Welcome to the ToDo Institute's Library of Japanese Psychology and Purposeful Living. Please take your shoes off (Japanese style) and come in and browse through a wide variety of resources designed to help you meet some of the most challenging situations you may encounter.

Our work is primarily grounded in methods of Japanese psychology (particularly Morita and Naikan therapies) and if you have experience with Western psychology you will find these approaches quite different. For many people, the blending of the psychological, the spiritual, and the practical is a refreshing and useful contrast to the traditional methods offered in the West.

Our library is set up so that ToDo Institute members have full access to all our resources, over 100 articles, and non-members have limited access to the underlined articles listed in the right margin. If you'd like to become a member, click on "Become a Member" in the left margin of this page for more information and a list of the benefits. We are a non-profit organization and your membership helps support projects like this library and work with disadvantaged groups like prisoners, cancer patients, people with mental illness, and others.

As you read articles you are also invited to post comments and responses to the articles. At the end of each library article is a simple method for you to post your comments, which are then available to other library visitors.

So enjoy your visit and let us know if we can be of further assistance.

todo@together.net

Best wishes,

Gregg Krech
Director, ToDo Institute

by Linda Anderson Krech and Gregg Krech

For many families the start of the school year has a more noticeable impact on day to day life than the start of the calendar year. This is certainly true in our family. As September rolls around, the daily routine of every member of our family, even our dog, changes. We thought we’d share with you some of the strategies we’re using to get off to a fresh start for the school year:

1. Sleep: Many children are on a relaxed bedtime/wake-up schedule over the summer. They are in for a rude awakening when school begins, if they don’t have some gradual adjustment time in their sleep schedule. Many kids face a 2-4 hour adjustment -- the equivalent of the jet lag that occurs when one flies from California to the East Coast. Your kids (depending on their age, of course) can help you calculate bedtime adjustments as they approach the first day of school. Figure out how much they need to adjust their bedtime each night if they are to be at the ideal bedtime once school actually begins and then stick to it. The same applies to wake-up time.

2. Organization: Try to create a good, solid daily routine for yourself, take care of assorted tasks in the evening -- homework, teacher’s notes, backpacks, clothes, lunch money, etc. Get the kids up with plenty of time to spare. Do what you can to minimize the chaotic morning rush. And in terms of the bigger picture, it can help to get a year-at-a-glance calendar so that everyone can get oriented to the bigger picture ahead. (We use Google calendar and find it immensely helpful).

3. Anxiety: Each child will go into the first day of school with . . .

by Gregg Krech
Soon we will be lifting our heads towards the sky to witness the dazzling display of fireworks that marks the celebration of Independence Day.

It's a wonderful opportunity to reflect on our good fortune of being born, through no effort of our own, on the soil of a country which offers us a great deal of freedom. We can easily take this freedom for granted. We mostly go where we want to go, say what we want to say, worship the way we want to worship -- and pay little attention to this gift of freedom.

But freedom is different from independence. (To listen to this podcast, click the play button below)


MP3 File

by Heather Peters

After all the running around you did this morning, stop for a second. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath . . . and let this moment sink in.
Just breathe.

Here you sit on the verge of what I think is one of the most exciting and yet scariest moments of your life. Exciting -- because you are about to step into the world and make your own decisions. Scary --because you are about to step into the world and make your own decisions. As of today, the training wheels are off. At least when your parents were making the decisions you sort of had someone to blame the results on. And there is some comfort in that. But now, along with the freedom of decision comes the responsibility of the results. Now is when you get to put into practice those things your parents and teachers have tried to instill in you all these years.

Cast your mind back to the first day of high school. There you were, a little freshman, wandering the great big halls of Geneva High School. Think about who you were, what you thought was important, who your friends were. Sometime, during those opening days, I know you thought about what it would be like to be . . .

Illusionist David Copperfield has made the Statue of Liberty disappear and walked through the

Great Wall of China. He founded Project Magic, a program using magic as occupational therapy. The U.S. Library of Congress named Copperfield a "Living Legend." In this audio segment, Copperfield talks about his father and his commitment to kindness.

Ms. Allende talks about how the death of her daughter was a defining moment in her life, causing her to look closely at her values and beliefs and coming to an important realization about the purpose of her own life.

by Gregg Krech

For the past twenty years I have been conducting retreats in which a person spends a week reflecting on his or her entire life (Naikan retreat). A participant always begins with her mother and a central part of the reflection is remembering the details of what was received from her mother from the time of her birth until the present day. But in many cases, the person’s mother has already died. On Mother’s day, how do we create a celebration for our mother when she is no longer alive? Here are five possible ideas:

by Peter Smith

In 1999, Peter participated in a course on Naikan reflection with the ToDo Institute. During that time he reflected on a number of his relationships, including his relationship with his mother. He wrote the following essay, describing how this reflection impacted on his relationship with her.

Last summer, due to economic circumstances, I lived with my mother and father. I was very nervous about this as the majority of the time my mother does not want me to live at home and I rarely want to live there as well. Just to put things in context, my mother is an alcoholic, addict, and, as I was growing up, was a rabid feminist who hated men and yet was utterly dependent on them at the same time. I am just as stubborn in many ways. I don’t put up with a lot of nonsense from her and neither does she from me.

In June, I began doing daily Naikan reflection on my relationship with my mother and went year by year, circumstance by circumstance. I was absolutely amazed by the generosity of my mother throughout my life. My former therapy taught me to hate her and blame my problems on her. Yet with Naikan, I saw a very scared woman who constantly gave and gave at her own expense. Who changed a thousand pooply diapers and nursed me through all kinds of illnesses. And in myself, I saw a kid, a teenager, and a man who did nothing but take and complain and inconvenience her.

I sent her a thank you card and an . . .