One of the pieces of research that stuck with me was by Wendy Hasenkamp who is now Research Director at Mind and Life Institute. She looked at the basic move in meditation. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing a visualization or compassion or mindfulness, the basic movement is this: when your mind wanders off, notice that it’s wandered, remove it from where it’s gotten attached, and put it back on your point of focus....

“Some describe tango as more martial art than dance. It’s not a kick-up-your-heels, let-yourself-go-completely kind of good time,” writes Tracy Picha, freelance writer and former editor of Mindful. “Because concentration is the name of the game when you’re trying to sense in another body the most subtle shifts in energy and weight and timing and angles, and every move or phrase is dictated but the order of them improvised.” [08/07/14 edited 08/08/14]

An article posted recently on Veterans Today explores whether anything that can be done prior to deployment to help “vaccinate” soldiers from the damaging effects of extreme or prolonged stress of combat. According to the Mind-Fitness Training Institute (MFTI), the obvious answer is mindfulness meditation. MFTI founder, Elizabeth Stanley, “has conducted studies with military personnel that show regular practice of mindfulness meditation corresponded with decreases in perceived stress and the development of fewer functional impairments in high stress contexts....

After the two-month meditation training, participants were less anxious and thought of themselves more positively. People with social anxiety disorder tend to be overly critical of themselves and often believe others are assuming the worst about them. While many people beat themselves up once in a while, people with get stuck on negative views of themselves. In the study, Goldin, along with postdoctoral scholar Wiveka Ramel and psychology Professor James Gross, found that nine sessions of mindfulness meditation training made people with social anxiety disorder feel less anxious and less depressed and improved their self-views....

He predicts meditation will be the next public health revolution. “In the 1940s if you told people that you went running they would say, who’s chasing you. Right now if you tell people you meditate—and I have a lot of experience with telling people this, they’re going to look at you like you’re a little weird most of the time. That’s going to change.” Harris notes that the benefits of mindfulness are so widespread that what seems to be holding mindfulness back is its ambassadors—often people who brand themselves as “self-help gurus” and make meditation seem like something reserved for yurt-dwelling individuals....

Wondering how you can incorporate some of those benefits into your own pregnancy? Here are her five tips for having a mindful pregnancy and early parenthood from Aimee Karr, who teaches yoga and meditation for pregnancy at her studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Slow down. Every month, a student in her second or third trimester will approach me and say something like: “Whenever I’m walking fast, I get this sharp pain in my [insert body part]....

Barry: And I’m Barry Boyce. Founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org. And I write the regular column Point of View. Stephanie: And this is the Point of View podcast. Stephanie: This is probably a good time to let you know that there is some unbridled language in this podcast. This might not be the one to listen to with kids present or those who would prefer not to hear people swearing....

Lesser, who has been practicing meditation for 30 years, is the author of Z.B.A.: Zen of Business Administration and, more recently, Less: Accomplishing More by Doing Less (both from New World Library). He earned an MBA from NYU’s graduate school of business and spent 15 years developing a greeting card company, Brush Dance, from a garage operation to a multi-million-dollar business. He now operates ZBA Associates, which provides consulting services to businesses around the world....

In the study, researchers in China assigned 46 college student volunteers to either a brief mindfulness meditation group intervention, or an emotion regulation education group. The meditation intervention, which was offered to 22 students, was based on core concepts of mindfulness and Vipassana breath meditation, combined with “knowledge gained from [the authors’] practical experience and from scientific reports on meditation.” The training involved a 30-minute lecture on theory of mindfulness meditation, followed by seven days of 15-minute audio-guided group meditation sessions....

However she says writing off the rioters as mindless individuals is a cop-out. She says using this label creates an “us versus them” paradigm. This dehumanizes the rioters and negates any hope of understanding the sources of their discontent. She proposes “careful listening” as a form of political action instead. She writes: Baker says one of the motivations behind the riots may well be a lack of listening. To read more of her post on this issue, click here....

Though the list of speakers is still being finalized, it now includes Pat Christen, Chip Conley, Stuart Crabb, Rich Fernandez, Michelle Gale, Soren Gordhamer, Scott Kriens, Eric Schiermeyer and Meng Tan. For more information about Wisdom Business 2.0, click here. To register, click here.

I called my talk Self-Care is An Act of Resistance: Shifting the Fight-or-Flight Response to Empathy-or-Action Response and here’s why. The main idea is that neither “fighting” nor “fleeing” are sustainable. More than that, they are responses we can move away from, we can evolve beyond. We often hear that our brains are hard-wired for fight-or-flight, that “we evolved this way,” but we know now that we continue to evolve....

I will fish out a snow globe, wind up the musical box at its base, shake it and place it on a table. Then I will put my hand on my abdomen, and ask the kids to put their hands on their tummies. Together we will feel our breaths move up and down as we watch the snow fall and settle in the globe. When the snow has settled to the bottom of the snow globe, I will shake it again....

Since 2007, Bauer-Wu has been an associate professor of nursing at Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and a Georgia Cancer Center Coalition Distinguished Scholar. As the the Tussi and John Kluge Endowed Professor in Contemplative End-of-Life Care, Bauer-Wu will be co-cordinating across disciplines to gather research and information on compassionate practices, as well as support patients on complex end-of-life issues. In this video from Emory University, Bauer-Wu discusses how mindfulness practices can support caregivers and reduce stress....

67% of cell owners check their phone for messages and alerts even when the phone is not alerting you. 44% of cell owners sleep with their phone next to the bed so they don’t miss out on the next dollop of dopamine in the brain from receiving the “ding” of a new text or email. 71% of teens use more than one social networking site. Though I can claim ignorance around things like Instagram or Snapchat, I also find myself among the 50% of the population who have taken a selfie....

Increasing scientific evidence, thanks to the works of Drs. Thupten Jinpa, Kristin Neff, James Doty, and many others, has shown that compassion has benefits not to be ignored—lower stress responses and symptoms of depression, greater levels of life satisfaction, creativity, and physical health. Compassion is generative. Compassion motivates action. We also know that compassion can be learned through formal meditation practices and gratitude journaling. These and other evidenced-based tools encourage self-compassion, empathy, non-judgment, capacity to listen, sense of shared humanity, and presence....

• Attention. By consciously choosing to place the mind on an object, we are training our capacity to pay attention. Attention is also trained by moving the mind from one object to another, and by coming back to an object when we notice the mind has wandered. Training attention in a body scan is a bit like doing resistance work in the gym—it takes some effort, but it cultivates strength and flexibility....

Yet when we talk about mindful meditation, often we are thinking about a combination of practices. These might include breath awareness—focusing on your breath and letting thoughts and feelings pass by without attachment—and loving-kindness meditation, in which you wish yourself and others peace, happiness, and well-being. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course, for example, includes both of these—plus yoga, walking meditation, and more—all practiced for several minutes a day each....

(Funny story: I once attended a mindfulness workshop where the facilitator announced at the very end of the workshop, “So, let’s all pause one last time and take our final breath together.” I had NO IDEA that attending this workshop was going to be my final act on earth! I couldn’t stop chuckling to myself at her choice of words while everyone else was dutifully and seriously attending to their respective breaths....