About Me
Welcome to my Wise Ways to Happiness Blog!
I earnestly hope that the information and guidance you find here will help you to live your life mindfully in the present moment as fully and as skillfully as possible.
Through this simple process of “capturing your moments” or “just being,” you are likely to enhance greatly your levels of satisfaction and fulfillment in savoring the simple joys and pleasures of your life.
Similarly, living mindfully “one breath at a time,” and consciously relaxing into pain, discomfort, or unpleasantness will help you to cope optimally with whatever challenges and adversities may come your way.
By applying mindfulness in these two basic ways, I’m confident that you will create the optimal conditions for experiencing what I like to call “ordinary happiness.” Even a modest increase in mindfulness is likely to increase your “happiness quotient” significantly in this sense.
You will also find abundant information and guidance here about how to develop “extraordinary” or unconditional happiness. This higher order happiness tends to develop quite gradually and usually entails a more disciplined and intensive application of mindfulness over a protracted period of time. Ongoing guidance on this noble journey by a qualified teacher is also highly recommended.
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About my background. . .
My name is George Shears and I’m a retired psychologist and psychotherapist. Since retiring in 1999, I’ve lived on the shores of a beautiful quiet lake in the remote north woods of Minnesota with my wife, Mildred, and three of our grandkids—Zach (16), Ethan (12), and Lili (8). Our family also includes my faithful German Shorthair Pointer, Yoda, and our mischievous cat, Ginger.
Having been born and raised in a quite similar rustic setting in northern Minnesota, our retirement here fulfills my personal dream of returning to my roots after living for over 40 years as a somewhat alienated city-dweller.
From early adolescence onward, I have been deeply fascinated with the vast positive potential of the human mind and equally saddened in observing how that potential is so commonly wasted or—much worse—channeled into the development of profoundly destructive behaviors of all kinds.
I now recognize that my main personal motivation in choosing psychology as a vocation was to try to find effective ways to help reverse this tragic reality, which has caused—and continues to cause—vast suffering throughout the world. I’m sure that growing up as I did with an alcoholic step-father contributed very significantly to my personal dedication in this regard.
After completing a highly rigorous period of graduate school training in Adult Clinical Psychology, with a strong emphasis on scientific research, I quickly realized that this specific career path was not congruent with my deeper personal passions.
In what then amounted to a 180-degree reversal from my strong academic training, I immersed myself in the Human Potential Movement during the first half of the 1970’s. I became involved in both Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology and actively experimented with a wide array of experiential forms of therapy—mostly within groups.
In the late 1970’s, largely as a result of what I learned during this period of experimentation, I developed a unique and very powerful form of experiential psychotherapy that I came to call Provocative Psychodrama. It was specifically designed to help clients quickly recognize and “externalize” their dysfunctional habit patterns at a deep feeling level.
Even more auspiciously, in 1975 I discovered and began practicing Vipassana Meditation as taught by Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein. They had recently returned from an intense period of training in Southeast Asia in this ancient form of awareness training.
Although I didn’t know anyone else who was involved in this meditational discipline, I recognized its tremendous transformative potential almost immediately and became strongly motivated to develop the powerful personal skill set that it entailed. For the next decade, I engaged mainly in a solitary practice, supported by reading a great many books and listening to a lot of excellent audios by competent teachers.
When some of these teachers started leading meditation retreats in my area around 1986, I participated actively in these events and had the immense good fortune of receiving their guidance in building on the foundation I had previously laid through my solitary personal practice.
One of my main teachers during this period was Shinzen Young. I was tremendously impressed with him then and have continued to regard him as one of the world’s most highly developed Master Teachers of mindfulness meditation.
More than any other teacher I know, he has developed a highly elegant, precise and comprehensive teaching system that is ideally suited for ALL mindfulness students from rank beginners to those who are highly advanced. For this reason, I have chosen to promote his work as fully as possible on this blog.
As I continued to develop these mindfulness skills personally, I began incorporating them into my psychotherapeutic work with clients who were receptive. In doing so, I increasingly recognized the tremendous potential of mindfulness for helping people extricate themselves from a wide range of highly dysfunctional mental/behavioral habit patterns.
Then, in 1993, I had the tremendous good fortune to participate in a week-long period of intense professional training by Drs. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Shortly thereafter, I pioneered the first MBSR program in a major hospital in Minnesota and continued to direct it until I retired in 1999.
As has been true in the vast majority of the hundreds (or thousands) of places where this program has been implemented, the results for the enrollees were highly positive. Most of them were dealing either with intense chronic pain or major anxiety disorders.
Since I retired, I have continued to apply mindfulness very fully in my life and have found it to be enormously valuable both in savoring fully the many joys of retirement, as well as in coping with the tremendous challenges that my wife, Mildred, and I (both in our 70′s) face on a daily basis in raising three of our grandchildren. I seriously doubt whether we would have been able to successfully meet these challenges WITHOUT the continuous application of mindfulness.
In summary, I strongly regard mindfulness as by far the most important skill set that I have acquired in my life. For this reason, along with my strong sense of essential oneness with all other beings on our beleaguered planet, I am passionate about sharing my knowledge and skills about mindfulness with as many other people as possible. I believe very strongly that it is the ultimate antidote for the rampant greed, hatred and delusion that currently plagues our world.
I heartily invite you to call on me if I can help you in any way in acquiring, developing and applying this wonderfully transformative skill set. You will find my personal contact information in the “Contact Me” portion of this blog.
Also, I invite you to click on the following link to get a FREE self-guided program in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, including 6 audios in mp3 format.
May all beings be happy!
This blog has been created as a resource to all people who are dedicated to increasing happiness and to decreasing suffering in their lives--and in the world--by learning how to live more wisely and skillfully.It aims to include a distillation of what I have personally learned in theses regards, along with the collective wisdom of many others.