A Guided Walking Meditation Choose a foot to start with. Pick it up, move it through space, and gently place it on the ground, feeling the sensations of each part of this process from heel to toe. So, picking the foot up, making a choice, picking a foot up, lifting it, moving it through space, feeling it touching down from heel to toe. Walk with intention. We’re so used to walking in what we call automatic pilot, basically being tuned out and just letting the body go....

The breath itself, a common anchor of attention in mindfulness practice, can be triggering. My patients, and some physicians that I lead in awareness of breath practice, tell me that focusing on their breath makes them even more anxious, and short of breath. My patients oftentimes have underlying lung disease that already takes their breath away. The sensation of air hunger, this need to take in more air, but you cannot, no matter how hard you try, is a terrifying experience....

The tree we are sitting under is that small yellow spot in the middle of the above panoramic image of Valley Forge National Park. There are days when we feel flustered and unrooted, moments when we feel like we’re just living in our head. Those are the times when it’s most important to pause, even for a minute, and practice some deep breathing with your feet on the ground....

With Breathware, you can become aware of how your breath changes. The app measures breath rate through a sensor that you wear at your waist and sends the data to your phone. The point is not to force you to breathe in a particular way, though. Neema Moraveji, co-founder of Breathware and director of Stanford’s Calming Technology Lab, says “there is no universally good way to breathe.” Instead, the app allows you to know how you’re breathing....

“To my surprise, the only thing that really interested me on the yacht was the crew—the captains struggling with alcoholism, the (c)overt relationships between the crew,” he says. When that journey through Asia ended with a sitar in India, what was once a teenage fascination with the human mind became a lifelong study of mind, awareness and human experience. So, in 2008, after completing graduate school in Vermont, a clinical internship and postdoctoral work in California, Amit and his wife returned to Israel, where he took up a job at the University of Haifa in the Psychology Department and founded the Observing Minds Lab....

Parenting is hard work, but having a child with a severe disability takes an extra toll. Mothers of children with autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders report high levels of stress, depression, and anxiety. This, in turn, can negatively impact how they care for their vulnerable children. Many studies have focused on therapies for the children, but the serious issue of parental stress has been largely overlooked—until now. A new study in the journal Pediatrics suggests that both mindfulness and positive psychology techniques can reduce mothers’ stress....

Creating Space for Compassion “My mission is to create a space where our voices can be heard authentically, and consistently. Everything I do at WURD is to create a place where we can be who we are in all of our diversity, all of our complexity, all of our excellence, and even all of our mediocrity. All of our voices deserve to be honored and heard.”While Lomax-Reese works to create space in media for people of color to be heard, she is looking to create that space in mindfulness as well, as co-creator of the People of Color meditation group, which meets on the second Sunday of each month from September to June....

You can listen Daniel Goleman’s conversation in this podcast. Goleman talks about the themes in his new book, including new brain-based research on emotional intelligence and how those findings can be applied on a practical level to professional and personal relationships. In particular, Goleman talks about how to bring elements of emotional intelligence into daily life. His suggestion? Concentration can only be maintained if we put effort into noticing what the mind is up to....

Late in July, we like to try to get into some of those patches just before the legions of rabbits do, and pick a little basket of berries. The girls have a tiny doll’s basket (the berries are no larger than the nub of a pencil eraser, but contain more concentrated sweetness than an entire bushel of the mega-irradiated, supermarket jumbo-giants), and because I’m colorblind, I can’t find the tiny strawberries and have to rely on the girls to do the harvest....

“To be permanently switched on is also to switch off to what takes time to be seen,” writes Cohen. “A lot of good ideas, as well as some of life’s deeper satisfactions, can get lost that way.” Cohen says companies are beginning to perceive these types of costs. Volkswagon isn’t the only one–Thierry Breton, the chief executive of Atos, the French information technology services giant, has said he plans to ban internal e-mail altogether from 2014....

title: “February 2014 Mindful Store " ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-01” author: “Paul Bullard”

In one study, the intervention reduced schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in another person’s suffering. After the brief intervention, participants reported less schadenfreude in response to another person’s failures. And while most people savor schadenfreude as positive emotion, it can be a major obstacle to our happiness. The more we enjoy other people’s suffering, the harder it is to feel sympathetic joy (happiness for others), compassion for others, and even self-compassion....

Habits of wanting—including craving or habitually seeking food, drink, drugs, sex, or any other object of desire. Habits of distraction—moving away from our present-moment experience toward something that seems more attractive, interesting, or exciting, such as social media, text messages, email, or TV. Habits of resistance—feelings of wanting to avoid something we find unpleasant or painful. These habits might manifest as anger, frustration, judgment, and impatience. Habits of doing, stress, and worry—feeling like we’re always on our way somewhere, without enough time to get everything done, checking off our “to-do” list, with a stressed, often frenetic sense of disconnection from the present....

What our writer, Pulitzer prize-winning Seattle Times reporter Maureen O’Hagan didn’t expect was how recent events made the department more open to talking about stress and taking an out-of-the-box approach to dealing with it. “Basically, the department hit rock bottom,” says O’Hagan, pointing to an incident involving a veteran officer who faced off against the rest of the police force last January. It left the team shaken, and the current police chief dedicated to finding new approaches to supporting the men and women in the department....

Dr. Sona Dimidjian—professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado—has every intention to support a world in which this kind of conversation is the norm. Where mindfulness practices during pregnancy are as commonplace as prenatal vitamins and prenatal yoga, as general-public as books like What to Expect When You Are Expecting. Dimidjian’s work with Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is extensive, and over a decade in the making....

Among other things, it offers the “last Vacation Mental Prep List You’ll Ever Need.” To read the article, “Vacation Sabotage: Don’t Let It Happen to You!,” click here.

The problem arises when anxiety overwhelms and blocks us. Traditional contemplative tradition refers to a pool of water (representing the mind), with anxious restlessness being the whipped up waters leading to muddiness, a lack of clear seeing to the bottom. When anxiety gets this wild inside us, we don’t see ourselves or the world accurately. We distort and react in order to stave off this internal chaos and we are hindered in our ability to relax into seeing clearly....

“She just makes me so anxious,” she said, gritting her teeth. I’ve been there myself. Lots of times. Seriously toxic relationships call for us to cut off contact altogether; others, though also toxic, seem impossible to avoid. Perhaps you have a constantly criticizing mother-in-law, or a neighbor who seems emotionally stuck in seventh grade. Maybe it’s a boss who belittles you when he’s stressed—or someone who is so under your skin you hold entire conversations with them in your head....