What just happened? As educator Elizabeth Cox explains in this TedEd video, the answer lies in the complicated relationship between short-term stress and memory. When you learn something new, facts you read or hear become a memory through three main steps: Once a memory is created, it can later be retrieved by the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for your thoughts, attention, and ability to reason. In the first two stages of creating a memory, moderate stress can actually be helpful for retaining information, as hormones released in periods of stress stimulates the brain....

Here are some tips for unearthing your hidden passion. 1) Clarify your values What really matters to you in life? What do you believe in? What brings you the most joy or lights you up? It could be exploring new places, family, justice, or supporting the arts, as examples. A Mindfulness Practice for Exploring What You Value: Think of an object related to your values and how it might be utilized in a job or hobby....

It’s ideal to develop a familiarity and skill with these strategies when you’re not feeling strong fear so that they’re available to you when they’re most needed. So let’s start with a short mindfulness practice that helps bring us here into our body, in this moment. A Guided Grounding Practice Finding a comfortable posture with both feet on the floor, allow the eyes to gently close. Or, lower your gaze....

Using these three tips can help you bring mindfulness into your daily trips, so that you can start and end your day with some softness and play. On your drive: Use each stop to take a breath: Whether you’re driving or taking a train, there’s gonna be stops. Every stop is an opportunity to take a deep breath and soften the body, making it a greater commute with greater ease....

Let’s face it: seeing the words “lawyer” and “mindfulness” in the same sentence looks a little weird. This might be why lawyers suffer disproportionately high levels of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. Lawyers are almost four times more likely to be depressed than non-lawyers, and twice as likely to be alcoholics. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lawyers rank fourth in the professions with the most suicides....

Human suffering is often about freedom and containment. When we have too much containment, we scream for freedom. “Let me be me! I need space! Don’t tell me what to do!” But when we have too much freedom, we start to feel adrift. Fearful. Lost in space… and suddenly we are longing for containment. “Hold me close! I need to feel safe!” My years of work as a therapist, professor, and community member—did I mention that I live in a cooperative household of eight adults?...

Live by routine. Take the needless guesswork out of meals and bedtimes. Let everyone relax into the predictable flow of a healthy and secure life. Turn off the engines. Discipline TV and computer usage and reduce artificial distraction, escapism, and stimulation. This begins with you. Elevate the small. And overlook the large. Want to change the world? Forget the philosophical lessons. Instruct your child in how to brush his or her teeth, and then do it, together, twice a day....

This push for perfect is exhausting, but often avoidable with practice. Rationalizing with what is basically an irrational habit doesn’t help much. The inner critic is like the old two guys on the Muppet Show endlessly deriding whatever happens without reason at all. Reasoning with our inner tyrant validates it as if it deserves our attention, when mostly its just an unhelpful pattern of thinking we’ve picked up along the way....

Wherever it is that attention goes, the rest of the brain follows. And in some ways, I think it’s very important to consider this. What does this mean? It means that where you pay attention, makes up the moments of your life, it actually makes up your life’s experience. In my lab’s work we really think about mindfulness not simply as a concept but mindfulness training as a cognitive training tool....

Reconciliation is the path to making peace with yourself and the world. Truly, to live and to die with a heart free of resentment, grudges, and ill will would be a crowning accomplishment in life. By practicing reconciliation meditation, you open the door to this possibility. This is a three-faceted practice. The first aspect is to direct reconciliation toward yourself, making peace with all of the ways in which you’ve felt deficient or inadequate....

I believe my average time per meditation would be somewhere in the range of 30 seconds to a minute, tops. As long as that’s where you’re aiming for your daily practice, go for it. But most of us aspire for a tad more practice on a regular basis. The challenge is, of course, that the “not feeling like doing it” is simply a thought that the brain has offered up as if it is a truth....

“She’s one of those mothers,” I imagine you thinking. One of those witless ones who buy toys without giving intelligent thought to the underlying message, the implication, or the outcome. A Barbie mom. I can’t remember exactly how it all began, but I’m sure it began with me. It is captivating to see a tiny child fall into pure and uncomplicated love. My daughter Georgia’s first major heartthrob was Snow White, who was just one in a color-coded sequence of princesses to be cherished, outgrown, and discarded, but we didn’t know that then....

David Marshall is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker who followed the hospice class for two years. In his documentary, Beginning with the End, the question Marshall seeks to answer is: Can empathy be taught? This web extra provides additional information related to an article titled, “A Matter of Death and Life,” which appeared in the February 2014 issue of Mindful magazine.

Savor the Sounds Around You We often think that meditation requires peace and quiet, but you can also use sounds as the object of your focus. This meditation helps you recognize sounds as they come and go, without labeling them as ‘annoying’ or ‘disruptive.’ Find a spot outside to sit or lay down and notice what you can hear: children playing, lawn mowers humming, birds rustling in the trees. With mindfulness, you can shift your relationship to these sounds....

Why is silence moving like a fog across the planet? Why is it growing in us as individuals, even as we learn of more and more issues that concern us? Why do we fail to raise our voices on behalf of things that trouble us, and then regret what we didn’t do? As I’ve watched the silence grow in myself and others, I’ve noticed a few reasons for the silence, although none is entirely sufficient as an explanation....

Fruits and vegetables have also become more expensive for everyone over the years, because our subsidy system puts a little too much emphasis on grain production and provides little assistance to specialty crop farmers. (Including fruits and vegetables under crop insurance in the most recent farm bill is a step in the right direction.) Marion Nestle notes in her Food Politics blog: “The Department of Commerce reports that the indexed price of fresh fruits and vegetables has increased by 40% since 1980, whereas the indexed price of sodas has declined by about 30%....