“My mission was never ever to be a meditation teacher,” he explains. “It just ended up being, ‘Ok, this practice has changed my life, let me share it.’” As a musician, public speaker and soon-to-be author, Williams says he considers his practice to be “the glue that holds my whole life together.” But before meditation would bring his life together, everything had to fall apart. Bringing Meditation Home William grew up in Pittsburg, California, in a neighbourhood plagued by gun violence....

Managing chronic disease People with chronic illnesses like diabetes, asthma, cancer, and heart disease often experience anxiety and depression. Both can interfere with self-regulation, which makes managing medications and maintaining healthy habits challenging. Researchers in Boston asked 92 adults with a chronic illness combined with anxiety and depression to participate in an 8-week program that included mindfulness, self-compassion, mindfulness-oriented behavior skills, and developing a self-management action plan. At the end of 8 weeks participants showed significant improvements in disease management compared to a wait-list control group....

The film explores the practice of forgiveness through a compelling range of stories, from personal betrayal to global reconciliation after genocide. Acclaimed writer, producer and director Helen Whitney takes viewers on an intimate look into the spontaneous outpouring of forgiveness around the world and among different cultures and ethnicities. “Forgiveness is elusive, mysterious, primal… an idea and an ache, which is rooted in existential concerns. My intention is to complicate this vitally important subject....

Do you use the morning drive to prepare for the day to come? Is driving a placeholder, a time for fitting in extraneous activities? Do you let the frustrations of the road soak into your body and spirit, filling you with anger or draining you of energy? A one-minute mindfulness approach to driving can improve your emotional tone, stress level, and ability to be open and adaptable. When I discuss the brain and multitasking in workshops, I often ask participants to share stories about multitasking while driving....

As the world has evolved, whether it’s in a personal way or it’s in a global way, we have tremendous difficulty with people. Now I did a group in Barre, Massachusetts where the Insight Meditation Society is that I co-founded in 1976. And this guy in that group said to me, “You know my whole life I’ve thought that of course we like everybody, but loving somebody—that’s like an extremely unusual, rare, rare state....

As I listened to Susan, I was struck by the sense that her joy reflected a much deeper discovery: that a spaciousness and freedom from reactive, auto-pilot leadership can be accessed by cultivating mindfulness. Leaders remember something fundamental about being a human being as they recognize that there is a way to meet each moment of their lives without reactivity, judging, and storytelling. These are not only unnecessary but also cloud their ability to see clearly what is actually there and respond with greater wisdom....

We decided to put the review of the Headspace app in the magazine and a few more on mindful.org. But as we were doing that it also occurred to us to ask readers whether these kinds of apps are something that you use or would use. We’ll be eagerly awaiting your response. See the full table of contents for Mindful’s April 2013 issue.

To get a bird’s eye view of how mindfulness is being brought to bear in the delivery room and beyond, we had writer Susan Freinkel attend Bardacke’s classes, right alongside a group of expectant couples. And then when Bardacke talked about “contractions of life,” we saw this was a parenting story that’s relevant to everyone. The number one goal? Learning to recognize and accept what you’ve got and then working with it....

The Academy Award-winning actress is the founder of The Hawn Foundation, which promotes mindfulness techniques for schoolchildren through its MindUP program. Hawn joins a long list of presenters at the Omega Institute, including Dan Siegel, Sharon Salzberg and Susan Kaiser Greenland, to offer educators practical advice on instilling mindfulness in their students and on maintaining, and benefitting from, their own practices. Click here for more information.

After Pearl Harbor, the country united once again. Each citizen rose to the occasion and did what had to be done to protect the values we hold dear. Millions of women in my grandmother’s generation answered the call and entered the workforce. They brought their talents and skills out of the home and into the world of commerce. They forever changed the American workforce and broadened and enhanced the role of women in our society....

The tricky thing about trying to interpret research about mindfulness is that many studies that claim great things for mindfulness are less rigorous than others, even though they may be peer reviewed. Many have poor controls—or, as in one case, the test group may be properly compared to a group doing something else (like exercise), but both groups actually show similar rates of improvement. University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson and I used the most rigorous scientific standards to sift through the sea of publications on mindfulness and other kinds of meditation....

Holstee has devoted its Potluck Series to encouraging members of the Holstee community and beyond to talk about what happened in Ferguson, MO, over the past few months. Holstee cofounders Dave and Mike Radparvar and Fabian Pfortmüller asked that community members devote their next potluck to engaging in “an honest conversation about race and violence in this country.” From the letter: Today, our thoughts are with Mike Brown’s family, friends and loved ones....

Uplifting Leaders A nonprofit in Jackson Hole, WY, is strengthening resilience, one leader at a time. With the guidance of neuroscientist Amishi Jha, Becoming Jackson Whole delivers Mindfulness-Based Attention Training (MBAT) to local leaders in health care, education, law enforcement, and more. Many leaders are also learning how to deliver the training themselves. Starting in late 2021, MBAT will be open to anyone in the city. BJW founder Sara Flitner says, “It will always be affordable or free....

“This is the first report that demonstrates that formal compassion training decreases the tendency for the mind to wander, while increasing caring behavior not only towards others but towards oneself,” said James Doty, a co-author on the study, Stanford neurosurgeon and the founder and director of Stanford’s CCARE. Although mind wandering is not inherently a bad thing, researchers pinpointed a particular dynamic: after compassion meditation training, participants showed a reduction in mind wandering toward unpleasant topics and an increase in mind wandering toward pleasant topics....

Since 2013, Giertz engineered a helmet that brushes teeth, drones that cut hair, and a machine to help you wake up in the morning, none of which really worked they way they were supposed to. “My toothbrush helmet is recommended by zero out of 10 dentists, and it definitely did not revolutionize the world of dentistry—but it did completely change my life,” she says. In this TED Talk, Giertz shares three lessons on how making useless robots led her to discover a deep sense of joy that she shares with over 1 million subscribers on her YouTube channel....

To read more about the success of “HEP,” the control CIHM is using — and what it might mean to the study of mindfulness — click here.

Dacher Keltner: After her year in India, Adizah Eghan returned home to the San Francisco Bay Area to find herself in the fast lane of her career track. At only 25, she landed her dream job as a producer for the radio show and podcast, Snap Judgment. And then she had that experience that many of us have had, where we get what we think we always wanted… but then we want something more....

As I write to you from my kitchen, there’s a war displacing millions of people on the other side of the world in Ukraine. Temperatures in Antarctica were 70 degrees higher than normal this week. We’ve lost almost a million people to the COVID pandemic in the US. There’s a great resignation happening as millions of people reject toxicity in the workplace and leave their jobs. Social issues continue to divide us....

Few people know better about how expectant moms, their partners, and their families feel about birth than Nancy Bardacke. A longtime nurse-midwife and mindfulness meditation teacher, Bardacke decided to merge childbirth education with mindfulness practice after attending a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training retreat for health professionals led by Jon Kabat-Zinn several decades ago. In 1998, she gave birth to the Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP) program, and in 2012 her book Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond was published....