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The Penn State basketball team, like the Seattle Seahawks, have started a meditation regimen to help maintain focus and improve play. From the article: Pat Chambers, the Penn State men’s basketball coach, also said meditation has helped his teams cut through the clutter of daily life. “There are so many distractions with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. that I think you need a solution on how you can rid yourself of all that for a few minutes to refocus,” he said....

Johnson blogs about Dan Hughes’s talk on “Intersubjective Mindfulness,” Hughes’s approach to dealing with highly traumatized people in therapy. The therapeutic tools he uses allow him to connect more deeply with his patients, and elicit from them the emotional werewithal to make pretty significant breakthroughs. The tools include modulating his voice in therapy to mimic, or match, the “experience” of the patient, which shows the patient that the therapist is open, curious and non-judgmentally accepting of his or her experience....

The terms “mindfulness” and “meditation” are often used interchangeably, but different practices are known to emphasize cultivating unique abilities such as attention, compassion, and social skills. To date, research has yet to show whether changes in brain structure, stress physiology, attention and social behavior vary by the type of mindfulness training received. To answer this question, a team of researchers embarked on a large-scale study of the effects of 3-months of different types of mindfulness training....

A: Since cave-boy first met cave-girl, partners have been trying to change each other. If only he or she liked dinosaur-knuckle stew, or would enjoy those William Shakespeare plays with me, or wanted to adopt a parrot. Or would learn to meditate. Sigh. So much relationship misery is caused by our attempts to fix our mate. But beware of the insidious if only. This thinking points to the fatal flaw in the scramble to live a pain-free life....

To read the article “Mindfulness and ADHD: an Interview with Lidia Zylowska”, click here. And for more about mindfulness and ADHD here on Mindful.org, click here.

Mindfulness allows patients to disengage from this negative thought pattern through the “body scan” technique. Patients are asked to systematically pay attention to each region of the body. As this happens, the alpha rhythms that are responsible for the flow of sensory information to the brain fluctuate. In an interview with The Guardian, Kerr describes this fluctuation as a “sensory volume knob” that acts as a focusing skill that “regulates attention so that it does not become biased toward negative physical sensations and thoughts, as in depression”....

Led by researchers at the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education at Australian Catholic University, educators in 20 Australian schools volunteered to participate in a school-based study. Eighty-five teachers from 10 schools attended an eight-week mindfulness-based program. Another 100 teachers from 10 different schools did not. After eight weeks, teachers who’d practiced mindfulness reported less stress, better sleep, and more mindfulness, self-compassion, and ability to use thoughts to help regulate emotions, compared to controls....

Obviously, avoiding conversations that need to happen is a bad managerial step. But organizations aren’t the greatest at addressing difficult feelings like anger and jealousy, says Daniel Goleman, bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence and Focus. Goleman suggests the best leaders are those who can get over something quickly, and help others get over something quickly, in order “to build a high bonding and cohesive state.” Negative thoughts and feelings have to be addressed up front—in other words, you should stop bottling up your anger....

Now, in a new study from the University of Zurich published in NeuroImage, scientists explore whether combining meditation with psilocybin—the chemical in magic mushrooms—may impact brain function and alter self-consciousness even after the high is gone. Understanding the Effects of Mushrooms In the University of Zurich study, 38 experienced adult meditators were randomly assigned to either a psilocybin or placebo control group. They then participated in a five-day, silent group meditation retreat....

The CD includes excercises to practice before and after meetings, how to cope with negative emotions and troublesome colleagues, and how to reduce stress and increase focus. For more on how mindfulness and the workplace can come together, read this article on Search Inside Yourself, a mindfulness-based training program that Bush helped start up at Google. Chade-Meng Tan, the founder of Search Inside Yourself, talks about the program here on our site....

The ability to feel what others feel and intuit their emotions from their body language, tone of voice, and other indirect clues is not only something that women are supposedly better at than men, but one that reflects (some researchers contend) hardwired sex-based differences in the brain. Among the cadre of scientists who study this, the empathy gap is considered strong evidence for “the essential difference” between female and male brains, namely, that female brains are good at sympathizing and male brains at using logical thinking to classify and analyze the world....

Listen to the audio podcast of Tim Ryan and Saki Santorelli at the JCC.

One of their tips is to work to build a girl’s confidence and leadership skills as a way to help them combat gender biases they may encounter. Often, girls don’t feel comfortable with public speaking for fear of being judged or being seen as “bossy,” which is a common gendered criticism of outspoken females. In order to counteract this fear, parents can show girls a wide variety of positive role models and actively encourage girls to feel confident and comfortable with their own voice....

Your ongoing swirl of concerns, hopes, and fears creates a mental dust cloud, reminiscent of the one that followed Pigpen in the Peanuts comic strip. I shouldn’t have said that to Dad. I bet that hurt him. The next time I see him I need to soften the blow… I’ll never be able to prepare for tomorrow’s meeting… I know there were some groceries to pick up, but what were they?...

1. Take a walk Modern life seems designed to make us stay in one place—sitting, standing, or lying down—for long periods of time. Most people don’t even remember a time when you had to get up off your butt to walk across the room and change the channel on the TV or go over to the bookshelf to consult the dictionary. Moving has gone out of style, and the balance of mental to physical energy expended can get way out of whack....

2. Allow yourself to surrender to gravity. Allow yourself to surrender and connect with the feeling of being supported. Feeling supported by the chair beneath you, or the ground underneath you. Even the earth, supporting you. 3. Bring your hand onto your body. You might bring it onto your chest, your heart or maybe somewhere else on your body. Let your hands be a kind of soothing, kind support as we continue to go through this practice....

In a recent post, blogger Chinae Alexander describes this feeling of knowing someone deserves that good news, but not being able to feel affected by it. She looks at some of the barriers to entering shared celebration in the good news of others. She notes how we can get caught up in how the event makes us feel, which can be a major distraction, or how our online personas can keep others from celebrating with us: I want to submit that the way we project our lives to others has really messed us up here, people....

Unlike many measures of national progress, The Happy Planet Index does not rank countries according to economic wealth alone. Instead, it uses global data on life expectancy, experienced well-being, and ecological footprints to assess 151 countries from around the world. The 2012 report is the third time the index has been published. “Countries like Costa Rica outrank the UK in the Happy Planet Index because their inhabitants live long and happy lives using a fraction of the planet’s resources,” says Saamah Abdallah, senior researcher at The New Economics Foundation....

But there was so much I never imagined, including a love so primal I’d never known anything like it, and parenting storms in which I was certain I had lost my way. I tried some things that worked, and many that didn’t. Like all parents, in raising my son I learned things about what kids really need that I would not have figured out otherwise. When my son reached the stage of pushing back when he wanted something he couldn’t have, I found myself torn between the influence of my own childhood and what I was coming to see was best for him....

The Mindful Kitchen: Savor a Cup of Cocoa Whip up a mug of steamy hot chocolate to savor this rich ingredient. Here are some suggestions for layering in aromas, textures, and flavors. Chocolate has flavor notes akin to a glass of wine—it can be earthy, floral, fruity and everything in between. Dark chocolate is bitter but also the most complex. Milk chocolate is creamy and sweet, its bitterness offset by sugar and dairy....