Some days, it seems pretty obvious the world is out to get you (even without a major plumbing disaster like mine). The coffee pot just knew you were late for an important meeting when it jumped out of your hands and leapt to its death on the tiled floor, didn’t it? Whaddyagonnado? Stuff happens. But the next time you feel harassed by kamikaze kitchen appliances or any of life’s large and small indignities, take a breath....
Obviously, the popularity of mindfulness meditation is wonderful. No problem there. It’s all over the place. Now if people can just actually do it, in addition to talking about it…. You can read the rest of Ethan’s post here, which we responded to. Here’s what we had to say: To the question of who should be the face of meditation, our answer here at mindful.org is, well, everyone should be....
This one-of-a-kind program launched in the summer, has students tackling both mindfulness theory and practice. The MA’s overarching aim is to teach students how to apply mindfulness skills “to social, cultural, historical, organizational, and political case studies” as well as into their own professions. Now we’re getting a peek into what it’s like to get a masters degree in mindfulness, including how students are using the program (one student is implementing mindfulness in hospice centers, another in schools)....
The Art of Being Still: Mindfulness and Young People is the second annual conference organised by the Sanctuary meditation centre. It’s now sold out. Conference attendees will include health professionals, teachers, parents and youths. Topics will include the practice of mindfulness, yoga, meditation, body scans and observation skills, and how these can impact young lives. Niamh Bruce and Bro Richard Hendrick, who work with young people on the Sanctuary’s The Art of Stillness in the Classroom, The Warrior Journey and The Wisdom Journey, will speak at the conference....
People agreed to pose as a homeless person. Then, they had their unsuspecting relatives (wife, sister, cousin, grandson) walk by. The relatives didn’t even notice their loved ones. Underneath every human being is a need for belonging. We all have a need to feel cared about, to be understood, to be accepted. Whether it’s someone who is homeless, a friend, a cousin, a sister, a brother, parents or grandparents, our brains begin to objectify them and often times forget the common humanity that binds us....
In this practice, we’re going to replenish our mental energy by returning to our senses, literally. By focusing on our senses, we can rest our attention on what we’re seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, or hearing. A 12-Minute Meditation to Reconnect With Your Senses READ MORE Jaime Ledesma, Mark Bertin, Tovi Scruggs-Hussein, and Shalini Bahl-Milne March 30, 2022 Elaine Smookler August 24, 2020 Elaine Smookler April 11, 2019 Carolyn Gimian April 1, 2017
Restore Your Heart by Resting Your Body read more Rashid Hughes February 19, 2021 Heather Shayne Blakeslee June 23, 2021 Shelly Tygielski November 9, 2021
As wise teachers have said, everything arises at the tip of intention. This has never been more evident to me than it is right now. The reality is, I can do virtually nothing about much of what is unfolding. What I can do is cultivate the ability, moment by moment, to choose how I relate to this experience. One element of consciously choosing how to relate and respond to the world means I’m frequently asking myself, again and again: How do I want to respond to these challenging times?...
Try This Guided Meditation for Body and Mind For this practice, you can sit or you can stand, or you can lie down. Just get comfortable, with your back relatively straight, your body relaxed and your heart open. Noticing How the Mind Affects the Body If just thinking about a lemon can make your mouth pucker, can you imagine how thinking about other things affects our bodies too? Take a minute to reflect on other ways that your mind changes your body....
The more periods of this depressed mood we have in life, the more likely we are to fall back into them again. Why does this relapse occur and how can mindfulness offer hope? Falling into a depression feels traumatic. Just like getting bit by a dog causes us to be fearful of and oversensitive to dogs, our minds and bodies become oversensitive to associations with the depression causing us to react to any sign of it....
If we looked long enough, we would see that a limited number of core patterns of brain activity and interaction seem to crop up as recurring features in a wide variety of different mental activities. These core patterns reflect some basic “modes of mind.” We can think of these modes of mind as loosely analogous to the gears of a car. Just as each gear has a particular use (starting, accelerating, cruising, etc....
Jacobs grew up practicing meditation, yoga, and martial arts. His parents, Lenny and Barbara Jacobs, were publishers of the groundbreaking spiritual magazine East West Journal for almost twenty years. They provided an early example of the kind of social entrepreneurship exemplified by Samovar. After graduating from college, Jacobs went to work in high-tech, an easy step for someone in the cyber generation. “But after about four years,” he says, “I found myself totally disconnected from myself and other people....
Theater of War Productions, based in New York City, is “a social impact theater company that uses storytelling and theater as a tool for helping communities address issues of public health and social justice,” says Bryan Doerries, the company’s artistic director. For Rushton, the production is an opportunity to “help my profession heal in this pandemic.” Pandemic Burnout Doerries notes that in the United States alone, there are around four million nurses, “who have been the most overexposed and under-resourced medical professionals during this pandemic....
Since 2016, Emily’s used techniques she learned in the Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) program, pioneered by University of Utah professor Eric Garland, PhD. Aimed at decreasing patients’ use (and misuse) of prescription drugs, the program teaches mindfulness and savoring techniques to ease pain and craving, while shifting awareness toward pleasant emotions. Johansson learned to “drink in” the sights, sounds, and smells in her present moment as they flow through her body....
For more on this topic, read Healing the Whole Person here on Mindful.org.
Or we shift our gaze and see the inches of cat and dog hair in the corners of our wood floors, the fur spread like a second mat on the living room rug. We’re seeing the cobwebs dangling from the corners of the ceilings, forming filaments of dirty lace across the tops of our cabinets. We’re seeing the age spots on our hands, our unpedicured toes, the hair on our legs coarse and dark after a winter of long pants, leggings, and tights....
Well, my teacher is a language teacher, but I can’t say that is anything limiting, because what he has taught me is how to exist, how to really exist. Because the language is everything. It has the spirit in it. Each word is kept by a spirit, which means that when people begin to learn the language they are beginning to pray, to become part of a community. When people learn the language, they are on a path....
I brought this swirl of doubt to my yoga practice. As a long-time practitioner, I find that my yoga practice is often a microcosm for what I’m experiencing in my life. On this particular day, while practicing in my bedroom, I was struck with a bolt of awareness about the kind of marriage I wanted to create for myself. It was a headstand day. My headstand is an exercise in trust....
I was in France at a wonderful time. People were taking fresh baguettes from the ovens and mussels out of the water, steaming them up, and putting them on a dish. People were buying things for lunch from the marketplace and then going back in the afternoon to buy things for dinner. I loved that immediacy. Also, in France I experienced small restaurants, those neighborhood places where there wasn’t any pretension....
