This comment comes from a brilliant young autistic woman who was told by her doctor that mindfulness would be good for her anxiety. She said it did the opposite: Mindfulness worsened her anxiety. In fact, it was a very negative experience that left her feeling like a failure. Unfortunately, I hear things like this often. I am part of a mindfulness research program at the Azrieli Adult Neurodevelopmental Centre at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, where in the course of the research, a large number of neurodiverse people have told me they are mindfulness “drop-outs....

Can’t get your hands on enough reading material about mindfulness? Check out Creating a Mindful Library: A sampling of essential books—new, classic, and forthcoming—specifically for those interested in living mindfully. September 30–October 1, 2011 Friday, September 30 Saturday, October 1 Toward a Mindful Society – an interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn The man who prescribes the medicine of the moment – a profile of Jon Kabat-Zinn Meeting Pain with Awareness – Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches you how Note: There will be a Mindfulness Town Hall moderated by Tami Simon of Sounds True beginning at 7:30 p....

Did you know that over 50 percent of the workforce in the US says Job Stress is a major problem in life? This is twice as much as ten years ago. We also have 50 percent greater healthcare expenditures and corporations are losing over $300 Billion annually because of work-related stress! What’s going on here? Let’s look at stress. Stress is simply a mental and often physical reaction to a perceived threat or change....

Given all this, you might think training in attention would be critical to any schooling. Indeed, William James, back in 1890, said such a training would be “an education par excellence,” although he confessed to being stumped as to what it might involve. Now, of course, we know—mindfulness practice nurtures attention, bringing with it a precious treasure of other well-being benefits. And yet, it seems that most of our educators remain unmoved by the power of meditation—like James over a century ago, schools know the importance of attention, but are less sure of methods to bring it about....

Now there are reports that some athletes are regularly turning to meditation inside the Olympic Village, looking for stress relief. Some are visiting the Buddhist shrine there, according to BBC News Asia—but not all are Buddhists. “When whoever comes to my shrine, first of all I welcome them, and discuss whatever their problems are and then encourage them to do a little meditation, which is helpful for them to balance their mind and relax their mind,” said the Most Ven Bogoda Seelawimala Thera, the monk in charge of the shrine....

Facilitated by the Mind & Life Institute, the symposia brought together a diverse group of researchers and scholars from all over the word to “explore the correlates and consequences of contemplative practice.” In this video, King talks about his own experience with meditation and mindfulness, as well as what inspired him to involve mindfulness in his scientific research. For the past five years or so, King has led studies trying to understand the basic neurophysiology and predictors of post-traumatic stress disorder....

If you live in Somerville, officials want to know. In fact, they want their city to be the first in the U.S. to systematically track people’s happiness. This spring, along with the city’s census forms, residents received a questionnaire asking them to rate their happiness on a scale from one to 10. So far, more than 7,500 people have mailed back the survey. The city asked Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University internationally recognized for his research on happiness, to guide them through the process of creating the survey....

If you half expect this ever-lengthening list to eventually include, oh, making matzoh-ball soup changes the brain, you are not alone. It is true that lots of solid scientific studies show that the adult brain can change in response to what we do and the lives we lead. But they are in danger of being crowded out, at least in the public’s understanding, by far less rigorous claims. (The jury is still out on Google, games, and conversation, but we’re pretty sure soup-making won’t make the short list....

Susan Bauer-Wu is a clinical researcher, educator, and mindfulness practitioner and teacher. She is currently the Tussi and John Kluge Professor in Contemplative End-of-Life Care at the University of Virginia School of Nursing and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Religious Studies and member of the directorate of the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia. Her research, scholarship, and teaching have focused on the effects of chronic stress and the use of contemplative approaches to bolster stress resilience and sense of well-being, especially for those challenged by serious illness, which is the basis of her book, Leaves Falling Gently: Living Fully with Serious & Life-limiting Illness through Mindfulness, Compassion and Connectedness....

Ingrid Wickelgren, an editor at Scientific American Mind. Her latest piece in the September/October issue of Scientific American is “The Education of Character: Scientists, politicians and celebrities are remaking schools as gyms for the brain where teachers build the mental brawn for attention, perseverance and emotional control.” Kimberely Schonert-Reichl, applied developmental pyschologist and a professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Pyschology and Special Education at the University of British Columbia....

Becoming a parent is wonderful for stirring up all of those old memories and connections from our own upbringing. Mix this in with our fractured attention spans and we begin to see why it is becoming increasingly important for us to learn how to attune ourselves to our own thoughts, feelings and emotions so we can have the ability to do that with our children. For many, childhood was a time of betrayal and invalidation where parents were potentially disconnected from their inner worlds of thoughts, feelings and emotions....

The Gratitude Journal In these pages, you’ll learn what the latest scientific research says about gratitude and the many benefits it has to offer, heartfelt personal essays, and guided meditations from leading mindfulness teachers. Plus, part of what makes this issue so special are the many invitations to engage with the content. Between the stories and practices, we’ve included space to create with prompts and coloring pages to help inspire reflection....

Although love is the quality we tend to glorify the most in romantic relationships, trust is equally indispensable. It’s the sustaining, slow-burning element of love. If you want to actively cultivate a deeper trust with your partner, new research has found it could be as simple as asking them one important question. Low Self-Esteem Interferes with Trust Researchers from the University of Waterloo conducted five studies with people in romantic relationships who suffer from a similar problem: One partner has a poor opinion of themselves....

Perhaps not surprisingly, the happiest countries on the list were Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands. Their average life evaluation score was 7.6 on a 0-to-10 scale. The least happy countries were Togo, Benin, Central African Republic and Sierra Leone, with a score of 3.4. However the report points out that not only wealth makes people happy. Political freedom, strong social networks and an absence of corruption are together more important than income in explaining well-being differences between the top and bottom countries....

A new study published in The Lancet Global Health Journal demonstrates that unhealthy eating patterns are the norm in most world regions. Taking a closer look, it’s actually the world’s wealthiest countries that have the poorest diets because they also have the highest consumption of unhealthy food. “To a certain extent, we’re paying for convenience at the cost of our health,” Congressman Tim Ryan writes in his latest book, The Real Food Revolution....

Those words touched me deeply, because I had just spent several years imagining, researching, writing a book about, admiring, and above all empathizing with Antonina Zabinska, a Polish Catholic woman who risked her own life and her family’s to save more than 300 Jews during World War II. Her husband, Jan, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, had smuggled many of them out of the ghetto himself, and the refugees hid in the zoo’s bombed-out cages and were given the code names of the animals whose cages they occupied....