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The four most common strategies that most people rely on when they feel threatened are to: Dismantling these kneejerk reactions is a courageous process that requires both self-awareness and self-disclosure, but the results are transformational, Taylor says. The key is to focus on your own experience, without blaming or criticizing your partner. Ask Yourself: What’s Getting Triggered? In other words: Be mindful and investigate your own strong reactions to see what old trauma or wound might be getting triggered before you lash out or withdraw....

The Mindful Kitchen: Outer v. Inner Hunger Cues Establishing a mindful eating practice and moving away from the diet mentality is life affirming. However, cultivating such a practice in our fast-paced society can be quite challenging. It requires an intentional shift from using external guidance about what, when, and how much to eat (e.g. diets, provided portion sizes, dress size, the bathroom scale, the size of your plate) to internal guidance (e....

A collective effort to help each other lower our political anxiety is important for reasons that reach well beyond the day of the election. When people feel anxious they move into a reactive mode. Anxious people tend to be less flexible and less open to new experiences and points of view. They’re more likely to oversimplify what’s upsetting them and view life through a binary lens. In an election year that means voters will grab on to narrow, inflexible beliefs around issues and candidates as if they were life rafts: She’s smart but he’s not; he’s authentic but she’s inauthentic; they’ll run this country into the ground but we’ll build it up....

A Practice to Cultivate “Don’t Know Mind” read more Kimberly Brown March 1, 2022 Barry Boyce March 17, 2022 Wendy O’Leary March 14, 2022

You don’t need to be a “perfect” meditator to begin discussing meditation with your child — you just need to be genuinely interested in the process and honest about your own experience. Once you feel familiar with the ideas and practices, you can introduce them to your family. Be sure to talk about your own difficulty sustaining attention and resisting reactivity. This can be an important part of the lesson for your child: you’re fallible and yet remain open to trying something new....

Although it feels easier to be critical―“I hate my body,” “She makes fun of my efforts to eat mindfully”―in fact, it’s actually easier to forgive. A form of letting go, forgiving creates a space to establish skillful habits and mind states that are in harmony with the desire to change. Forgiveness also diminishes the stress that comes from judging ourselves and others. The process begins by forgiving ourselves: our mistakes, feelings, and habits....

But lately I’ve noticed a major gap in my recall of the last many months of special times. I know that we played Uno in there somewhere, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what we talked about, or even evoke one clever thing she said. On one occasion, I do remember mapping out a mental list of errands that needed done once we were finished coloring in the mermaid coloring book....

Despite its ever-growing popularity and mounting evidence of its benefits, mindfulness as it is being taught today is not without its critics. Ron Purser is one of them. In his book, Purser assesses the contribution that mindfulness is making in helping people to reduce their stress and enhance their well-being, and finds it wanting. His main concern is not what mindfulness does, but what it doesn’t do. In his estimation, much of people’s suffering is not caused by how they manage stress internally, but rather by the hardships and inequities imposed upon them by our capitalist society....

02/04/11

The acronym S.T.O.P. encapsulates how mindfulness practice can support us in making the most of opportunities for engagement in the world. Like all mindfulness practices, it has many different applications. For one, it is a simple tool that can support us in being here in a much more lively way with ourselves, opening up to what is coming up for us, right here, right now. Stop and Take a Conscious Breath S stands for Stop Stop what you are doing and if possible, perhaps take a seat....

You’re not avoiding difficult conversations because you’re bad or broken. Your brain is protecting you. Self-compassion helps you face the discomfort of tough conversations.Self-compassion is not selfish or passive. It’s courageous. With that in mind, it is crucial that we not only start having difficult conversations, but that we start learning to master them. Along the way, practicing self-compassion is key to transforming the muck of difficult interactions—the blame, shame, resentment, and anxiety—into moments of connection, solutions, and leadership in our relationships at home and at work....

It turns out that the narrator and my two high school friends aren’t the only ones who feel this way. A recent study looking at the effect of random acts of kindness on both the giver and receiver found that many are suspicious of kind gestures. When met with kindness people often wonder, “What do they want from me? What’s his or her agenda?” If you’re one of the countless people in this world who don’t think that being kind is that big of a deal and just like acting that way, the good news is that it doesn’t matter much if the receiver is welcoming or suspicious of your kind gestures....

It was an arresting occasion partly due to the setting—we are perhaps getting used to meditation happening in health centres, private businesses, even schools—but here it was being practised and taken seriously in the symbol of the British establishment, by politicians from all three main parties, offered up as a way to approach some of the most pressing social issues of our time. I think it’s fair to say that the days of mindfulness being seen as something new agey or alternative are coming to an end....

In fact, global warming is increasing the frequency and severity of all those events, as well as raising sea levels. But it comes from something quite different from an evil-looking terrorist. The sources—such as power plants, vehicles, farms, and factories—are impersonal and invisible, and close to home—the way we use energy, not the machinations of a foreigner. Faced with a threat with these attributes, the brain reacts with an unimpressed meh: Our minds evolved to detect and respond to threats that have certain features, and global warming has none of them....

We’re here twice a month, introducing you to some of the teachers, thinkers, writers and researchers who are engaged in the mindfulness movement. You’ll hear all kinds of conversations here about the science of mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness and the heart of it. I’m Stephanie Domet. I’m the managing editor at Mindful Magazine and Mindful.org. And this is Real Mindful. This is a time of year when many of us begin to turn our thoughts toward gratitude as the calendar year dwindles....

What Colzato and her team discovered was that open-monitoring meditation was far more effective in stimulating divergent thinking, a key driver of creativity. Not surprisingly, the study also showed that focused-attention meditation was more strongly related to convergent thinking, which is important for narrowing options and formulating a workable solution. (Note: Most common forms of mindfulness meditation use a blend of both approaches.) Two years later, another Dutch psychologist, Matthijs Baas, expanded on Colzato’s work and demonstrated, in a series of studies, the importance of specific mindfulness skills in the creative process....

It’s tempting to think “I’ll develop more mindfulness after my job is less demanding, my kids are grown, and I have more time.” We’re waiting for the perfect schedule to magically align with our desires. Yet we may need the benefits of mindfulness even more when we think we have the least time to pursue them! Like a good diet, adopting a mindfulness practice is a matter of looking at the habits of our life and making choices about what we can reasonably do, setting an intention, and getting the help we need to stick to it....