This is one of the most common questions I’m asked by people wondering if mindfulness is for them. There’s often a subtext behind the inquiry: most mindfulness courses ask participants to practice for up to 45 minutes a day, the suggestion being that this will be a vital part of the learning process. Forty-five minutes a day seems a lot of work for most people, especially in a culture where sitting still and “doing nothing” for any time at all is unusual....
Get Smart Researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria wanted to study how different meditation styles would affect automatic behaviors. They randomly assigned 73 adults to one of four groups for internally focused meditation, externally focused meditation, open monitoring meditation, or a waitlist control group. All meditation group participants were asked to attend two sessions per week of roughly 30 minutes each for four weeks. The internal meditation group focused on sensations related to breathing....
Far from a radical revision, the guideline newly suggests a little well-chosen time is fine starting near eighteen months, when used interactively with a care taker. Below eighteen months no time remains best, apart from maybe video conversations with grandparents. From two to five, an hour daily maximum is recommended, and for older kids, two hours total time tops, no different than before. Why is screen time such a uniquely charged and challenging topic?...
McDonagh’s essay lost me at the start of paragraph five, which begins “So what exactly is mindfulness? On the back of a week of sessions, I can assert with some confidence that…” I’m a journalist myself, and it still amazes me that writers are encouraged to offer guidance on a topic in which their experience is next to zero. Would McDonagh critique the plays of Moliere after a week of French lessons?...
To fall into this goal-oriented mindset is to fundamentally misunderstand what meditation is, and how it helps. Indeed, expecting meditation to “make me better,” perhaps based on the results of clinical studies, may well sabotage the practice, whose benefit comes partly from letting go of the tendency to grasp for results. In the UK, psychologists have positioned mindfulness within the cognitive-behavioral tradition, and there are similarities—like CBT, mindfulness offers a practical set of skills that can help people relate more effectively to their thoughts and feelings....
Very early in the campaign, I realized that my daily meditation routine wasn’t enough to prepare me for the challenging conversations that lay ahead. I’d need to hit reset several times a day, and especially before challenging meetings, in order to ensure that my choices and actions were aligned with my intentions for the campaign. The Mindfulness Gap Between Meditation and Life I distinctly remember the moment I saw the gap between practicing mindfulness in my meditation practice and being mindful in my interactions....
Today, any thirty-minute TV show includes at least eight minutes of advertisements, and much of the television programming for kids is rarely more than a twenty-two-minute commercial for tie-in toys or other merchandise. Even when they turn off their screens, our children are barraged with advertisements for toys, games, and the latest gadgets—not to mention having such goodies placed at child height in grocery stores, pharmacies, coffee shops, and more....
Other possibilities: listening to music, turning off your phone, getting a massage, loving-kindness meditation, walking on the beach, and reading a book. Slightly less common ideas? Horseback riding and playing backgammon. Do you feel relaxed when meditating? A sense of relaxation can be a nice side effect of meditating, but it’s not a requirement. 55% say they usually feel “chill” when they meditate. For 39% meditation can be relaxing sometimes....
My phone and I became fast friends—though I was a jealous, needy friend, and kept my iPhone clamped tight to my hip in a pouch, not unlike an old West gunslinger with his colt revolver. Ask my wife about my compulsive phone-checking at the dinner table and you’ll know a bit about what became my addictive cycle of non-work-related phone-fun (and suffering). Whether it be the mindless nudge toward your phone screen, a thick slice of cake, a cigarette, or various substances, craving is familiar to us all....
What’s the difference between these two outcomes? A new paper by researchers at UC Berkeley suggests that it might be self-compassion. The researchers recruited 400 adults and invited a group of them to identify their biggest regret, then write about it with self-compassion and understanding. Some wrote about cheating on their partner; others wrote about becoming estranged from their parents. As a comparison, other participants journaled about their regrets from a perspective of self-esteem—focusing on their positive qualities, rather than their negative ones—and others described a hobby they enjoy (the control group)....
So the question becomes whether we can actually allow emotions to arise and flow through us naturally, because they are simply a part of human experience, and let go of resisting them so intensely. This is a significant part of mindfulness practice: to continually work to accept the presence of strong emotions (or any emotions) when they arise, to acknowledge them, and allow them to play themselves out. There is no such thing as an illegitimate emotion....
Mindful extols the work of mindfulness teachers who teach in secular contexts. These teachers are very unlikely to raise political issues in the context of a mindfulness class, at the risk of alienating a student. The intent is to create an open, safe space welcoming to all. So, it is an article of faith with Mindful that we work to maintain mindfulness as an apolitical space, so to speak—in the sense that we don’t take specific political positions, or directly advocate for a given policy, politician, or party....
Are you one of the millions that seek mindfulness practices to feel calmer and more at ease? Do you hope meditation will settle your thinking mind? In this episode Cara explains how breath training calms your nervous system and ultimately works to settle a busy mind. Cara explains that when your body feels sluggish, your mind feels sluggish. When your body feel tense, there’s a good chance your mind will feel tense too....
What he got, a few years later, was a full mindfulness curriculum at the school—the first of its kind in the United States. Some students who took Halpern’s first course—”Effective and Sustainable Law Practice: The Meditative Perspective”—described it as “the most important course they took in law school,” says Halpern. This new curriculum opens up the opportunity to deepen practice, both meditative and legal. “If [students] conclude early on they want to have a career in which mindfulness is going to be a central element of how they practice law, they will be able to do so....
The piece, written by Daniel Sieberg, former science and technology correspondent for CBS and CNN, refers to multitasking (“the preferred excuse of the gadget-obsessed”) as not being all it’s cracked up to be: The piece goes on to suggest taking a break from your gadgets, as well as setting time limits and respecting some “digital rules.” For example, “I must choose the human or the device. If someone is talking to me, I will do my best to put my gadget aside and listen to them....
Today, Zindel talks to us about a new online program called Mindful Noggin that can bring MBCT to you anywhere, anytime. Elisha: The Mindful Noggin is a great name, what exactly is it and how do you see it pushing the needle forward on integrating MBCT into our daily lives? Zindel: I am glad you like the name Mindful Noggin. It refers to an ongoing collaboration with eLearning Specialists NogginLabs....
The first meditation instruction I ever got was sit down and feel your breath, just feel the natural flow of your in and out breath. And as many of you have probably heard, I was very disappointed at first. I thought, “Feel my breath? I came all the way to India.” You know, where’s the magical esoteric practice thats going to wipe out all my suffering and make me a totally happy person?...
STOP (Stop, Take a breath, Observe your experience and Proceed) Click here to enlarge the chart. RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Inquire, Non-identify/Natural Awareness) This acronym created by Michelle McDonald and popularized and adapted by Tara Brach, is incredible for helping us gain perspective, self-compassion and confidence with our difficult feelings. We also experience stepping into our natural awareness. POINT (Pause, Open, Inquire, Non-identify, Truth) Here is the latest acronym that I think gets to the essence of mindfulness and because there is no prior reference to this, I’ll spell it out here....
As mindfulness continues to increase in popularity and visibility, so the critiques have emerged. This is a good thing, because cogent critique enables those of us who teach and trust in mindfulness to notice our blind spots, understand people’s objections, and refine our approach so we can respond skilfully. And perhaps the most pressing critique of mindfulness that needs addressing is that which has fuelled the Ladybird satire: what looks from the outside like self-regarding inactivity must surely entail a passive, socially-disengaged relationship with the world....
