Tabla de contenidos para August 2016 en Mindful

What’s your ideal vacation? 35% PREFER TO EXPLORE NEW CULTURES by getting to know locals, and 19% just want to lounge on the beach with unlimited food and drink. 11% choose the best of both worlds, exploring new cultures while staying at a fancy hotel. 8% like to trek through mountains with only a backpack. 3% opt for the staycation, complete with PJs, TV, blankets, and snacks. So many great options! Where do you go when you eat out on vacation? 84% EAT WHERE THE LOCALS EAT, while 9% seek out fine dining whenever possible. 3% opt for an all-inclusive resort so they don’t have to think about it, 2% look for a recognizable chain restaurant, and 2% go the adventurous route, grabbing something from a street cart. What continent…

“Happiness” is a loaded word: It’s loaded with expectations, hope, yearning, confusion.... You get the idea. What makes happiness feel so elusive usually has more to do with how you relate to the concept than with how you really feel. Here are a few simple adjustments that can help you unleash the happiness within yourself. 1 Be present Awareness is the springboard from which we can appreciate the world around us. Set reminders in your phone throughout the day to pause and check in with yourself. By stepping into a space of curiosity you will discover an increased ability to notice happiness in everyday life. 2 Harness difficulty As long as you’re alive, challenges will find you. Sometimes you probably even create challenges for yourself—we all do. Instead of getting…

I really like listening to audio meditations. Is guided meditation as good as quietly meditating? The key word here is “listening.” If you’ve arrayed yourself on your meditation cushion or favorite chair, flipped the switch on your sound system, and settled in to listen to Jon Kabat-Zinn guide you through an awareness of breath meditation because you just love his voice, then you may have a bit of a problem because you really aren’t meditating. You’re listening to a recording while sitting on a cushion. Big difference. But you may find that having a gentle, invitational voice nudge you back on track when your attention drifts facilitates your practice. Maybe when you sit on your own without the recording, your attention seems to drift, wander, meander, and dart about aimlessly.…

Imagine this scenario. Harry wakes up on a typical workday, a Wednesday, in a mood—a frighteningly intense mood. A free-floating anxiety courses through his body, making him edgy and angry. When he gets up and goes into the kitchen, he hears his roommate opening a bag of chips to put a handful in his brown-bag lunch. The crinkling of the chip bag sounds like the roar of a jet engine to Harry; it’s that irritating. He wants to scream at his roommate to quiet down and just go away, now. He keeps it together enough to let his roommate get on with his day, but these feelings scare Harry. He feels he may be losing control altogether. How can he concentrate? How can he work with others? Perhaps he should…

PREPARATION Begin by deliberately adopting an erect and dignified posture, whether you are sitting or standing. If possible, close your eyes. Then take about one minute to guide yourself through each of the following three steps: Adapted from The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Reprinted by permission of Guilford Press. Visit the authors’ website at www.mbct.com 1 BECOMING AWARE Bringing your awareness to your inner experience, ask: What is my experience right now? What THOUGHTS are going through your mind? As best you can, acknowledge thoughts as mental events, perhaps putting them into words. What FEELINGS are here? Turn toward any sense of emotional discomfort or unpleasant feelings, acknowledging their presence. What BODY SENSATIONS are here…

What happens when the object of our desire moves from fantasy to reality? Envy springs from believing there is something we want that someone else has. What happens when we ask ourselves whether it’s really what we want? Try this: 1 Imagine that you’re able to purchase the mansion of your dreams. 2 Now imagine owning that mansion 20 years from now. Be as detailed as possible: Who will clean it? Will you be paying the taxes and upkeep? How will it feel to be in that big house alone at night? 3 What do you notice about your envious feelings now? Are they still as strong? Often when we take our envy to court, it can help us see whether pursuing this path will truly make us happy or…

We all live tense, stress-filled lives packed with back-to-back meetings, appointments, and tasks. Perpetual busyness, which used to be intermittent enough that we could see contrast between chock-full days and the others, seems like it might be the new norm in the 21st century. Socked in with activity; no break in our schedules. So what can we do to clear the air? To function with competence calls for perspective that’s hard to find when we’ve got our heads down, forging through a neverending to-do list, hoping things will work out. The kind of perspective that brings focus and clarity comes from space. And while we may not always have a choice about clearing our calendars, we can make the choice to clear our minds of the habitual momentum that blocks…

