain is certain to come, and no lingering aftereffects - unlike the stress reactions in ordinary folk.