The word "heart" is an anagram for the word "earth". Hence, the phrase "home is where the heart is".

Did you know that the human heart is the organ that generates the strongest electromagnetic field of any organ of the human body? In fact, the electromagnetic field of your heart can be measured up to a few feet away from your body. Furthermore, this energy field changes in relation to your emotions. One thing you should know about electromagnetic field is that every organ and cell in your body generate an energy field.

Because the heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field, the information stored in its electromagnetic field affects every organ and cell in your body. Could this be why the heart is the first organ to function in a fetus? Besides generating the strongest electromagnetic field, the heart has an intelligence of its own, which is why certain neurocardiologists refer to it as the heart-brain or the fifth brain.

"Anyone with any degree of mental toughness," artist Georgia O'Keeffe wrote in contemplating life and the art of setting priorities, "ought to be able to exist without the things they like most for a few months at least." It's a beautiful thought, and yet a strange and discomfiting one as we grow increasingly accustomed and even entitled to the simple, miraculous conveniences of modern life. I think of O'Keeffe each time I catch myself, mortified, on the brink of fury over a wifi outage aboard an airplane — centuries of physics and privilege converging into a superhuman capability we've come to take for granted — and then I quickly reach for Seneca as the ultimate vaccine against this humiliating hubris.

Two millennia before O'Keeffe, the great Roman philosopher — a man of timeless wisdom on how to stretch life's shortness by living wide rather than long — took this point to its exquisite extreme in a letter to his friend Lucilius Junior, found in the altogether indispensable Letters from a Stoic (public library).

Understanding the root causes of addiction can help us to better treat it.

What causes drug addiction? One Canadian physician argues that the problem isn't the drugs themselves.

Dr. Gabor Maté believes - based on research and his own experience working at harm reduction clinics in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a poor area that has one of the worst drug problems in North America - that the root of addictive behaviors can be traced all the way back to childhood.

Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother." Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a "bread sandwich" tucked into his bag.

In light of the upcoming presidential race and the increase in narcissism among our youth, I think it's safe to say that, as a society, we could use a little more humility.

Our culture places so much value on external accomplishments, appearance, and self-aggrandizement—all things that are ephemeral at best—that even a small display of this quiet virtue can make one feel like a drowning man coming up for air.

Yet why can it be so challenging for us to express humility? Is it because we often misinterpret its active demonstration to be a sign of weakness, when in actuality it is an indication of tremendous inner strength?

The self-help and "mind-body-spirit" scenes are billion dollar industries, but how has the commodification of spirituality affected our ability to practice it? As sacred principles are co-opted and watered down to sell feel-good mass-market products, those unwilling to sellout spiritual principles are pushed further to the margins - where they are increasingly maligned as "cultist" for putting spirituality ahead of materialism.

Alternative spiritual teachings and groups that encourage a way of life outside of mainstream values are being marginalized and suppressed from all sides.

On one side, what is deceptively being presented to the general public as a viable and appealing alternative to mainstream religious institutions is largely owned by corporations and individuals looking to profit from people's natural interest in spirituality, making it nothing more than a cleverly disguised offshoot of the mainstream itself.

Corporations and individuals who sell spirituality select fragments of ancient spiritual concepts or teachings and then repackage them to be more appealing as a product to sell. In the process, however, they violate the integrity of the original source and distort the original meaning and purpose.

Additionally, by charging money to access the majority of their products, these merchants of spirituality break the timeless cycle of freely giving and receiving spiritual knowledge (which is a fundamental spiritual principle found within the origins of many spiritual traditions).

This has created a confusing landscape that is difficult to navigate for spiritual seekers looking for truth beyond the mainstream and has begun to change the very definition of what "spirituality" is, as it turns more into an alluring commodity to be bought and sold instead of a way of life.

Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother." Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a "bread sandwich" tucked into his bag.

The boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy would later identify as "resilience." (He is widely credited with being the first to study the concept in an experimental setting.) Over many years, Garmezy would visit schools across the country, focussing on those in economically depressed areas, and follow a standard protocol. He would set up meetings with the principal, along with a school social worker or nurse, and pose the same question: Were there any children whose backgrounds had initially raised red flags—kids who seemed likely to become problem kids—who had instead become, surprisingly, a source of pride? "What I was saying was, 'Can you identify stressed children who are making it here in your school?' " Garmezy said, in a 1999 interview. "There would be a long pause after my inquiry before the answer came. If I had said, 'Do you have kids in this school who seem to be troubled?,' there wouldn't have been a moment's delay. But to be asked about children who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and making it even though they had come out of very disturbed backgrounds—that was a new sort of inquiry. That's the way we began."

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Waking Times Editor's Note: This list was gathered and collated by Brendan D. Murphy with kudos to Mark Passio, Tim McClew for the distillation, and Juliet J. Carter.

"Real compassion kicks butt and takes names and is not pleasant on certain days. If you are not ready for this FIRE, then find a new-age, sweetness and light, perpetually smiling teacher and learn to relabel your ego with spiritual sounding terms. But, stay away from those who practice REAL COMPASSION, because they will fry your ass, my friend." - Ken Wilber

Mark Passio's 10 Basic New Age Deceptions

1. Ignore the "Negative"

The notion that you make things worse by focusing on negative issues is false. Ignoring negative issues, like ignoring symptoms of an illness, only serves to make the issues worse. Refusing to look at critical information, just because it makes you uncomfortable, is willfully choosing a state of ignorance—to remain un-conscious.

Correction: Seeing the negativity for what it is creates an ability to steel oneself against its harmful effects and perhaps avoid them entirely.

If you are looking for a radical new way to dispose of your body after death, look no further than mushrooms, says TED Fellow artist Jae Rhim Lee. Coming on the market this year, her "death suit" will allow bodies to decompose in an environmentally-friendly manner.

The "death suit," which is actually a pyjamas-like suit containing colonies of specially selected fungi, offers an alternative option to burial or cremation and is also available for pets.

I have a lot of respect for Native Americans — those who populated this land before the first European white man set foot on these shores.

History rarely mentions it, but countless thousands of those Indians were killed by disease and carried in the boats of those early traders. But before that, the American Indian had a thriving culture, in tune with nature and appreciative of the beauty around them.

Of all the cultures referred to as "primitive" by supposedly civilized society, this is the culture we know the most about. Yet at the same time, we know very little about them. Sadly, history and Hollywood has not treated the Native Americans fairly, portraying them as a barbaric culture, mostly responsible for attacking white settlers and committing atrocities on them.