Her new book 10 Mindful Minutes, is also subtitled “Giving our children—and ourselves—the social and emotional skills to reduce stress and anxiety for healthier happy lives.” To read an article in The Telegraph about Goldie Hawn’s recent mindfulness projects, click here. For Mindful.org’s ongoing coverage of Hawn Foundation activities, click here. 02/24/12

The examples of compassionate companies range from those contributing to charities to those entrenched in local communities—like Panera Cares in Chicago, a restaurant that asks customers to pay only what they can afford. USA Today reported that Panera Cares uses profit primarily to job-train at-risk kids, and muses that “corporate kindness” could one day become as commonplace as coupons. For those of us whose workplaces aren’t included in the 25% of US companies with stress reduction initiatives for staff, corporate kindness might seem more like a distant trend than a day-to-day reality....

The lack of support available to help them navigate this environment has providers feeling as though they can’t keep up. According to most estimates, nearly 50% of doctors in the US are burned out. Many are ready to quit and there is an expected shortage of 120,000 physicians in the US by the year 2030. As this mental health crisis rages on, there is a rising cry among the healers for a return to the joy, meaning, and connection that initially called them into their chosen profession....

The exponential rate of development in new technologies will revolutionize almost every industry worldwide within the coming decades. Rapid breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, the internet of things, nanotechnology and, biotechnology promise to dissolve the distinction between our physical and digital worlds forever. At the Summit, Uber founder Travis Kalanik predicted that within 5-10 years most taxis will be automated and, rather than calling a driver, we’ll communicate with cars through sophisticated AI....

In my role as director of the Mindfulness Initiative, a policy institute that provides the research and administrative support to the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness, I’m helping MPs engage with the Department for Education on mindfulness and offering a number of suggestions for their consideration. These suggestions could be helpful for anyone thinking of bringing mindfulness training into schools. Mindfulness in Schools: Potential Problems and How to Fix Them Know the difference between focussed awareness and mindful awareness Firstly, we emphasize that mindfulness is more than just calm and concentration....

A Mindfulness Practice: Be Kinder to Yourself 1. Think of a situation in your life that is difficult and causing you stress. This might mean a difficult relationship, a challenge at work or school, concern you’re feeling for the pain of a loved one, or anything else that comes to mind. It’s usually best to go with the first thing your thoughts land on. 2. With the situation in mind, recognize if you feel the stress in your body....

Everyone probably doesn’t feel the same way as I do, but perhaps they should. While being in nature leads to better health, creativity, and even kindness, there may be something special about being among trees. After all, trees are important to our lives in many ways. The most obvious is their role in producing the oxygen we breathe and sequestering carbon dioxide to help protect our atmosphere; but science suggests trees provide other important benefits, too....

Duration: Full Time Job Description Come join the dynamic team at Mindful—a public benefit corporation dedicated to sharing secular mindfulness with the world, as a support to good health, positive relationships, and the creation of a compassionate society. With a monthly audience of over two million, this is a chance to make a real impact! You’ll enjoy our positive, flexible, and collaborative work culture. We like what we do, but more importantly, we like each other....

I led the creation of a Google training program called “Search Inside Yourself,” which was designed to help people put down that mental baggage and approach each new situation with a present, focused mind. It quickly became the most highly rated course in all of Google, with huge waiting lists. Search Inside Yourself works in three steps. It begins with attention training to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear....

Parlan McGaw, who leads Meditation for Actors in New York City, has been acting since he was a child. When he started practicing meditation in 1988, he began to see how complementary the two practices were. “I had an instinctual feeling,” he told me,” that meditation and acting fed each other—that meditation could enhance acting, and any artistic pursuit for that matter.” McGaw looked into contemplative theater but decided that he was not so interested in creating theatrical productions based on contemplative philosophy....

So it’s no surprise that therapists have taken an interest in using mindfulness with their patients. The potential for benefit is clearly great. But how can therapists actually incorporate mindfulness into their practice? And, is it always helpful to patients? To get answers to these questions, look no further than Sitting Together: Essential Skills for Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy. The authors—Harvard-based psychologists Susan Pollak and Ronald Siegel, and clinical social worker Thomas Pedulla—provide a wealth of research demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness for both therapists and patients, along with detailed guidance on when and how mindfulness practices might be useful in specific therapeutic situations....

And, as we’ve also pointed out, together with Dan Harris, talking to people about meditation with a holier than thou attitude is the surest road to being ignored. When it comes to people telling you how to work with your own mind, skepticism is healthy. Professor Grant is having the natural, intelligent, response to being oversold on something. Good for him, and good for us all. Perhaps his outcry about stopping “the meditation madness” is a signal that it’s time for those of us who are proponents of meditation to move beyond cheerleading and preaching to simply serving the hundreds of thousands of people who readily accept that meditation is beneficial while continuing the slow work of finding objective evidence of effectiveness....

“More and more people report using meditation practices for stress reduction, but we know very little about how much you need to do for stress reduction and health benefits,” said lead author David Creswell. A similar number has been echoed lately by another neuroscientist: Richard Davidson of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, U-W Madison. As Davidson tells Mindful, research is beginning to show how as little as 30 minutes per day training our minds to do something different can result in measurable changes that can be tracked in a brain scanner....

Contemplatives including Matthieu Ricard, Sharon Salzberg, and Joan Halifax will deliver Keynote Address and Master Lectures on the nature of contemplative practices and how they can inform science. For registration and other information visit contemplativeresearch.org.

Feeling good in your own skin Do mindful people feel better about their bodies? Researchers asked 115 female college students about their level of mindfulness, body responsiveness, body shame, and overall health. Women who reported greater awareness and who tended to be nonjudgmental and nonreactive—key mindfulness skills—had less body shame, were more attuned to their bodies, and were healthier overall. The researchers say it’s not yet clear whether mindfulness increases body satisfaction, or vice versa....

A recent report from the United States that examined pregnancies between 2014 and 2018 found that the number of women being diagnosed with postpartum depression is nearly one in 10, a jump of almost 30% from 2014. In Canada a 2018 survey found that almost one-quarter (23%) of mothers reported feelings consistent with a diagnosis of postpartum depression or anxiety. There is growing evidence that mindfulness training may be effective in reducing the risk of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders....

There’s only so long such a story can be news, and it’s interesting that recently we’ve started to see the appearance of a number of pieces offering a more critical view. This is—in my opinion—an excellent thing, partly because it suggests the known benefits of mindfulness are now sufficiently understood as to no longer be remarkable. But it’s also a good thing as it creates an opportunity for reflection on some of the challenges thrown up by the very rapid shift adoption of mindfulness practices in contemporary western culture....