Heather Hurlock: How is happiness connected to mindfulness? Sharon Salzberg: “One of my meditation teachers said that the most important moment in your mediation practice is the moment you sit down to do it. Because right then you’re saying to yourself that you believe in change, you believe in caring for yourself, and you’re making it real. You’re not just holding some value like mindfulness or compassion in the abstract, but really making it real....
The culture there is all about connection, but the connections are forced and superficial. She has no room to examine her choices, as she’s mindlessly absorbed into a corporate culture where people don’t cultivate their own attention. They only seek it from others: see me, see me, like me, like me, share me, share me. It’s a fictional account, but the concern about over-controlling workplaces is very real. Back east, Michael Lewis’ chronicles of Wall Street collapses—in The Big Short and Liar’s Poker—portray a culture of disconnection....
Living in the moment is often a challenge, even for those who practice mindfulness regularly. In this animation from School of Life, Alain de Botton shares four ways you can reconnect with the present experience. 1. Recognize you may not always feel how you’re meant to—and that’s ok. De Botton explains that life is full of moments where we are expected to feel certain things towards certain situations. On birthdays, we’re meant to feel happy....
It’s no small thing to take on the responsibility of teaching others how to work with their minds, no less teaching teachers to do that. (It’s not like teaching, say, tennis; it’s the mind, after all. Nothing is subtler or more elusive). A meditator since she was a teenager, a meditation teacher for decades, and a teacher of teachers for quite a while, Diana Winston—director of mindfulness education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center—writes from direct experience....
I first noticed Donald’s style convention about a year ago, not long after he’d told me about his other e-mail practice. “As I sit at my computer answering my mail,” he said, “I pause before I open each one. I take a breath, and make the intention, ‘May I open this e-mail and respond for the benefit of myself and for all beings.’ Then I read the message and respond....
To people who’ve already been practicing, this may not be such an unusual story; they’ve likely sensed such effects in themselves. What is unusual is that this story’s caught the attention of news sources like Boing Boing (one of the most-read and linked-to blogs in the world), Business Week, and even the gossip site, Gawker. This means that more and more people will be looking for more information on bringing the benefits of mindfulness into their lives....
He would know. He’s been teaching mindfulness to the inmates at Folsom Prison outside of Sacramento California for the past four years. He was invited to teach mindfulness to the staff at Folsom and then, when they decided to start offering it to prisoners 4 years ago, he switched to teaching inmates. He works with people in the general population and also the men who are kept in what the prison calls therapeutic modules....
The Mind & Life Institute is dedicated to “building a scientific understanding of the mind to reduce suffering and promote well-being.”
Before the study, professional military trainers completed a 12-week MBAT training practicum and eight weeks of training to teach MBAT to soldiers. Mindfulness trainers who had not worked with soldiers also completed the practicum. Next, 180 healthy, active-duty, male army volunteers received MBAT instruction from either a military trainer or a mindfulness trainer, via weekly two-hour instruction and daily audio-guided sessions over four weeks, on themes of concentration, body awareness, open monitoring, and connection....
Mindfulness helps us embrace change through accepting its inevitability while also actively pushing back where we can. Aging is here, and happening in every moment. This life experience accumulates whether we want it to or not. How we use it is up to us. Change Is Always Possible However you feel about growing older, it’s possible to experience it with a greater sense of ease. One simple formula remains the best medical advice we have when it comes to aging well: healthy nutrition, regular exercise, and adequate sleep....
Now, I’ve come back to the topic. I have no choice really—if you keep breathing, you keep getting older. This is not necessarily bad—especially when you consider the alternative—but it’s oddly surprising; the relentlessness of time passing. You can take a break from thinking about getting old, but you can’t take a break from actually doing it. The days keep going by, marking their passage on your body. You’re continually stepping forward into the next piece of your life, going through gate after gate....
I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it during a job interview, but my potential employer was asking me if I ever had a difficult encounter with a medical professional, and I blurted it out. It tends to happen when I’m overtired or under pressure. I blurt, then the negative thought cascade begins “Why did I say that?!” “Now I’m probably on the CIA’s psycho-nut-case-stopper-list.” “Now they’ll be no more cross-border bargain, ANYTHINGS!...
The answer has proven less obvious, and largely depends on whom you talk to. When it comes to the science of happiness, researchers still don’t fully agree on how to measure it or, even, a clear definition of what “happiness” is. Take, for example, the widely reported and controversial “happiness gap” finding that parents are less happy than people who don’t have children. One of many studies, a survey of 397 adults, found that parenting may provide meaning in life but not necessarily happiness....
That said, I don’t mean to totally dismiss the potential pitfalls of mindfulness practice. Sometimes, when people have difficult or extensive histories of trauma or abuse, meditation practice may put them in touch with those memories and emotions, and they can sometimes feel overwhelming, particularly at first. For this reason, if you have a history like this it’s wise to be working with a therapist while exploring the practice of mindfulness....
He recounts how he has seen many different anti-depression treatments be developed over the course of his career—but meditation was never one of them. There’s a reason for that, he points out: while traditional treatments help alleviate depression and allow patients to get their lives back on track, they often don’t address keeping patients from relapsing once their lives are on track. “What we now understand about depression is that it is an episodic and recurrent disorder,” he says....
As we prepare to slowly re-open our workplaces in the next few weeks, it feels like a very important time to ask ourselves, “How do I want to show up right now as a leader, partner, friend, coworker, and member of my family?” Personally, I have been using this time of quarantine as an opportunity to take greater personal responsibility, shed the stories that keep me disconnected or stuck in patterns that no longer serve, remove the armor of self-protection, and notice where I can create more connection and harmony with the people in my life....
The new map emerged from the Human Connectome Project, a five- year effort to map the brains of 1,200 young adults using MRIs. While the previous map showed 50 regions,the new map presents 180, based on physical differences, functional dif- ferences (e.g., differing responses to a stimulus), and connectivity to other regions. On the surface, regions look identical, so the brain map “is more akin to a map showing state borders than topographic features; the most important divisions are invisible from the sky but extremely important all the same,” says the university’s Tamara Bhandari....
On the flip side, when we feel grateful for our work and colleagues, and when our employer expresses gratitude for our valuable input, we can cope better with the stressful demands and pressures that a job places on us. Gratitude also promotes positive appraisals of our work, and we feel motivated to perform to a higher standard. Despite these psychological and behavioral benefits, gratitude has not been well studied in a workplace context....
