Sharon Salzburg is a best-selling author who has written extensively on the subject of Eastern philosophy, specifically Buddhism. Much of her work has been focused on explaining aspects of Buddhism to a Western audience. She has written and taught a great deal on the subject of meditation, for instance. In 1974, Salzberg was one of the founders of the Insight Meditation Society, located at Barre in the US state of Massachusetts, a group she initially formed with Jack Kornfield, a teacher of the vipassana movement in American, and Joseph Goldstein. Salzberg would later go on to create the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in 1989, again with Goldstein. In the mid-1990s she also established a long-term meditation retreat centre, again in Barre. However, it is for her writing that she is best known, not least for her 1995 publication, 'Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness'.
In essence, goal setting is a practice that means people will commit to future objectives or achievements and work out a plan that they will try to stick to in order to accomplish them. The idea is that it is really a form of planning that tries to move you on from your current situation to a new, improved one. As such, setting goals in a formal or even semi-formal way tends to improve focus. It also often means that you can keep your 'eyes on the prize' more effectively by helping you to avoid distractions and other calls on your time that do not work towards the objective you have set for yourself. Setting goals will often mean committing to a level of effort in order to achieve them, but by their very definition, the goals ought to be rewarding in some way.
There are two definitions of self care. The first one relates to matters of health and well-being. In short, anything you do for yourself to help promote better health, both bodily and mentally. For example, regularly doing sports and physical activity is a popular method of self care. The other definition of relates to self-esteem. In this sense, it means doing things which will help to raise the perception of oneself. Self-affirming thought processes are just one example of this. Overall, caring for oneself means taking the same sorts of measures one would to care for another person but applying them to yourself.
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