I wrote about this in my book, Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveler: “It is what it is, while it is. Nothing lasts forever. Difficulties will pass and so will the wonders; tune in to the preciousness of life. Bring this awareness into the moments of your day, tuning in to what really matters.” Three Mind Traps that Drain Inner Strength Life is so precious. How can we get better at setting aside the trivial mind traps that keep us stuck and drag us down into states of anxiety and depression?...

The trouble started on a late afternoon in September. It was around 6 p.m., and I was sitting under one of the trees in my backyard, watching a brace of pigeons splash wildly around in our stone bird bath, beneath which a stone head of the Buddha rose up from the grass. My dog Nova, a West Highland white terrier, rested peacefully nearby. I’ve always loved this hour of the day, when the spill of late afternoon light, so ethereal, filtered through old-growth trees in Wedgwood, a neighborhood of gentle hills and slopes at the edge of strip malls, burger joints, auto dealers, and Rick’s topless nightclub in Lake City....

We give very little attention to learning to listen, learning to really hear another person or situation. Yet think back to the moments with other people when our hearts were engaged and we felt fed by being together. In those moments, weren’t we hearing one another? In times like those, when we have listened to and heard one another, we have felt life arising from a shared perspective. Why We Miss New Opportunities Each situation, each moment of life, is new....

Note that I use “mindfulness momentum” rather than “mindfulness movement.” Momentum describes the groundswell surge of irrepressible engagement with mindfulness present in all parts of our society, whereas “movement” connotes an organized or planned effort. While we certainly have leaders and inspiring voices, the momentum of mindfulness surging through the world is coming from so many different places that it’s very much like the ground elder that’s taking over my wife’s garden....

Yes, says Bill George, Harvard business professor and former chairman and CEO of Medtronic. George started meditating in 1975 to cope with stress, and he liked the results. Now, 800 individuals take his Authentic Leadership Development course annually at Harvard— both MBA students and executives. The course gets students to hone their strategies and goals with mindfulness techniques and other reflective practices. In the clip below, George discusses how mindfulness helped him de-stress and focus on his work....

But the truth is, while the circumstances we’re in may seem unprecedented, the difficult emotions we’re feeling are part of our inheritance as human beings. We don’t have to ignore or push away what we’re feeling. With a little practice, we can soothe ourselves and maybe even find the wisdom in our emotional roller-coaster. The ability to be with and befriend our emotions is our foundation for finding the good, and for responding to the crises around us with skill and compassion....

But the costs over time are beginning to show: sick days, disengagement at work, and lack of loyalty. Researchers Emma Seppälä and Kim Cameron, writing for Harvard Business Review this week, outline how each of these areas are harmful to productivity over time.“Wellbeing comes from one place, and one place only—a positive culture,” Seppälä and Cameron write. They suggest four research-based ways for bosses to create a more positive culture at work: foster social connections, show empathy, go out of your way to help, and encourage people to talk to you (read about each in “Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive“)....

To me, intimacy expresses what liberation actually feels like: relaxed, easeful, ordinary, in a way. Liberation isn’t found someplace else. It’s found right here. That’s why one teaching says the path is right beneath your feet. When we look into the mind’s conditioning, in a close and personal way, we begin to understand the ways that we cause ourselves suffering—and that’s the real freedom of meditation. It isn’t about helping us to transcend or get out of our experience....

A 12-Minute Guided Body Scan I invite you to continue to breathe, to be mindful, to be thoughtful, caring, and loving. Maybe try to carve out a few minutes every day to practice, maybe share it with somebody. Hopefully, you were able to do this practice and give yourself some attention. Hopefully you found that it was valuable. I believe that once we get to a place of loving ourselves, giving love to others is an easy next step....

According to the story, an ingenious CEO and her team invented a female personal sexual pleasure device—yes, a vibrator—that, somehow, operates hands-free and produces “blended orgasms,” which sound like fruit smoothies, but apparently are orgasms achieved by simultaneous inner and outer stimulation. Inventor Lora Haddock claims she fell off a bed the first time she felt one. That experience sent her on an engineering quest to produce this double pleasure on demand....

This latest shooting, coming on the heels of one last week in Colorado, became the occasion for the New York Times to tally up the dead and wounded from mass shootings so far this year. To say that it is sobering and unsettling is a huge understatement: In 209 out of 336 days this year, at least one shooting left four or more people injured or dead in the United States....

Shame has a way of rusting things in our family lives. We learn as kids about becoming accountable for ourselves when we hurt or displace others. Parents, in how they handle these crossroad moments when kids are to blame, can help them learn to come clean. For kids, parents can model awareness of what’s actually going on, and keep from either descending into the depths of unnecessary shame, or walking away from responsibility altogether....

The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds is America’s leading lab studying the effects of meditation on the brain. Davidson says that studying people who do systematic mental training like meditation helps neuroscientists learn more about what the human mind is capable of. One of the things the laboratory is studying is how mindfulness can increase the brain’s powers of attention and its ability to respond more flexibly to stressful events....

Why did you start meditating? It was around 1999, in college. My father became ill and died withina year. It was a huge blow, and I explored different alternatives to alleviate my suffering. Somehow I discovered a book on Buddhist meditation. I read a couple of paragraphs and did a simple meditation exercise, and that was it: Something clicked inside me. Those first practices gave me the possibility of having a silent mind for a little bit, of quieting the turmoil I was going through....

To that end, the mindful living community organizers at Wanderlust have been hosting a series of “conscious town hall meetings.” These events provide a forum for discussing how we can create mindful policies for America. “America is facing a number of challenges today, economically, diplomatically and militarily,”says Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan. “We are in uncharted waters. And in order to best address these issues we have to be able to see them clearly, as an interconnected whole....

Just as different populations (meditators vs non-meditators; clinical vs community populations) use facets of mindfulness in different ways (Woodhead et al 2013), age and gender also influence how individuals respond to meditation and mindfulness. Studies investigating effects of mindfulness often use the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), which looks at how subjects score on five different facets of mindfulness. Five Facets of Mindfulness Used in This Study Past studies show that men tend to score higher on the “non-reactivity” facet of the FFMQ, while women score higher on the “observing” facet....