You can see maybe why I wanted to bring him here today to talk about why mindfulness is helpful for our present day maladies and what we can learn from ninja training to get out of our heads and into our lives. Elisha: Why is mindfulness so effective in working with our personal mental, emotional and physical maladies? Richard: I begin to feel like a snake oil salesman when I talk about all the research demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness, but the key factor is awareness....

Cecile says after practicing meditation daily for one month, her panic attacks began to dissipate. “Now, when I feel my anxiety come up, I can name it, […] I can feel it come up, and I know that, like my breath, it’s going to come up and leave out of my body, so I shouldn’t attach to it.” In this video, Cecil talks about her anxiety and discusses how being mindful of her feelings and attempting to be aware of the present has changed her sense of reality, which she previously felt she had no control over....

Guided Meditation VR is the first virtual reality meditation app to hit the scene. Developed by Cubicle Ninjas, it allows you to “expand your mind,” by placing a headset over your eyes and ears and immersing yourself in a serene illustrated environment like a lush, sandy beach or a burnt orange and rusty red-hued treescape, while listening to a guided meditation of your choosing (the nine options include “Zen” and “Relaxation”)....

How annoying is that? Relaxation is distinctly not something you can just command yourself to do. It needs to come over you and perhaps, ultimately, to overcome you. That’s one of the reasons so many of us grow to appreciate mindfulness practice. It sneaks up on stress from the side. It lulls us into letting go of obsessively grasping for a permanent security blanket. But we’re not instructed to “just relax....

The entire program will cost us around $160,000, and the funds will contribute to Mindful Moment trainers, Mindful Moment staff, classroom supplies, administrative expenses, and more. To see the whole proposal with a breakdown of spending, click here. To learn more about the Holistic Life Foundation and their campaign to start the Mindful Moment program, visit their indiegogo page. The short video below also explains what HLF wants Mindful Moment to look and feel like....

A Joyful Retreat In September, InsightLA hosted “Creating Joy in Community,” the first residential meditation retreat by and for transgender, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and genderqueer (collectively, trans*) people. Mindfulness and Buddhist practitioners, as well as new meditators, attended the four-day program. It was broadly accessible, thanks to scholarships (from donations), care for accessibility needs, and a trauma-informed approach. All the retreat’s teachers and staff are also trans*. Martin Vitorino, InsightLA’s Director of Programming and a retreat leader, noted that factors like gendered housing plans and few teachers of diversity can make other retreats untenable for trans* people....

The fifth and final step asked participants to take part in exposure exercises. The exercises required participants to provoke IBS symptoms, to eliminate behaviours that served to control symptoms, and to expose them to situations where symptoms were particularly unwanted. The results of the study showed that compared to the control group, participants in the mindfulness training group improved on IBS-related quality of life and gastrointestinal-specific anxiety, depression, and general functioning....

So how do we cultivate that safe space? It starts with knowledge. I found out things about myself and others. I discovered what I attracted in my life. I honored my own complicity. I learned from my actions and the actions of those around me. My closest friends taught me my most important lessons and for that I am forever grateful. My family set the foundation for me to even recognize the lessons my friends would bring....

We use weekly “Too Hot To Handle” check-ins to take each others’ temperature, see who’s “on fire,” and discuss how we can spread the work around to make sure we’re hot enough to keep us warm, not burn us out. Sometimes our systems fail us. Sometimes we take on too much. It takes all of us working together to maintain compassionate systems that support our thriving at work. This New Year, rather than offering you a “New Year, New You” issue, we wanted to to explore how mindfulness can help with one of the most complex problems of our time: burnout....

From the article: “A good example of how it can work is when you’re kept awake at night thinking,” says Williams. “You toss and turn and you get angry because you can’t sleep. The anger doesn’t help, but you can’t seem to stop it. Mindfulness isn’t about suppressing those thoughts, but about enabling you to stand back and observe them as if they were clouds going past in the sky....

Jane Brox • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt An author fascinated by the fundamental aspects of life, Jane Brox has written about family, farmland, and light—all to great acclaim. She is a micro-historian with a farmer’s feel for the value of getting dirt under your fingernails to get to the heart of the matter. Using the modern technique of alternating and intertwining stories, Brox reports on silence as a means of reform in early penitentiaries (thought to be more humane than corporal or capital punishment) and as a means of spiritual development in the monastery....

The Institute will bring experts on compassion, empathy, and mindfulness together with a selected group of 60 educators to equip teachers and administrators with research-based skills to boost their own emotional well-being as well as the social and emotional well-being of their students. Speakers include : Rick Hanson, Ph.D., neuropsychologist and author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Lasting Inner Strength; Megan Cowan, co-founder of Mindful Schools, and Vicki Zakrzewski, Ph....

Focus on Cycling: Albuquerque Bicycle Transportation Examiner Karolyn Hudson has been following a sports psychology program, with Dr. Dana Blackmer, to improve her cycling. In this third lesson, mindfulness becomes a part of the assignment. Mouthfuls of Mindfulness: Whether you overeat, undereat, or just feel conflicted about how you eat, mindfulness practice, says physician Jan Chozen Bays, can help you rediscover a healthy and joyful relationship with food. Backyard Mindfulness: Naturalist John Bates shares his ever-growing appreciation of the phenology of the Manitowish River, where he lives....

The installation cost around £34 million, and was created in collaboration with artist Brian Eno. The result is a quiet room playing Eno’s music where patients can have a chance to relax or de-stress. Turner said the hospital will test pulse, blood, anxiety, and other physiological changes to people in the “Eno room.” Eno, considered the godfather of ambient music, told The Guardian that the collaboration “seemed a natural step for me to take as I’ve been dealing with this idea of functional music for quite a few years....

In this recent Ted Talk, Andy Puddicombe, founder of Headspace (a project that works to demistify meditation through the Headspace App and exercises available online) explains how putting everything down for ten minutes a day gives the brain a much-needed moment to rest and recuperate. But putting everything down doesn’t mean meditation requires no thoughts at all. “Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind,” Puddicombe explains, “But actually it’s about stepping back, seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going....

This accelerated pace also prevents me from knowing that I ate, how much I ate, and whether I even liked what I ate. How many times have you stopped after being lost in thought and found the potato chip bag empty without even realizing that you ate them all? To live fully in the present moment and wake up to our senses requires that we put on the brakes a little....

However, even with the increase in mindfulness practice and mental health awareness, the diseases of despair (suicide, substance misuse, alcohol-related disease), and the many stress-mediated chronic diseases (heart disease, high blood pressure, depression) are on the rise, leading to a continued decline in U.S. life expectancy. Perhaps we’re still missing a piece of the puzzle? As a licensed psychologist, professor, and co-founder of Open Source Wellness, I have a particular take on this problem....

I’m excited for more people to learn about these valuable tools for living a healthy life—your brother, your mom, the guy in your office who just took stress leave. Mindful.org has been a great start. Mindful magazine is a further step. And MindfulTV—a video channel devoted to the new definition of health—would complete the picture. I made a personal donation on behalf of my granddaughters, who I hope will experience mindfulness as part of their early education....

From the Newsweek article: But the research is now making it clear that the Internet is not “just” another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed. To read the Newsweek article, “Is the Web Driving Us Mad?” click here. 19/07/12 [image © flickr.com/ssoosay]