There’s a course for that. Designing Calm is a graduate course at Stanford’s Institute of Design that aims to allieviate some of the stresses of contemporary life by introducing mindfulness practices into our technological devices. For instance, one Ph.D student created a sensory belt that detects the heart rate. If the heart rate changes due to, say, email overload, a breathing exercise is promptly sent to the user’s iPhone to restore optimal breathing....

UK ministers are considering introducing mindfulness lessons in state primary and secondary schools. At a commons education select committee this week, Liberal Democrat Mr. Laws was asked whether the Department for Education planned to promote mindfulness courses to boost children’s well-being. His reply (from Daily Mail online): “We are very interested in promoting this and we certainly think that it’s an area that merits consideration based on the evidence we’ve seen to date […]Mindfulness or meditation has been shown to be an invaluable tool to help bolster young people’s resilience to psychological stress....

These are good questions, and there is an interesting relationship between the practice of mindfulness, which involves making space to observe the patterns of experience without getting caught up in them, and living life in an engaged and compassionate way. In the book, Jonty Heaversedge and I argue that practicing meditation is a skillful way to cultivate well-being—both personal and social. If we can learn to watch the flow of our own thoughts, feelings, habits and biases, seeing them with ever-greater clarity, then we are in a good position to bring that understanding to act more wisely in our lives....

To Pause and Protect In a groundbreaking program, Oregon police officers are learning mindfulness techniques to better deal with stress, be more focused on the job, and connect more meaningfully with the people in the communities they serve. Maureen O’Hagan reports A Journey to the Center of Yourself Depression is not a disease, says James Gordon, M.D. He talks to Tracy Picha about the importance of seeing depression not as an end point but as a fresh opportunity for growth and change Sidebar: James Gordon’s seven stages for the journey through depression The Best Medicine Even if we hurt—maybe especially if we hurt, says Elaine Smookler—it helps to laugh Your Thoughts Our Thoughts Contributors Now Designing buildings with humans in mind • The final frontier: NASA meditates • Overwhelmed by choice?...

I can’t wait to share it with you. One day my friend Robin and I were discussing the power of “See, Touch, Go” to help stay focused on what matters. We talked about how it’s made us better listeners, more focused at work and less judgmental of ourselves when we veer from our intentions. She also told me that she had an idea that adapted it for compassion. She said that the other night she was having a particularly difficult conversation with a friend and in that moment was able to See her own frustration arising and because she was aware of this she took an opportunity to Touch her heart to ignite a more loving awareness and decided to Go from there....

We all have areas in our lives where we resist “turning towards” the pain. Maybe the pain is in a relationship. Maybe it is a behavior that we do not want to look at. It could be a bad habit or something from the past, which is easier to just ignore. But it is there. And until we come to terms with it, it is just going to stay there....

The two of them hit it off like long-lost siblings, Morgan writes in a recent email exchange with Mindful. By the end of the flight, he texted an introduction to Jelani Memory, founder of children’s publisher A Kids Book About and author of A Kids Book About Racism—and that’s how Caverly’s newest book A Kids Book About Mindfulness came to be. A Mindful Book Reading for Kids Q&A with Caverly Morgan Mindful: What inspired you to write a book about mindfulness specifically for kids, and in what ways do you think it was different than writing a book for adults?...

Philosopher and author Alain de Botton shares six ways you can tell your friendship is the real deal. True friendship is about trusting one another. While acquaintances or work colleagues may hide their shortcomings from you, a friend confides in you. “They show how much they trust us by confessing failings and sorrows which would open them up to possible humiliation from the world beyond,” de Botton says. A friend gives you the gift of vulnerability, which allows you to be vulnerable in return....

More specifically, in cases of depression for example, thinking happy thoughts and concentrating on the good, while downplaying the bad, may not be as helpful to Asians as it is to white populations. The authors of the study, Jennifer Wang and Kelly Koo, suggest the use of mindfulness therapies instead. Mindful therapies encourage patients to pay attention to both the good and the bad parts of their thoughts. They let the patients “observe when they feel good and bad and notice that both will disappear....

Results of the study, conducted by Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues, were published in the online edition of the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Read the abstract here). A direct correlation was also found between the amount of gyrification and the number of years a person meditates—possibly providing further proof of the brain’s ability to adapt. For more on Luders’ studies at UCLA, read “Your brain doesn’t look a day over 40, dear....

According to the study, police aren’t encouraged to show emotions within the law enforcement culture. Research has shown that police become more emotionally detached within 18 months of service. As there’s a large body of research suggesting that detachment from emotions can have detrimental consequences to emotional health, the researchers were interested in the interaction of these variables over time. Strikingly, police recruits showed an increase in depression and other mental health problems after starting the job....

Suppose we define pain as the pure physical sensation of the body responding to some negative stimuli, and suffering as our response to pain. From a mindfulness perspective, it is important to differentiate pain and suffering because however unavoidable pain is, we certainly have some leeway when it comes to suffering. The biggest difficulty in working with pain is not the pain itself; it is how we react to it....

Caverly Morgan: I don’t think I’m just projecting onto others when I recognize that in myself there was a type of turbulence that didn’t let me move through the world on behalf of my deepest love and understanding, on behalf of my deepest knowing. It feels authentic for me to say that others in this time, too, long for a way to reconcile that. The questions I was asking were: How does my personal mindfulness practice, which has brought me a lot of peace, a lot of benefit, that I know “works”—how does that directly relate to injustices in the world, the massive structural processes of othering that lead to tremendous harm?...

The Mindful Kitchen Recipe: Strawberry basil salad Slice a quart of strawberries, tear up a bunch of basil leaves, and toss them in a bowl with a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar, a smidge of salt, a few pinches of sugar, and a couple of cranks of freshly ground black pepper. Let marinate for 10 minutes or so, then serve. read more Mindful Staff November 12, 2019 Claire Zimmerman August 20, 2019...

What’s your go-to fidgeting method when you’re bored? 38% say they don’t fidget, as they’re perfectly comfortable to just sit and stare. Another 27% rearrange things arbitrarily, and 27% doodle. 8% bite their fingernails. Is boredom a good thing or a bad thing? 42% Say it’s neither good nor bad, and 24% say it’s both good and bad. 15% consider boredom entirely a bad thing, and 12% are ambivalent. Only 9% think boredom is good....

These fancy words describe something we’re all familiar with: the feeling that we truly know someone we’ve been repeatedly exposed to (or magnetically drawn to) on television, or nowadays through myriad forms of social media, and yes, even through magazines. Psychologists point to parasociality as a one-sided relationship where the celebritee pours time, emotional energy, and commitment into the celebrity, who doesn’t know them at all. It’s an odd relationship to say the least....

In my mind I believe I’m letting my emotional dam release in a scheduled fashion: acknowledging it’s there, providing some safe spillways for processing, some tunnels for inspecting any damage, a few postcards in the gift shop for tourists. But I know this is not the way emotions like to be treated. You may want to ask me: If you recognize this, why are you doing it to yourself? The answer is: because that’s just the way it is right now....

Sexuality is one of the only experiences where non-meditators naturally experience a calm, concentrated state of present-moment happiness. After all, mindfulness and making love are both practices of awareness. So imagine what can happen if you cultivate this awareness during sex? Quite simply, mindfulness can make you a better lover. In terms of sexual communion, we can practice leaving our head behind and becoming one with our breath and our lover’s breath, our heart and our lover’s heart, our body and our lover’s body....