I can still remember winning my first hockey game when I was ten years old. Man, that was fun! Our coach was thrilled. Our parents were overjoyed—one of the dads even bought donuts for the whole team. Naturally, as young hockey players, we were pretty excited as well. I mean, what was not to like? We had free donuts! And, our head-coach was in a good mood. As much as I remember that glorious moment of stuffing my face with a chocolate glazed donut, I also remember the first time we lost....

In other words, a clinician facing an individual may have to admit what they do not know—not what the world expects of “experts.” The authors liken the work to meteorology, where professionals’ conclusions emerge from wrestling with nature’s chaos. Like meteorologists, mental health clinicians try to impose order on disorder, and often create “narratives that are incomplete or wrong.” Given this sober assessment, what do the authors suggest? For one thing, they counsel the field to start with a little more humbleness, being honest about the fact that human beings have an overconfidence bias that causes us to overlook errors....

Here are three simple ways you can shift out of autopilot mode: Gentle body scan: A relaxed body leads to a relaxed mind. Go through your body in search of any tension or holding that’s there and see if you can intentionally allow that to soften or adjust. Stretch your body in any areas you’re noticing a constriction. Get your face out of your phone: If you’re like me, you know you’re a little too connected to this two-dimensional device....

Hi! I’m Liz. I’m a psychologist, and a professor of Community Mental Health. I spend my days thinking and writing about people and their thoughts and feelings and behaviors (basically, LIFE). I went to school for approximately a bajillion years to try to understand human beings, studying biology and cognition, relationships and sexuality, families, and sociocultural phenomena. Do you know how many times we talked about money? Like, people’s relationships with money, spending, saving, and the drama and suffering that ensue?...

If you require your books about yoga and meditation to be primly reverential, Yoke is not the read for you. Here, Stanley gets extremely real about the trials and tribulations of yoga on and off the mat, with writing that is friendly and familiar, peppered with swears and slang and moments of hilarity, a dash of spirituality, and the occasional side order of astrology. If you like Stanley on Instagram, you’ll love her in Yoke—and if you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong on a yoga mat or meditation cushion, Stanley’s honest writing, fresh insights, and unabashedly fun approach ought to make you feel right at home, wherever you are....

Shalini Bahl-Milne February 24, 2021 Bob Stahl June 13, 2017 Bob Stahl November 8, 2017

Mirabai Bush is the co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which seeks to transform higher education through the introduction of contemplative practices and perspectives. Mirabai has worked at the interface of mindfulness and social justice since she learned contemplative practices in India in the 1970s. Ram Mahalingam is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He’s the director for the Mindful Connections Lab....

Time required 15 minutes daily How to do a loving-kindness meditation: Relax Your Body: Close your eyes. Sit comfortably with your feet flat on the floor and your spine straight. Relax your whole body. Keep your eyes closed throughout the whole visualization and bring your awareness inward. Without straining or concentrating, just relax and gently follow the instructions. Take a deep breath in. And breathe out. Bring Your Attention To The Warmth of Your Heart Keeping your eyes closed, think of a person close to you who loves you very much....

read more Mindful Staff February 11, 2021 Kylee Ross July 1, 2020 Susan Kaiser Greenland June 22, 2020 Sharon Salzberg June 10, 2020

In the mind of jealousy, we are caught up in comparing, and in one sense we loom large and others fade into the background. Yet, in another sense, we see ourselves as small and what others have as big. We push and we pull. Feelings of jealousy can be mixed up with love (the clingy part), and anger, the feeling of wanting to push another away, to hurt them or lessen them....

As we reported in the April 2013 issue of Mindful magazine, Ali, Atman, and Andy founded the Holistic Life Foundation in 2001. Starting with 20 fifth-grade boys, the foundation’s after-school program introduced yoga, mindfulness, urban gardening, and teamwork to children in the neighborhood in an effort to revive the community through its youngest, most vulnerable members. In a city where the dropout rate for high school students is routinely higher than 50%, 19 of those first 20 boys graduated and the other got his GED....

JG Larochette: 25 kids who maybe got still and silent for 10 seconds in the first five months of the school year dropped into practice, eyes gently closed, bodies still. SD: That’s JG Larochette, he’s the founder and director at the Mindful Life Project. The Mindful Life Project is a nonprofit JG started almost a decade ago to help bring the transformative power of mindfulness and its tools to school kids and school communities....

A report by Benoît Tranzer, managing director of branding giant Millward Brown, says the post-recession consumer has abandoned rampant consumerism, possibly for good. They want to shop carefully—mindfully, even—and advertisers are looking for ways to appeal to them. Tranzer maintains that the mindful consumer is doing more with less, turning away from expensive brand names, spending less on luxuries and buying closer to the heart. While the old consumer wanted instant gratification, the mindful consumer considers local community, moral responsibility and the environment....

It can be hard to find the time to commit to changes we think are important, like making our own baby food or doing some sort of daily exercise. So the average parent simply does not have the hours, or the psychological bandwidth, to make self-improvement a part-time job. Still, there must be some practical value to gain from such an inexhaustible knowledge base. Is it possible to be inspired by all the “better parenting” literature, rather than simply discouraged by its demands?...

MBCT combines the best of standard cognitive therapy, which helps people become aware of negative thought patterns and behaviors, with mindfulness-based strategies, which help people form a new relationship to thoughts and behaviors. MBCT consists of guided meditations and breathing practices, mindful movements like walking, and exercises aimed at understanding the stress-pain connection and identifying automatic thoughts that intensify pain. Through MBCT you learn to train the mind to identify and interrupt automatic thoughts, feelings, and reactions to pain and build a new relationship with discomfort....

Stanford Compassion Training is an eight-week course (plus a week of orientation), which integrates traditional contemplative practices with contemporary psychology and scientific research on compassion. The training is designed to support anyone who wants to cultivate compassion for themselves and for others. No meditation experience is required. For more information and to register, click here.

This one-day conference will take place at Stanford University on December 6, 2013 and will include talks by academic experts and tech industry leaders. It wiill also include a Compassion and Technology Contest where individuals who are chosen for their compassion-inspired technological designs will present and compete for best design idea before a panel of judges and the conference audience. (The three winning finalists are up for some excellent prizes....

“These projects will help us understand whether meditation does indeed produce long-lasting changes in the brain, what these changes are, and whether these practices may be helpful in the daily life of people of those who are suffer from certain health problems as well as those who are ‘normal’,” says Richard J. Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry, and founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center....

Herzfeld calls it the “Global Emotional Awareness Movement” (GLEAM). Her objectives in launching this movement include helping people appreciate the role emotions play in their lives, introducing practices for managing feelings, breaking down the cultural taboos around sharing feelings and inspiring a more emotionally aware and peaceful world. “When we don’t know what we’re feeling and when we’re operating from not knowing, we tend to hurt ourselves and others,” she explains....