Are there places in your life where someone’s discomfort leaves you feeling uncertain of what to say? Or maybe their pain is simply making you uncomfortable? Our brains are wired to get away from pain and one way we do that in a relationship is try to lighten the moment. One person says, “My son is failing in school.” They have clear pain, your mirror neurons pick this up and so you feel pain....

Brian punched in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and at his direction—he called out the commands…LEFT 20 DEGREES RUDDER…STEADY AS SHE GOES… and I repeated them out loud—I steered this very large ship through the Halifax harbor and brought it alongside the dock at the bottom of the street I live on. As we pitched on the waves, I could actually feel it in my stomach. Very cool. Though my brother and I were the only ones on “the bridge” that afternoon, a real bridge could be crowded....

Technical reasons. I’ve found that if I use animals, it makes it easier to suspend my readers’ disbelief. We tend to know our own species very well, so we’re cynical about human characters. That means it’s easier for me to tell a story about a dentist who is a donkey than it is for me to tell a story about a dentist who is just a regular person. Also, I find it refreshing to get away from humans....

Delegates shared stories of their own journey to mindfulness practice through depression and anxiety, and accounts of profound overcoming in the face of life-altering illness and injury. Mindfulness, said Sports Minister Tracey Crouch, had helped her cope when therapy wasn’t appropriate, leaving her a passionate advocate of the practice in the professional context and determined to discover where it could be of most service in the policy landscape. An in-depth symposium brought guests up to speed with the latest news of mindfulness in UK healthcare and criminal justice, including eloquent first-hand testimony from Mark, an ex-inmate introduced to mindfulness after 30 years in and out of prison: “it gave me my life back....

Greater Good in Action’s practices range from casual to intensive. You can choose one that’s five minutes or one that’s a whole day. Each practice has all the information you need to understand it, in straightforward language. When you find a practice you’re interested in, you can view and save it and read why you should try it, how to do it, and scientific evidence that the practice works. Greater Good Science Center revolves around using science to create a more compassionate society and giving you the tools to help....

Where do the snap judgments and other thoughts come from that can cause us to inflict so much pain on ourselves and each other? We have a natural tendency to think that the thoughts we generate in our minds are our own. We cook them up in our own heads. We decide whom we like and don’t like and what is good and bad. It’s what makes me me. But in fact thoughts enter our heads from all kinds of places and they hang around waiting to be recycled at the appropriate moment....

This video is the second chapter of 15, it follows the moderator introduction.This chapter features Wendell Berry on “Deconstructing the Idea of Pleasure.” The remaining chapters may be watched here. Remaining chapters include : 03. Scaling Down Our Carbon Foot-Print 04. Wendell Berry Rereading Preamble 05. Local Adaptation 06. Eric Schlosser: Revival of Food Culture 07. Lack of Focus on Human Rights 08. Carlo Petrini: Social Injustice 09. Rethinking the Definition of Slow Food 10....

Her lengthy moment of silence made the words she had chosen to say up to that point even more eloquent. It was a brave and a bravura moment. It takes courage to stand resolutely in front of people and tacitly ask them to join you in silence. Silence in public can be very awkward, but it can also be powerful. In these times when our communities are divided along many lines, perhaps we need more silence....

Mindfulness. It’s a pretty straightforward word. It’s the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. But how does that play out in the everyday world around us? To answer this question, we look to the key players bringing mindfulness into different aspects of society. Politicians talk about it. So do police officers, NFL teams, and neuroscientists, to name a few....

Why does that matter? Because better understanding the physiology of gratitude can help pinpoint strategies for harnessing its health benefits and help people understand the importance of fostering this powerful emotion. The goal of my research has been to lay the groundwork for understanding what happens in the brain when we feel grateful—and a picture of the grateful brain is now starting to emerge. When I first embarked on the journey to study gratitude, I came across philosophical treatises and religious exhortations emphasizing the importance of gratitude, along with scientific studies suggesting that gratitude can improve your sleep, enhance your romantic relationships, protect you from illness, motivate you to exercise, and boost your happiness, among many other benefits....

In recent years, a topic of growing importance is understanding what genetic mechanisms underlie psychological and physical health. This is critical in helping us understand whether mind-body interventions (MBIs) such as mindfulness can reverse the molecular effects of chronic stress, and whether MBIs can contribute to disease prevention. Scientists have recently taken a step further in studying the biological mechanisms of MBIs by analyzing gene expression—a humble process that happens inside each and every one of our cells, by which DNA sequences are transcribed and translated into proteins....

That part is almost entirely wrong. Three days later, I get off a plane in Shanghai. Lights are streaming all around me from the city’s 7,000 skyscrapers, each of them bathed in a different neon glow, purple or electric blue or green. A Maglev train, flying a few inches above the ground, whisks me into the heart of the labyrinth at 250 miles per hour. I walk through narrow alleyways, Chinese characters exploding around me, and all the teeming energies of 23 million people trying to make their future before tomorrow....

But what kind of luck is it? Good luck that you are unharmed and alive to tell the tale, or bad luck that your vehicle is now destined for the junkyard? Science tells us that whether you label an experience good luck or bad luck has a lot to do with your personality. Dr. Barbara Blatchley, professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and author of the book What Are the Chances?...

It can be helpful to notice our preconceptions and stories in the quiet of a meditation session, but it can also be powerful to notice our biases on the spot, in the heat of the moment, and switch things up. Here are some steps to consider. 1. Notice Your Habitual Thought Patterns Based on some old information, you find yourself trapped in a habit pattern. You’re prejudging a person, people, or a situation, and it’s all attached to a story you’re holding onto: These people always… When lost like this, you need to find out where you are, what’s really happening in your mind as it interprets what’s in front of you....

Set your judgments aside and try these out over the next week as an experiment…allow your experience to be your guide. Curate Your First Sounds: Rather than starting the day off with an alarm that makes your body tense and startled, choose an alarm that’s gentle and soothing—chimes, bells, more relaxing music, whatever it might be. This allows your body to take in something soothing to start the day. Hydrate Before You Caffeinate: Rather than going straight for the coffee or tea, see if you can take in a big glass of water....

Leave anger at the curb The car ahead of you signals to turn left, but moments later, turns right. An insignificant incident, but one you react to by swearing and blaring your horn. Why? Because the brain is doing a lot of work, parsing 200 decisions per mile while drawing on 1,500 psychomotor skills to get you from point A to B. To curb that stress response, try this mindful driving game: give the first five drivers “the right to be wrong”—to make a mistake while driving....

If your answer to these questions is no, if you’re one of those people who spends all day breathing the lifeless output of a building-ventilation system, then you may be encountering nature deficit. And it’s making your life less enjoyable, less healthy, and more stressed. We are in the midst of the largest wave of urbanization in human history. The United Nations reports that more than half of all people on Earth now live in cities....

A good way to overcome this obstacle is to incorporate mindful expressions into your daily vocabulary. This will help you become aware of your principles and apply them to everyday challenges. I find the following five expressions extremely valuable in adding more meaning and mindfulness into my life, and I hope they will have a similar effect on yours. “I don’t know.” Contrary to popular belief, being “enlightened” doesn’t mean that you know everything there is to know about the world, and it certainly doesn’t mean that you pretend to know everything....

A plethora of books that attempt to rehabilitate boredom as a normal, even valuable, experience have found their way to the Mindful offices in recent years. The benefits of boredom are still trending. This tome by Danckert and Eastwood, both professors of psychology (at University of Waterloo and York University, respectively), stands out because it explores not just what boredom can do for you, but what boredom is and why it (paradoxically) deserves our attention....