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is noted for developing the ABC model of behavior. One of the many versions of the model posits an Activating Event (an event or experience that sets off the cascade), Beliefs (we evaluate what we’ve experienced, either rationally or irrationally), and Consequences (what happens in our mind, or our emotions, or action we take as a result). The ABC model is an important part of MBCT. As it says in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression, in “the ABC model of emotional distress,” the main point is that “our emotions are consequences of a situation plus an interpretation.” We find ourselves in emotional distress—we’re screaming at our spouse— and we’re clueless about how we so suddenly got there! We start with a SITUATION (A). And end up with…

As long as we are the apple of everyone’s eye and have all our needs and desires satisfied, as long as there is nothing at all that we want that we don’t have or can’t have now, life is a wonderful dream. But the instant that we want what YOU have, the seeds of envy are planted. Elaine Smookler has been a mindfulness practitioner for more than 20 years and is on the faculty at The Centre for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto. She is a Registered Psychotherapist and teaches mindfulness to corporate clients through eMindful. For instance, your body. It’s really, really nice. I bet it would look great on me. The more I think about it, seeing you in that body makes me feel fat (how dare you, by…

Every time I talk about mindfulness, I hear: “My brain is way too busy to be mindful.” “My ADD is so bad; I just can’t focus.” “The last thing I need is another item on my to-do list.” I understand. I really do. I get to the end of a shower with wet hair but I’ve been so preoccupied that I have no idea if I’ve washed it or not. I spill blueberries all over the kitchen floor and lose my keys and pinch my little girl’s chin into the buckle of her car seat because I’m just not paying attention. And yet I maintain that I practice mindfulness on a daily basis. How? Because I’ve learned not to define mindfulness too narrowly. Here’s why you might be having a…

Researchers often find that after several weeks of compassion meditation practice, people perform more acts of kindness and caring outside the lab, such as visiting a retirement home or telling a coworker what they appreciate about her. They also report more feelings of compassion toward suffering people. They act more kindly toward strangers. They become less subject to the “bystander effect,” whereby everyone assumes that someone else will step up and come to the aid of a stranger in need. They more readily offer an exhausted woman a chair, as occurred in a 2015 study at Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Good news, right? Sharon Begley is senior science writer with The Boston Globe Media Group, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, and…

How did you get to where you are? I used to be a 21st-century juggler: Happily married, a mother of school-aged children, a vice president and deputy general counsel of a Fortune 200 company—General Mills—president of the board of a large nonprofit, and a daughter of aging parents. Then GMI asked me to lead their acquisition of Pillsbury. Suddenly, I had to put another significant ball into play, and this would become the deal from hell—almost 18 months of 12-14-hour days, day in and day out. Nor was the stress alleviated when a Pillsbury VP mentioned that if I weren’t able to close the deal, some 10,000 Pillsbury employees could lose their jobs. I can only imagine the pressure. It got worse. A month or so after that conversation, my…

When we investigate envious thoughts and emotions, and notice how the body responds to our feeling lesser, we can recognize the signs of envy before they start to take root in the brain. The next time envy begins gathering strength, try this check-in: Tune in to the present moment by bringing awareness to sitting, standing, or lying down. Inhale and take a moment to notice where you feel that in-breath most vividly, such as in your belly, chest, rib cage, nose, throat, or mouth. Bring to mind a situation of someone having something you want—a nice car, a nice house, a nice job. Maybe they’re talented or attractive, good with people or young—anything you do not feel you already possess, but want. (Choose a small basket of envy, rather than…

Catherine Morey-Nase, founder of The Wellbeing Corner, is a mindfulness meditation teacher who runs Mindful Hiking Days and Mindful Meanders in and around Melbourne, Australia. Hiking with friends while enjoying great conversation and laughter is one of my favorite activities. But unless we make a conscious effort to stop every now and again and really pay attention to where we are and what we are doing, we can miss a tremendous amount. Stopping and consciously engaging our senses when out hiking not only calms and grounds us—relaxing both mind and body—but it also deepens our connection to the natural world. Excuse the cliché, but mindful hiking is really about remembering to stop and smell the roses (or the eucalyptus, as the case may be). I’ve always loved being in nature.…