To explain, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-5), which is scheduled for publication in May 2013 by the American Pyschiatric Association (APA), presents two major classification changes to depression and children’s mental health. First, the APA proposes that grief reactions that last longer than two weeks may be diagnosed as depression. Changes to children’s mental health includes re-drawing the boundaries of attention deficit hyperactive disorder. The APA also proposes the creation of a new disorder called disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, which is characterized by recurrent temper tantrums....

The following version of the S.T.O.P. practice will help you reclaim your sense of balance and strength to follow through with the task at hand, whether you’re surrounded by strangers or people you know. Again, S.T.O.P. stands for Stop, Take a breath, Observe, and Proceed. Try it now. Stop: Begin by taking a pause and giving yourself permission to stop what you’re doing. This is your special time to listen in and nurture yourself....

The act of contribution takes on many different forms. You might donate your time at a local senior center, set aside a certain amount of money each year for charitable giving, or engage in small random acts of kindness. Whether it’s giving up your seat on a crowded bus or helping the person in front of you on an airplane hoist a carry-on into the overhead bin, each day there are countless opportunities to contribute to the lives of others....

On its website, the center states: “the increased demand on parents of children with disabilities can cause stress, tension, financial burdens and feelings of helplessness.” The free services are meant to provide some relief to parents, who in turn may better support their loved ones. The center offered the same free services in May, for Mother’s Day. To read more about families and special needs, read these stories on Mindful....

Presence involves a simple yet incredible shift—from the ordinary state of mind wandering to bringing our attention to the experience of what is happening right now. You can make this shift anytime, anywhere. Why develop this habit? Spiritual leaders and philosophers have attempted to answer this question for thousands of years. And yet Ferris Bueller (the impetuous high school student from the classic 1986 film) might just have the best answer: “Life moves pretty fast,” he warned....

The iBme retreat model allows participants to dive deeper into these practices in a safe, residential environment. Participants gain a level of insight into their own experience and heartfelt connection with peers that may be only possible in this supportive setting. For more about iBme, click here. To read more about mindfulness and teenagers, see Mindful.org’s “On Teen Life” blogger Gina Biegel’s blog posts. iBme is holding a fundraiser—Commit to Sit—in order to offer as many teen retreat scholarships as possible....

From the press release: The study called “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for High Blood Pressure” will recruit and treat 180 patients from Northeast Ohio and Philadelphia for five years. Some of the patients will use mindfulness to reduce stress, and others will use an alternative program that doesn’t use meditation called Stress Management Education. “I am a relentless advocate and proponent of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and have seen positive results in lowering stress and pain levels in both students and adults,” Ryan added in the press release....

So how can we start laughing more every day? Seems like a silly question—but hey, silliness is in order! Here’s Barry Boyce, Mindful‘s Editor-in-Chief, talking about why it’s important to ask ourselves that question. From Mindful‘s June 2015 issue: Laughter is very serious business. Just ask John Cleese, who sings the praises of spontaneous laughter—“he who laughs most, learns best”—and believes “true laughter… destroys any kind of system of dividing people....

The sharp, streamlined creation took about three years to produce. The long timeline has to do with the fact that Ganfi was starting from scratch in a lot of ways. “Very soon, I realized that there’s no actual know-how, how to work with the cardboard, besides making packages out of it,” says Gafni, “so I started to explore it, and then I figured out a lot of things out of it....

Instead of so often eating with our mind somewhere else, why not flip things around and use everything surrounding food as an opportunity to expand mindfulness? Most of us find that if we’re asked to go on a short fast, perhaps before having a medical test, we can pull it off. In a moment, without all that much stress, our nutritional habits drop away. We have no choice: I’m hungry, but I’m going to wait....

A: You can have it all, providing the “all” includes a nervous breakdown. Forget life-work balance. Whoever came up with that concept needs to straddle a see-saw for a few moments and discover that a balancing act is inherently precarious, exhausting, and impossible to maintain. Many female patients come to me for help with anxiety and exhaustion. They are wracked with guilt that they can’t find time to make homemade cupcakes for the school bake sale because they have a year-end report to write....

I’m skeptical. Scientists, like humans generally, fall into the trap of looking for explanations that suit them best. Meditation may indeed do all that is claimed. But has research really demonstrated that fact? The way these studies are usually conducted, they cannot rule out two alternative explanations for the effects attributed to meditation. One is a placebo response: People who practice compassion meditation might believe it makes them kinder, better people—and expectation makes it so....

I was in an intensive care ward at the time, with an acute deterioration of my condition. I had been bedridden for several months and unable to sit up, but on this occasion I had undergone a diagnostic procedure that required me to sit up for several hours afterwards. During this long night of intense pain I felt myself sliding towards the edge of madness. I spent hours with two internal voices locked in combat -one voice convinced I could not stay sane till morning and the other willing me to do so....

Here are five common obstacles to meditation, and how to overcome them: 1. Doubt The uncertainty about whether something will “work” or not often plagues many people in the beginning of their practice. The thoughts is, “this can work for others, but it won’t work for me.” Sometimes doubt is healthy, teaching us to look closely at things before we buy it. But the unhealthy doubt just takes us away from experience before it teaches us anything....

While she talks to experts in factories in China and the United States and draws on statistics, Cline also draws from personal experience. She describes her own epiphany after a KMart shopping session that ended with buying seven pairs of shoes because they were seven dollars each, how at her shopping height she was purchasing one item per week; how all of the above ended up in the back of her closet, barely used....

In the spring of 1995, when she had been teaching Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction for eleven years, Elana Rosenbaum was diagnosed with non-hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her cancer led her to many arduous courses of treatment, including a stem-cell transplant, and brought her to the brink of death. It also brought her deeply into the practice of mindfulness and made her one of the most sought-after teachers of mindfulness for cancer patients. Rosenbaum’s 2005 book, Here for Now: Living Well With Cancer Through Mindfulness, documents her experience and provides guided exercises to help patients live with cancer rather than suffer from it, and to become participants in their care rather than observers....

Though I regarded her assertion as an overstatement, it definitely made me think. How much can a man know about being a woman? We are told that each of us has a masculine and feminine “side.” This sidewise understanding has so entered the vernacular that a character on a cop show can say, “I don’t have a feminine side. Where my feminine side would be, there’s just another masculine side....

I remember feeling something new that year: the desire to give gifts. So one morning I crept up the plywood framed stairs to the second floor, where the only roof was a tarp flapping in the Santa Ana winds. There I collected little triangular cast-offs from two-by-fours and the quarter-sized steel punch-outs from electrical outlet boxes, and with Elmer’s glue and a few crayons I transformed these bits of construction trash into sculptural gifts for my family....