As frightening as the virus, is the uncertainty it’s causing. Amid the fear and uncertainty, I’m reminded of why I practice mindfulness. A fellow meditation teacher recently encouraged her students to check inside and see what all the fear and uncertainty is stirring up. You’ve been training for this, she told them, and now it’s time to use your practice. That’s wise advice, and will remain so as the COVID-19 situation evolves in the days, weeks and likely months ahead....

How long do you usually stay upset after these events? An hour? A day? A week? We constantly face rejections big and small in our everyday lives, but some people regain their calm more quickly than others. A new study provides preliminary evidence that the way we respond could be determined by how mindful we are and traced to a specific part of the brain. In their study, the researchers recruited 40 undergraduate students to answer surveys about their mindful awareness: how receptive and attentive they typically are to events and experiences in the present moment....

“Traditional mental health approaches just are not meeting the needs of queer and trans youth,” he says. “They are very much underserved and understudied in terms of developing and researching programs and interventions that will actually be helpful.” A mental health clinician and assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, Iacono recently received a grant from the Mind and Life Institute to develop mindfulness-based programming that is accessible, safe, and supportive for young people of sexual and gender minorities....

There’s an arsenal of treatments at hand, including talk therapy and antidepressant medications, but what’s depressing in itself is that they don’t work for every patient. “Many people don’t respond to the frontline interventions,” said Benjamin Shapero, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) Depression Clinical and Research Program. “Individual cognitive behavioral therapy is helpful for many people; antidepressant medications help many people....

What led you to meditation? I was traveling abroad on a program that studied ecology and social issues, and a friend gave me a copy of That Which You Are Seeking Is Causing You to Seek, by Cheri Huber. The book had a profound impact on me. It planted a seed in me, you know, to really have a different relationship with myself and the world. What gave you the idea to bring mindfulness training to teenagers?...

How can teens foster emotional well-being during this often-turbulent time of life? Many teens turn to external sources—friends, family, hobbies. But what if they could turn inward and find support from within as well? In a recent study published in the Journal of Adolescence, Dr. Brian Galla of the University of Pittsburgh found that mindfulness training can reduce stress and support health and well-being in teenagers. In his study, conducted in summer 2013, 132 teens participated in a five-day mindfulness retreat by Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (where I am executive director)....

We meet here twice a month to introduce you to some of the teachers, thinkers, writers, and researchers who are engaged in the mindfulness movement. You’ll hear all kinds of conversations here about the science of mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness—and the heart of it. And if you have been a listener of Point of View with Barry Boyce, you have come to the right place. Barry is our guest today, as a matter of fact....

When I met Mark, the man who is now my second husband, I was optimistic. He met my propensity for anxiety with a proclivity for deep calm. He told me that he wanted to dedicate the second half of his life to romance. I was sold. Even better, no one was a bigger champion of me (or my work) than him. In that first year together, he gushed over me in a way that only my grandmother had done before....

Freddie’s uncle was the internationally renowned psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning and founder of Logotherapy, heralded as “The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy” after Freud and Adler. Logos is a Greek word which denotes meaning. Viktor Frankl believed that man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in life.
A survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, Frankl’s horrific experiences taught him that people can survive any hardship if they are able to make a positive meaning out of it....

I decided to take a look at the research on loving-kindness so I could answer that question for myself. One study I found, published online by Psychological Science,shows that training adults in a loving-kindness-style “compassion meditation” actually makes them significantly more altruistic toward others. The study suggests not only that it’s possible to increase compassion and altruism in the world, but that we can do so even through relatively brief training in compassion practice....

Sound impossible to do any of those things in the midst of your chaotic life? Too expensive? Too tough to schedule? Take heart. There are plenty of other, perhaps more practical ways to pursue and attain a mind-body connection: a place of physical and mental peace that allows you to focus, relax and return to life re-energized. In this article, busy mothers and professionals alike share what works for them and what very well could work for you....

“My books are meant to be a tool,” he says. “[They are] aimed at training the reader into an experience of themselves, so that mindfulness becomes just as commonsensical as breakfast.” “It’s not one size fits all. The curriculum is life itself.”

“Though you can use a lot of words to describe compassion, by putting it into art, art adds value to words and art goes deeper than words,” says James Heiks, the district’s fine arts coordinator. Since the fall, 10,436 students from Appleton, Wisconsin, taking part in The Appleton Compassion Project have met to discuss what compassion is and what it means to them. “It really causes students to dig deep and discover for the first time how compassion is a part of their lives,” says Heiks....

Dr. Robert A. Burton, author of the forthcoming book Pathological Altruism, says selflessness gone awry may play a role in a broad variety of disorders, including anorexia and animal hoarding, women who put up with abusive partners and men who abide alcoholic ones. He also cites examples of physicians whose desire to heal patients can border on fanaticism, which can “perversely end up hurting them.” Though these are extreme examples, the article does go on to say that people must generally be aware of the energy they spend on others and know their limitations....

Two studies from a few years back looked at what happens in people’s brains as they make mistakes. One used college students performing a computer task; the other used doctors making decisions about which medications to prescribe. In both studies, participants received immediate feedback about whether they had made the right decision, and they were given opportunities to try again, using what they had learned. It turns out that there are two typical brain responses to mistakes....

Many of us have heard bits of the extraordinary story behind singer/songwriter Jewel, who came to national attention in 1995 with the multiplatinum album Pieces of You: She was raised on an Alaskan homestead, and spent her childhood singing in bars with the family band before she left home at 15. When she was discovered in a San Diego coffeehouse four years later, she was living out of her car....

Researchers recruited three groups of 12-15 human resource managers for the study. One group received eight weeks of mindfulness-based meditation training; another received eight weeks of body relaxation training. Members of the control group received no training at first, then after eight weeks were given the same training as the first group. Before and after each eight-week period, the participants were given a stress test of their multitasking abilities. Researchers measured the participants’ speed, accuracy and the extent to which they switched tasks....

If practising mindfulness can help people—and it appears to—then all this evidence can only be a good thing. Whereas for years meditation’s public image was stuck in the 1960s, tainted with hippie self-indulgence or new-age flakiness, now it’s being taken seriously by everyone from top academics to US congressman and government departments. But while it’s the gold standard for evidence in our culture, can scientific data tell the whole story?...