“What if I grow up to be ordinary?” she said. The fear this child expressed—that she may not be that special—is one that I see often in my work as a therapist. Somehow this girl, and many other clients I’ve seen, equated self-worth with being impressive. I frequently hear from parents that their kids struggle with low self-esteem. Their children might seem outwardly confident, but they are suffering because of their unrelenting preoccupation with judging themselves....

• “The ability to spend freely and not worry!” • “Living well and not outliving our money.” • “Investing to make my house sustainable.” • “I don’t have money priorities.” What’s the main thing you have saved up for in the past? 32% of respondents said”buying a home,” while 27% saved the most for travel. Paying for their own or their children’s education was top for 22%. Another 15% saved up for things like their wedding, retirement, or studio equipment, and 4% saved for a major gift for a loved one....

In response, we just keep on pushing through, surviving on adrenaline. We overschedule ourselves; we drink another coffee; we respond to one more email. If we stay amped up all the time, we think, we’ll eventually be able to get things done. But all that does is burn us out, drain our productivity, and lead to exhaustion. There’s another way—a calmer way. Cultivating a more restful, relaxed state of mind doesn’t mean we’ll drown under all our responsibilities....

From the Infinite to the Infinitesimal: What the Stars Can Teach Us about Life Humans like to take the measure of things, and sometimes it saves a great deal of time to measure space. The other day two deliverymen were moving a refrigerator into my smallish kitchen. I offered them the tape measure several times, but they looked at it with disdain, preferring to eyeball the situation and muscle the refrigerator through....

You can read the Times piece here, but we have to ask: While taking a pause for thought allows us to get beyond initial reactions, how about taking a pause to NOT think? For some of our articles on taking a mindful pause, click here. 

So we asked ourselves “What is the essence of mindful eating?” It is tasting each thing. There’s a famous exercise of eating a raisin mindfully. You taste it completely: you experience “one taste.” How about we go beyond the raisin and choose one ingredient to celebrate each issue, we thought. With this in mind we found the multi-talented Béatrice Peltre, author of La Tartine Gourmande, who prepares, arranges, and photographs her recipes....

For professional grocers, their daily work environment is challenging at best, and often traumatic. There’s the physical stress of manual labor: stocking, shelving, cleaning, ringing up groceries, and moving eight hours a day, five days a week, week after week after week. Then there are the emotional burdens: the racism in the parking lot, the sexism in the aisles, the homophobia at the register, eight hours a day, five days a week, week after week after week: a work environment that fosters constant employee turnover....

Then he bought his wife a new horse trailer. “I was towing it with my truck to have electric brakes installed,” he remembers, “and as I was driving down the road, I thought, it has no brakes, maybe I’m going a little fast—” and as if on cue another vehicle pulled out in front of him, cutting him off. Eisen managed to get his truck and trailer under control and safely off the road, but as he sat there in the immediate aftermath of a near wreck, adrenaline pumping, he had a terrible realization....

Each day, most of us think nothing about the fact that we wake up and don’t make a move until the sunlight or a light turned on in our room is there to guide us. In the grand scheme of the planet, however, that’s an unusual orientation. Most species, including all manner of insects, plants, and animals, primarily navigate the world through pheromones. While we all know that dogs have a better sense of smell than we do, the same is true for most species on the planet, according to biologists such as E....

Those who make it past mile 100 are the hikers who carve out new habits amid the challenge of their new lives: wake up, eat Pop-Tart, stuff tent into pack, walk. Wearing clothes clammy with yesterday’s sweat, squatting behind a tree to go to the bathroom, and eating ramen for dinner every night become the norm. But hikers who establish those useful on-trail habits tend to get bored of them as soon as the novelty and challenge are gone....

“They looked so resilient,” recalls Bernstein, a professor of clinical psychology with the School of Psychology, University of Haifa, in Israel. However, study after study showed that there was, Bernstein says, “a real public health crisis of mental health that we didn’t know about.” The refugees came from “extraordinarily, shockingly high rates of traumatic stress experiences”: torture, imprisonment, starvation, combat. Following the trauma and stress of forced migration, the refugees also struggled with post-displacement issues, including separation, grief, isolation, loneliness, fear, conflict, and no access to education or work....

Lying in the dark, you start to panic: You know your alarm will go off in just a few hours and you’ve barely slept a wink. You need to be alert and ready to tackle the day ahead, and you’re sure that without enough deep, restful sleep, you’ll barely be able to function. Your worry is well-placed, says Matthew Walker, PhD, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science....

How can teachers manage a kid like Jada who may have suffered trauma, but whose emotional reactions make it difficult for her to learn? Not by getting angry, for sure. That would just trigger her, because she’s hypersensitive to criticism. In my new book, The Trauma-Sensitive Classroom, I present key, alternative strategies teachers and schools can use to help kids who’ve experienced trauma to do better in school. I’ve found that when teachers recognize the symptoms of trauma, build supportive relationships and classroom environments, and build upon strengths to help traumatized kids learn self-regulation, they can play an important role in helping them heal....

How do we reduce the pressure and still give our children what they need? A long-term focus on the resilience of our children—their ability to overcome challenges independently—is what can really help them thrive in school. As a developmental pediatrician, I believe it’s the proven basics that matter most for a child’s resilience: their belief in their own self-efficacy, strong self-management skills, and reliable relationships. If we can let go of other pressures created by our busy family life, fads and trends within our communities, and information overload on the Internet, we can confidently focus on the tried-and-true instead....

At the center of the study is something called “readiness potential”: the firing of brain cells that occurs right before we become aware of our intention to act. More than 50 years ago, researchers discovered that the brain fires before we are consciously aware of the intention to do something (like reaching for pizza). Some interpreted that as evidence that brain activity, not intention, is responsible for decision-making, and that free will is a myth....

“It’s one thing to use meditation to be more open, expansive, and present to what arises,” says Dr John P. Forsyth, Professor of Psychology at the University at Albany, SUNY. “It’s another to use it to fight a war with your emotional life, history, and the thoughts in your mind.” But in cultures like ours, which emphasize the suppression and control of painful thoughts and feelings, it’s not surprising that mindfulness has been interpreted as a clever way to be happier, and less depressed, stressed, or anxious....

Keynotes include Dr. Ronald Epstein, developer of mindful practice programs to enhance the capacity of health care professionals to provide patient-centered care, and J. David Creswell, PhD, who explores the brain and physiological basis of stress reduction in mindfulness and mindfulness meditation practices. The 2013 Conference will feature more than 75 presentations that include research forums, presentation dialogues, workshops, keynotes, breakfast roundtables, and Pre- and Post-Conference Institutes. View the conference schedule....

Still, I often wonder if something is lost if we rely too much on scientific method and language as our way of approaching this work. I’ve written before about how scientific findings can bring expectation of future results, and that this can sometimes sabotage our mindfulness, taking us further into the stress of unfulfilled desire and out of the present moment. But I suspect there may be another risk too—that of unconsciously narrowing our experience into a conceptual frame....

Many of our automatic reactions arise, habitually, from emotionally difficult experiences in our pasts. When we take time to experience our thoughts and feelings with a present-centered, non-judgmental attitude, we begin to see such patterned behaviors for what they are and they naturally subside, rather than drive us to react in ways we may later regret. Evidence suggests that regular mindful awareness practice changes how our body and brain respond to stress, possibly strengthening connections in the prefrontal cortex and reducing reactivity in our limbic system, supporting self-reflection and self-regulation....