Don’t Wait for Perfect It’ll never come. An entrepreneur is someone who simply starts by taking one step, gets feedback, learns, and takes another one. She then repeats this pattern over and over again; which is called progress. Action defines entrepreneurs, not ideas. Know Your “Why” Allow yourself to be obsessed with the problem you’re solving, not your solution. Clarity of purpose guides you to your ultimate solve and protects you in the often long journey to get there....

How to Mindfully Appreciate Nature This article originally appeared in the June 2019 issue of Mindful Magazine. READ MORE Scott Rogers February 9, 2021 Heather Shayne Blakeslee March 25, 2021 Mindful Staff January 17, 2021 Christopher Willard December 15, 2020

Protecting and nurturing the functioning of your brain is important for your long-term health and well-being. You can make lifestyle choices that protect, exercise, and strengthen the physical brain, which in turn supports the complexity of all of your emotional, relational, and cognitive functioning. 1. Move It! Research in the last 10 years has made it abundantly clear—we need to move our bodies not just for the health of our heart, lungs, muscles, and joints, but also for the health of our brain....

Two Basic Belly Breathing Tips Breathe deeply. When you breathe deeply, your diaphragm at the base of your lungs pushes your belly out. This is belly breathing and is a natural way to breathe—you can see babies doing it. As you exhale, gently press on your belly. As you breathe in, encourage your belly to expand, and as you breathe out, allow your belly to contract. You could even gently push your belly in with your hand when you breathe out to help you to do this, if it doesn’t come naturally to you....

Understanding What Causes Your Panic Attack There’s no predicting when your next panic attack will occur. It might happen while you’re out running errands, interacting with strangers at the market or post office. Being in public may feel like the worst-case scenario for a panic attack, but it is also your cue to listen to your mind and body. Mindful inquiry will help you investigate what is driving your panicky emotions, in order for you to become free from them....

Everything is impermanent. It’s always changing, coming together and falling apart. And it’s frustrating to not be able to make things go our way. But paradoxically, when we can accept that everything is not up to us, and we stop trying to control what we can’t change or trying to predict what we can’t predict, then we can feel a lot more at ease and more open to the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives....

Full stop. Though the Guardian article went on to provide more nuance, the reading public sees seven years of complex painstaking work by a large group of dedicated people reduced to a single conclusion in a headline. That is what is to be expected. As the old newspaper saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” When results are simplified to this degree, though, it helps if we can remember to dive deeper to see the specifics of what was studied, and what continues to be learned as a result....

Sensations might include feelings of pressure and temperature at the points of contact of the body with the floor, or tingling, itching, pulsations, aching, throbbing, light touch from the air currents, warmth or coolness anywhere in the body, the possibilities are endless. They may also include significant degrees of physical discomfort or pain that might arise either from sitting without moving for extended periods of time, or from a particular medical condition....

Magee is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of San Francisco. In Mindful‘s June 2013 issue, Magee talked about bringing mindfulness into the legal field and noted that “the goal is to help lawyers develop the capacity to put themselves in the shoes of another, to listen more thoroughly, with as little judgement as they can manage.” This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners....

Exercise: Investigating Judgments If you allow critical judgments to remain unexamined, they can come to occupy many of your thoughts and emotions, and even your dreams. But if you examine them, you’ll find repetitive themes that are connected to earlier life events and discover that even your judgments regarding others are often rooted in self-judgment or events that happened earlier in your life—sometimes when you were very young. It’s a good practice to investigate all of your judgments, and this practice will help you do exactly that....

Yesterday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed new statistics indicating that nearly 1 in 12 Americans were diagnosed with asthma by 2009. The Vital Signs report found that people diagnosed with asthma in the United States grew by 4.3 million between 2001 and 2009. However in recent years, studies involving meditation and asthma have been promising in terms of helping control the chronic disorder. Recently Bob Stahl has also released a CD, Working with Asthma, COPD, and Respiratory Challenges, which offers an introduction to mindfulness meditation in the context of dealing with respiratory challenges....

Resetting the Table: A People’s Food Policy for Canada was released on April 18. The People’s Food Policy Project is the result of two years of interviews with 3,500 people. Created by grassroots organizations and individuals across the country the project’s goal is to create food sovereignty for Canadians. This means “connecting that people have a say in how their food is produced and where it comes from. Food sovereignty seeks to rebuild the relationship between people and the land, and between those who grow and harvest food and those who eat it,” says the website....

In the February issue of Mindful, you can read our feature article about how some urban meditation studios are meeting the needs of their unique—and growing—communities. Below you’ll find guided meditations from some of the studios so you can get a feel for what happens inside their classes. Guided Meditations from Urban Meditation Studios: Intro to Breath, from MNDFL New York, NY mndflmeditation.com “This basic mindfulness of breath meditation is a way to cultivate peace, clarity, and generally a good way to get to know ourselves better....

1) Think about someone else’s pain and how you might help When you’re going through a hard time, it can feel all-consuming, and even hurtful, that the rest of the world is just skipping along as always while your reality has been turned upside down. Yet when things are going well, we can be strangely oblivious that someone else might be experiencing the same kind of difficulty we’ve known. Is there someone in your sphere right now who is struggling?...

Whatever the habit is that you want to make, here are a few practical tips to help make your changes stick. How to Make Your New Habits Stick 1. Choose the right practice If you’re trying to integrate the ability to become more present in your daily life, choose what you want to practice. You may want to integrate a more formal mindfulness practice that would come in the form of a sitting meditation or mindful yoga....

This is a huge elephant in the room, and so we say, “Clearly we are white older women of privilege and don’t know your culture or the issues you face. But you are the people to take mindfulness beyond the white world and it’s time for us to get out of the way.” There was an audible letting go in the room. People were happy to have the situation named and for us to show respect for their efforts to bring diversity to this work....

At the inauguration, we joined close to a million people stretching from the west front of the Capitol down the Mall and to the Lincoln Memorial for a great party that I found both uplifting and moving. It was a momentous moment: America’s first black president was being sworn in for a second term on Martin Luther King Day, fifty years after Dr. King delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the opposite end of the Mall....

That’s when I spot the guy who suggested I try this yoga class. The congressman has flipped his dog. He’s turned his downward dog almost inside out—back bent, belly up. The moment offers one answer to the central question of this story: How does Representative Tim Ryan truly live his mindfulness practice? As I stick with downward dog, he looks like he could hang out upside down all day, and the more I get to know him, it’s clear his steadiness is not limited to the yoga mat....