“My breath is boring—just the same thing over and over again! Surely there must be something more interesting to watch?” This kind of comment comes up quite often when people start mindfulness training. It’s good to be curious about why we practice mindfulness of breathing, but just because we experience some discomfort during the practice doesn’t mean it’s not helpful. In fact, perhaps it’s helpful partly because the breath shows us our discomfort and the patterns of relationship that perpetuate it....

He recently sat down with Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington Foundation – Brené Brown Endowed Chair at The Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy and is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness and her latest book Dare to Lead, which is the culmination of a seven-year study on courage and leadership Michael Gervais: Brené, how are you?...

What Is Loving-Kindness Meditation? Loving-kindness meditation focuses on developing feelings of goodwill, kindness and warmth towards others (Salzberg, 1997). As I’ve described in my TEDx talk, compassion, kindness and empathy are very basic emotions to us. Research shows that loving-kindness meditation has a tremendous amount of benefits ranging from benefitting well-being to giving relief from illness and improving emotional intelligence: Well-being Increases Positive Emotions & Decreases Negative Emotions In a landmark study, Barbara Frederickson and her colleagues found that practicing seven weeks of loving-kindness meditation increased love, joy, contentment, gratitude, pride, hope, interest, amusement, and awe....

It is more than possible though to not only survive the holiday season, but to even thrive and connect to your particular observance in a deeper and more profound way. Here are some common stressors that pop up this time this year, and mindful antidotes to help you through the discomfort. 1) Demands on Time In December, our schedules often fill up quickly with work and personal holiday parties. These back-to-back parties start to feel overwhelming as we try to juggle them with all of our other commitments....

At Mindful we are very excited to see our community grow, and we love fostering genuine communication and sharing among our Mindful readers. Being part of Mindful.org’s events and social media requires mutual trust and compassionate consideration. In order to maximize the benefits for all, no matter what kind of social community you find yourself in, it is important to abide by a few specific guidelines for safe sharing....

1. Notice any limiting beliefs that say you can’t do something. 2. In that moment, notice you’re awake and have the ability to see and do things differently. 3. Notice if there is any fear there. Meet it with self-compassion, and say to yourself, “Breathing in, I’m aware of this fear. Breathing out, may I be at ease.” 4. Respond with a learning mindset. You might say, “I’ve tried this before and it hasn’t worked for me, but this is a new moment, and maybe I can learn something from it....

How to Navigate Emotional Turbulence 1. Accept your vulnerability Acknowledge how vulnerable you and your moods are to seemingly small things, like snide remarks or lousy weather. Sensitivity is no cause for shame. Even though your skin may not be as thick as you would like it to be, you shouldn’t feel less than because of your emotions. 2. Edit your social life Friends that impact your well-being can definitely affect your moods....

Here is a practice for cultivating joy that you can use anytime and anywhere. You can do the entire practice in just eight breaths, or you can spend a few minutes on each exercise before moving on. Each breath has a single word to help you remember how to focus your attention. With the first breath, bring your awareness to the sensation of your breathing. Pay close attention to the physical sensation of your breath as it moves in and out....

A: When we touch in with pain, we are exploring what compassion looks like in our hearts, and in our world. So whether we’re watching the news, or we get an emergency call from a family member, our hearts go out to those who are in difficult situations. We realize we’re all connected and that we belong to the world. Then our work is to acknowledge what’s hard and be with that, allowing it to move us....

My husband’s legs are long, and mine are not. When we hike together he can move ahead quickly and I often find myself taking up the rear. This isn’t a problem, unless we’re hiking an unfamiliar trail. I remember hiking with him in Death Valley on a long, winding path, worried that we had gotten lost. I was wearing a hat with a big brim that flopped over my eyes and, because I was focused more on my feet than the horizon, before I realized it, he was far ahead of me....

In the 20 plus years that I have had the great privilege of working with leaders in a wide variety of business, government and non-profit organizations, I have often been struck by how hard they work, how dedicated they are to doing the best they can and how big their hearts are, even when they hesitate to feel them for themselves. And it is also true that there has been a never-ending drumbeat to do more with less, to react in time measured in internet seconds and to compete in an ever-growing and complex global marketplace....

July is now writing her second feature film, a story based on the fear of nothingness. This is not the subject of most feature films, but it is vintage July. Her career is one long string of surefooted surprises, from performance art to groundbreaking websites. July’s debut feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, won a major prize at Cannes, and this year critics are praising her first book of short stories, Nobody Belongs Here More than You....

Alison Armstrong, an advocate for sustainable consumption, took six self-confessed shopping addicts, trained them in mindfulness and has shared her results. Eight-weeks of training, Armstrong reports, helped the out-of-control consumers to spend less. They reported feeling happier, having more self-acceptance and less anxiety. Armstrong says shopping addiction is a real issue. Her report claims 8-16 per cent of Britain’s adults are addicted to shopping. Though sometimes, passed off as a minor ailment, this addiction is no joke....

We all had the great honor to be together at the Metropolitan Club at New York’s Central Park late last month, celebrating Goldie Hawn’s work in trying to bring social and emotional learning to schools in America through the MindUP program. MindUP features lessons to improve behavior and learning for children that, the foundation says, can fit easily into any schedule and can be implemented with minimal preparation. The program provides children with emotional and cognitive tools to help them manage emotions and behaviors, reduce stress, sharpen concentration, and increase empathy and optimism....

“There are very few people who are talking about it in a way that can relate to someone raised in the age of irony,” says Harris. “We need to have people who don’t use terms like ‘sacred space’ and the ‘goddess mother.’ We need people who can talk about it in a normal way.”

Mindfulness instruction lasted 1—12 minutes, and included focused attention on the breath, sounds, or bodily sensations. After each session, teens rated their level of rumination and emotional state. In the end, 90% of the teens used the app, with the typical user completing 29 minutes of training, or an average of 1.5 sessions per day, with 91% of these sessions lasting 1 minute. Girls and older teens showed the most immediate improvements in mood and rumination after each session....

From the moment it started, I couldn’t contain my excitement. The nerd in me was blown away by the extraordinary way in which many of the movie’s messages “measured up” to reality from a neuro-scientific perspective. For example, the way a day full of short-term/working memories is then consolidated during sleep. While the film gave up some scientific integrity for the sake of storytelling, its poetic license didn’t drive too far away from the reality that we are, essentially, made up of personality traits that wax and wane during different points in our life....

What do your people know that you don’t? Have you made an effort to find out? Have you created a culture in which people expect to learn from each other up and across the organizational chart as well as down? It may feel a bit unsettling to encourage people under you to show that they know more than you do, but people are always going to know things you don’t know....