Well-Being Is More Than Just Meditation In the past two decades, the science of well-being has grown. We know that “flourishing” (defined as a combination of physical, emotional, and mental health) is a state of mind where life feels good. Flourishing is not about perfection or being happy all the time, but a recognition that when we have purpose, meaning, and connection in our lives, getting out of bed every morning is easier....

Playing sports requires moment-to-moment attention combined with loose, flexible awareness. It’s a place where what’s going on in our head has to synch with what’s happening on the ground. Therefore, it’s a place where lots of mind training takes place. Professional athletes, without a doubt, are the most significant role models for many young men. Unfortunately, too many players fail to be truly meaningful role models for deep values that can carry you through life whether you succeed in sports or not....

The photos circulating through the Internet were of a polar bear and a dog playing together. I first saw them in a National Geographic magazine many years ago and was captivated by the story. A dog named Churchill was tied up to a stake in the ice. His owner spotted a starving bear, just out of hibernation, through the window of his cabin. He watched in horror as the bear approached his dog....

By using mindfulness as part of therapy, deep levels of information can be accessed quite readily. Most therapists are used to asking questions such as, “How does that make you feel” and “What happens when you do that?” We are less familiar with guiding a client into a state where he or she can answer these questions from direct experience instead of simply trying to figure something out cognitively. Mindfulness basically involves paying careful attention, without judgment or preference, to the details of present moment that are often missed as we rush through our lives....

“This sort of unrequited passion – so often celebrated in literature and society more generally – may sound generous and in that sense loving, but a devotion to an unrequited situation is, in truth, a clever way of ensuring we won’t end up in a relationship at all; that we won’t ever need to suffer the realities of love,” he explains. Whether you’re pining over someone who broke it off, or can’t stop thinking about a crush who could have been the one, here are three ways to move on from heartbreak:...

Meditation is not something you only do by yourself. That’s a myth. It’s not private navel-gazing. There’s a big element of sharing with others and finding and giving support. We asked six meditation teachers for advice on how to keep going when you hit a wall. Here’s what they said: Donald McCown “You’re not getting the full deal unless you are involved in a community. One thing meditation offers is a real connection to other humans....

Here are five postures for you to try so that you can focus on your practice and get more out of your meditation. You can watch me teach all of these different ways to sit in this video. 5 Meditation Postures for Beginners 1. Classic Sitting In classic sitting we want to create an upright posture. We want to keep the spine straight to facilitate easy breathing, and we want ease in our bodies so that we can focus on our breath, our body, or sounds around us....

Saveland had begun to take an interest in work done at a human performance laboratory at the University of Montana that suggested there were many similarities between firefighters and elite endurance athletes. He then started to research endurance athletic training that employed mindfulness training, and was impressed with how applicable this approach might be to firefighter training. Last year, he and Putnam piloted a half-day course that introduced firefighters to situational awareness and recent research on the benefits of enhancing it....

Wow. People used to assume that baseline happiness is unchangeable, but I am living proof that it can be moved from high negative to high positive with only a few years of practice. It is really about the training. In my Search Inside Yourself class, for example, the vast majority of participants did little or no meditation before the class, but after just a few days or weeks of meditation, many of them reported meaningful increases in happiness....

One curriculum in Harlem has kids lead each other in meditation and sit for about 10 minutes a day. The teachers have been trained in the RULER program, designed at Yale University, with the goal of helping children develop emotional intelligence. The results of this program reflects the research on emotional intelligence: “They’re doing better in school. They have more positive relationships and on top of that, they have better physical and psychological well-being,” says child development expert Denise Daniels in an article from the Time Warner Cable News....

We reported in the August issue of Mindful magazine that Chris Ruane, the Vale of Clwyd MP, had invited 12 MPs to spend 75 minutes a day meditating for 8 weeks. And it looks like Ruane’s efforts as parliament’s leading advocate for mindfulness are paying off. So far, more than 50 MPs have participated in the mindfulness course Ruane set up in conjunction with the Oxford Center for Mindfulness. The Huffington Post reported that another round of the 8-week course is due to start in February, with a further 25 signed up....

Janice Marturano is spearheading the blog. She’s the founder and executive director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership. And she also contributes to Mindful magazine in our In Practice: Work department. Marturano’s first post on the Mindful Leadership blog looks at the definition of a mindful leader. She writes: A mindful leader is someone who embodies leadership presence by cultivating focus, clarity, creativity and compassion in the service of others....

The weekend retreat will take place from September 14-16 in Lingfield, Surrey. It will offer an experiential introduction to mindfulness meditation, exploring what mindfulness is, how it can be cultivated and what it can bring to your life. For more information and to register for any of the retreats, click here. Ed also regularly teaches eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction courses—see London and Sussex for more on those. And click here to read Ed’s latest blog posts on Mindful....

If we go back to my worry-filled mind as I anticipated going snorkeling, we can see that talking about that experience is just the kind of opening that would help teens relate to a common pattern in their own minds. A great intervention to use with teens is to have them find out how many of their thoughts are actually about what’s going on here and now. They can see that by spending so much time in their mind on things that have already happened or are going to happen, they aren’t living their life right now....

The experience of mindfulness tells us that a moment of openness can serve as a powerful interruption in stuck patterns, but much depends on what happens next. What follows is a reflection that weaves between the personal practice of mindfulness and the social practice now emerging through the Occupy movement. When we practice mindfulness, we are taking a stand: we commit to occupying ourselves, to fully inhabiting our body and mind....

Amidst fantasies of building a sustainable, small-yeild garden for his daughter and “learning knife-throwing,” Oswalt ended up slinking around the web instead. “I still clicked on videos. Visited my usual news aggregate haunts. Wasted time,” he writes. Email, interrupted After a month, Oswalt noticed some changes to how he used his phone: By this point I rarely looked at my phone. The only times I’d use Twitter was to re-Tweet a link to a project I was involved in, or help promote a friend’s documentary, or fund­raising effort, or album release....