Brewer is developer of a new app, Eat Right: Now! ($19.99/month, IOS and Android) that trains users to differentiate between stress-related hunger and actual physiological hunger. Participants learn mindfulness practices to ride out cravings and they can find support from the online community. People are using the online community in part to talk about one major experience: constant cravings. Once a pattern of eating is established, hunger caused by stress and hunger that comes from needing nourishment get conflated....

In his article, Brooks talks about the need for leaders skilled in the art of collaboration in light of the escalating conflicts between President Obama and the Republicans in Congress. Brooks suggests that a truly collaborative leader needs to be an “honest broker” between individual parties in order to rally interested parties behind a unified effort. He writes: In an essay posted on LinkedIn, Walker argues that collaborative organizations usually need a person at the top who “is widely trusted and capable of rallying the interested parties behind the unified effort....

I have a secret I’m going to share with you that I tell the people who come to the Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy groups I lead. You are not so special or so bad. I’m sorry. You are ordinary. I find that such a relief. Trying to live up to some unrealistic standard of who I should be and what I should accomplish is ultimately exhausting and demoralizing. Whose standard is it anyway?...

Britton’s research is often quoted by traditional media. Here she is, in her own words, talking about some of the messy truths about mindfulness. Meditation is not all peace and calm. Sometimes stuff can come up that needs to be dealt with. Meditation is not the “warm bath” it’s been marketed as in this country, Britton says. “A lot of psychological material is going to come up and be processed....

The event, celebrating its fifth year in 2014, will draw a crowd of 1500+ to explore the great challenge of our age: To not only live connected to one another through technology, but to do so in ways that are beneficial to our own well-being, effective in our work, and useful to the world. The 2014 conference includes optional Monday Intensive sessions, allowing an entire day to delve into a single topic of interest; and a People’s Stage, offering breakout sessions chosen by conference participants....

1) Education In California, the Insight-Out program engages victims, prison administrators, community members, and inmates to find new ways of “doing prison” that are more humane and effective than the current punitive model. As part of the program, inmates mentor at-risk youth and receive certification in domestic violence training, which allows them to educate others about domestic abuse. In San Quentin alone, more than 400 prisoners have signed up for the program....

Here Tara Healey, founder of the MTM program, discusses why she does it, and introduces Harvard Pilgrim’s new mindfulness “e-Learning” class. (Healey was also a presenter at last Fall’s Creating a Mindful Society conference in New York.) Read on and follow the link to e-Learning below for more. In high school… I was curious about why some kids were happy and others struggled. My interest was in human behavior and how the mind worked, although I wouldn’t have used that language then....

Presumably it’s because we really don’t like ourselves too much. Once the cycle of self-dislike gets started, then it takes a huge amount of determination and effort to make changes. And the mind is a perfect servant, as it will do whatever it’s told, but it’s a terrible master as it fails to help us help ourselves. Which can be even harder when our mind is like a deranged monkey, leaping from one thought or drama to the next, never allowing us time to be quiet, peaceful and still....

A 12-Minute Meditation to Cultivate an Open Heart read more Elaine Smookler January 16, 2023 Nate Klemp, Eric Langshur, Mark Bertin, Jason Gant, Sharon Salzberg, Michelle Maldonado, and Diana Winston January 11, 2023 Eric Langshur and Nate Klemp January 11, 2023

A Meditation to Nurture a Felt Sense of Gratitude read more Mindful Staff September 21, 2022 Elaine Smookler December 20, 2022 Carly Hunt July 27, 2022

Time required: 15 minutes daily for at least a week (though evidence suggests that mindfulness increases the more you practice it). The most basic way to do mindful breathing is simply to focus your attention on your breath, the inhale and exhale. You can do this while standing, but ideally you’ll be sitting or even lying in a comfortable position. Your eyes may be open or closed, but you may find it easier to maintain your focus if you close your eyes....

As this practice becomes comfortable for you, you can use it to combat everyday stress. If you feel unmoored, lost, or pulled in different directions, take a moment to wish yourself peace, just as you’d comfort a friend. A Practice to Foster Resilience Reprinted with permission: New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Copyright © 2015 by Mark Bertin, from Mindful Parenting for ADHD

Yet as easy as it is to engage in the quotidian “thanks—no problem” exchange in our daily routines, we’re often left, in moments of larger generosity, feeling unworthy or embarrassed by what’s being offered. If you’ve ever thwarted a friend’s attempt to treat you to dinner or received a gift that you insisted was “too much,” you may be struck by that thankfulness gap. So, if “thank you” is too easy to say in some instances, and out of our reach in others, how can we go beyond a muttered “thanks” to one that’s truly underpinned with gratitude?...

Athletes, coaches, and team owners are struggling to combine their aspirations of winning with the—not always popular or even welcome—role model status that accompanies elite competition. In my opinion, mindfulness meditation can help accomplish both winning and creating a healthier culture within sport—and it doesn’t have to be a choice between one or the other. I realize that a good lot of you appreciate this. But I was an eye-rolling skeptic at one point in my athletic and coaching career....

Now, Seligman is promoting a new book called Flourishing, which says that it’s not all about happiness, it’s about an acronym he created called PERMA (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment). How do we flourish? The idea is to find which of these matter most to you, create a goal on how to improve this area of your life, create a plan on how to reach that goal, and then monitor your progress....

Imagine for a moment the amount of energy you expend brooding over the future, ruminating about the past, comparing yourself to others, judging yourself, worrying about what might happen next. That is a huge amount of energy. Now imagine all of that energy gathered in and returned to you. Underlying our usual patterns of self-preoccupation, stinging self-judgment, and fear is the universal, innate potential for love and awareness. Loving-kindness meditations point us back to a place within, where we can cultivate love and help it flourish....

It’s no wonder we feel afraid. We hear every day about terrible things­—accidents, addiction, assaults, aneurysms, adultery, Alzheimer’s, attacks, amputations, abductions, atherosclerosis, abandonment, AIDS—and these are just a few at the beginning of the alphabet. Some misfortunes are caused by other people, some by our own missteps, and many simply by the fact that everything changes—we age, our children grow up, economic conditions shift, storms brew, wood rots, metal rusts, everything that is born dies....