In a room overlooking the Canadian Rocky Mountains, 200 teachers, administrators, physicians, mental health professionals, social workers, and parents gathered together from across the globe. They had travelled from throughout Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Israel, and Turkey to be in Banff, Alberta on July 15-17 for the first international event to address mindfulness and youth. I was there as a local organizer with an interest in mindfulness, but no background in education or healthcare....

The United Nations adopted a resolution affirming happiness as a fundamental human goal—and suggesting that we should approach economic growth in a way that promotes well-being for everyone. Social systems and institutions have a role to play in our happiness, and that’s evident in this year’s World Happiness Report. Researchers ranked countries by their average happiness levels and found, for example, that GDP, life expectancy, freedom, and corruption make a difference....

“Vinegar: so many types, so many uses!” “Simple foods like soup and bread.” “Eggs.” “Natto: Japanese fermented soybeans.” “Lentils and beans.” “Fresh produce. I love grazing from my garden.” Breakfast and supper were the clear mealtime winners, with 39% and 38% of the vote. Lunch came in third at a respectable 17%. Another 5% expressed their devotion to snacks. A few brave respondents—a bit less than 1%—copped to their favorite meal being wine....

What brought you to meditation? Crisis. For a long time, I had been very ambitiously pursuing happiness and working tirelessly at it—but it was an external journey of pursuit, one of accumulation, and, in retrospect, avoidance of grief about the destruction of my family and the loss of my sisters to crime and drugs and my par- ents to alcohol. When my partner and I decided to end our relationship, I felt devastated and empty....

The way I understand these current challenges in healthcare is rooted in my experience as a physician, and particularly my specialization in the science of mindfulness, compassion, and emotional intelligence training. After experiencing burnout working on the frontline, I discovered the healing potential of mindfulness and self-compassion practice and, in doing so, realized the need for these practices within medicine. This led to the creation of the Mindful Medics: Healthcare starts with Self Care program....

The talk came around to what might happen if we began consciously sharing messages of compassion. What might Jon suggest as a good message of this type, one that can be easily remembered and shared as we take the idea of “Creating a Mindful Society” into the future? His answer: “Inhale beauty; exhale goodwill.” Nice words to start our days with. What if they caught on, even a little? So pass them on, and we will do the same....

Researchers collected information from approximately 23,000 households in the United States. The full results of the study are available in the May 9, 2011 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. Robert Puff, Ph.D., author of the Pyschology Today article about the study, notes optimistically that the medical community appears to be embracing “meditation over medication.” 08/10/12 [image © flickr.com/opensourceway and bainesmcg]

More than 75 presentations are scheduled, including research forums, presentation dialogues, workshops, keynotes, breakfast roundtables, and a full day retreat. Conference Chair, Saki Santorelli, Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness, will give the keynote presentation. Other speakers will include Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Amishi P. Jha, Ph.D., Philippe Goldin, Ph.D. and Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., among many others. For more information, click here. Click here to register online or print the registration form to fax or mail....

– Chade-Meng Tan Engineering manager Bill Duane, for example, discovered the importance of giving himself quality time, so he reduced his working hours to four days a week. After he did that, he was promoted. Bill found time to take care of himself and discovered ways to accomplish more while doing less. I asked Bill about the most significant changes he experienced during Search Inside Yourself, and he said he learned to listen a lot better, gain control over his temper, and understand every situation better by, in his words, “learning to discern stories from reality....

The whole idea came about when she and co-founder Pam Warhurst, the former owner of the town’s Bear Cafe, began fretting about the state of the world and wondered what they could do. They decided they needed to act locally. So now raspberries, apricots and apples are grown on the canal towpath; blackcurrants, redcurrants and strawberries beside the doctor’s surgery; beans and peas outside the college; cherries in the supermarket car park; and mint, rosemary, thyme and fennel by the health centre....

According to Mindfulness Research Monthly (MRM), “stress acts through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and other endocrine signaling systems to influence the immune system.” So acute and chronic psychosocial stress can be expecially harmful to people who are HIV-positive (and have compromised immune systems). The participants involved in the study are said to often encounter “stigma and related stress.” The participants’ CD4 returned to baseline level by 12 months. Results were published in Psychosomatic Medicine....

The study, by researchers from Giessen University in Germany, Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and Massachusetts General Hospital, involved 17 experienced mindfulness meditators and 17 non-meditators. While brain activation of participants was measured in an MRI scanner, participants received mildly painful electric shocks on the left lower arm. Participants were instructed to relate to the shocks in different ways: with mindfulness, and with a normal, daily life stance. Participants were then asked to rate the intensity and unpleasantness of the shocks, and the anticipatory anxiety in regard to receiving the shocks....

“Our kids are facing such adversity at different times in their lives, are we really teaching kids to weather the storm?” says Lantieri, “In the U.S. I’m sorry to say, 1 out of 5 kids growing up wind up having a mental disorder. There’s got to be something wrong with a culture that raises kids where 1 out of 5 of them is not emotionally healthy at the age of 17....

There’s a very subtle, and for some, not-so-subtle habitual relationship with our technology. I could easily make the argument that most of us have an addiction to our screens. In China there are currently 400 intensive treatment center for web addiction. An entire documentary called Web Junkie has been created to chronicle this issue there (Note: I’ll be at the Laemmle Music Hall in Los Angeles, California on October 5th doing a Q&A after this screening)....

In the CIHM blog, writer Marianne Spoon notes that the study is the first of its kind to blend laboratory and real-world settings into one experiment on savoring and how we’re affected by our emotions. Over the course of the study, 100 participants played guessing games while scientists collected functional MRI scans of their brains. From Spoon’s CIHM blog: Through brain imaging, researchers could observe reward learning and how much positive emotoin increased following reward: To learn more about the study’s design, read “Keeping up that positive feeling: the science of savoring emotions....

Understanding Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Post-traumatic stress and PTSD may occur after experiencing or witnessing a shocking or dangerous event. During the event, fear triggers a cascade of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that flood the nervous system and mobilize the body’s defenses. Once the threat subsides, the nervous system usually “resets,” initiating the healing and recovery process. In some cases, or when stress is chronic, the system does not reset, and the physical and psychological effects of acute or prolonged stress manifest as symptoms of traumatic stress....

In light of that, we like to think of mindfulness as having three major way stations, rather than three major benefits, which begin with you, and end with…well, the whole damn world. Mindfulness is good for you Not only that, mindfulness is good for the you sitting there reading these words. A lot of the things we spend time on involve planning for the future, or attempting to stave off negative effects we think the future might bring: working hard to save money, eating as healthfully as possible, exercising whenever we find time to do so....

Our minds wander, on average 50 percent of the time. The exact rate varies enormously. When Harvard researchers had 2,250 people report what they were doing and what they were thinking about at random points throughout their day, the doing-thinking gaps ranged widely. But the biggest gap was during work: mind-wandering is epidemic on the job. But we can take steps that will help us stay on task more of the time when we need to....

In the end, it seems that mindful eating comes out on top. Read the full article: “Abstinence versus mindful eating:Changing the brain’s appetite wiring, one raisin at a time” For further reading on mindful eating:

Fighting Inflammation Chronic stress increases inflammation, upping our risk of many chronic diseases. Two studies find that mindfulness practice may lower this risk in those most vulnerable to stress: midlife-to-older adults, and those with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more. In the first study, 153 stressed adults attended one of three groups: Monitor+Accept; Monitor Only; or a Stress Management education control group. Participants provided blood samples before and after training to test for changes in C-Reactive Protein (CRP), a commonly measured biomarker of inflammation....