Tabla de contenidos para April 2020 en Mindful

One of the things I love about mindfulness is the constant invitation to go deeper. Even a few breaths can get you started, shifting from hectic and harried to calmer and more peaceful as you gain perspective on the thoughts and emotions racing around. As you spend more time practicing, and perhaps experiment with different types of mindfulness, your experience can be as varied as the landscape of your mind, the contours of your life events, the intentions you bring to your practice, and the environment of your present moment. Walt Whitman famously said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Indeed, we all contain multitudes—an ever-changing kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings, and perspectives—and we are surrounded by worlds of opportunities for growth. I’ve been practicing variations on mindfulness since my early…

In early December, many Twitter users decided to break down the silence around mental health by sharing their experiences with mental illness and recovery using the hashtag #mymentalhealthin3words. The answers ranged from lighthearted to profound, with each providing an honest look at the nuances of mental health. “Struggling but fighting” @Weltzchmerz “Just keep swimming” @clemserrell “Dogs. Exercise. Therapy.” @ ninaandtito “Happiness is internal” @ JPBrown5 “Searching for change” @ buzy263”…

Music tours are hugely profitable, and fossil-fuel-intensive. Coldplay’s frontman Chris Martin said the band wants to “turn it around so it’s not so much taking as giving”—announcing they won’t tour again until they can make the process neutral, or even good, for the environment. Performance artist David Datuna shocked modern-art aficionados by eating another artist’s installation that had sold for $120K: a banana duct-taped to a gallery wall. “I call the performance ‘Hungry Artist,’ because I was hungry and I just ate it,” he said. Ooookay. In St. Johns County, FL, the public libraries teamed up with EnChroma, which manufactures glasses that let color-blind people see colors normally. The glasses are available for patrons to borrow, just like a book, for up to two weeks. A PhD candidate at Michigan…

When John Teasdale, Mark Williams, and I were developing MBCT, we designed the Three-Minute Breathing Space as a practice for approaching experience from two attentional lenses, both narrow and wide. We wanted to create a sort of choreography of awareness that emphasized shifting attention, checking in, and moving on. This practice provides a structure for noting, grounding, and allowing—in the midst of challenging situations or whenever automatic pilot takes over. ATTEND TO WHAT IS The first step invites attending broadly to one’s experience, noting it, but without the need to change what is being observed. FOCUS ON THE BREATH The second step narrows the field of attention to a single, pointed focus on the breath in the body. ATTEND TO THE BODY The third step widens attention again to include…

To connect more deeply with others, we must face the one person that we keep on the shortest leash: ourselves. We often reject other people’s care or attention when we believe we don’t deserve it—but there’s nothing special you must do to deserve love. It is simply because you exist. Follow this guided meditation to open your heart toward giving and receiving love. IN THE MORNING • 10 MINUTES Open Your Heart This meditation begins by imagining yourself surrounded by a circle of the most loving beings, making generous offerings of love and goodwill to you. Sit comfortably, eyes open or closed. 1 Imagine you’re encircled by people who love you. You, in the center of a circle, made up of the most loving beings you’ve met. Maybe they exist…

Many years ago, the five-year-old son of a friend of mine came rushing into his father’s workshop talking rapidly in a rush of insight and pointing to a tool on the bench: “Daddy, this isn’t a screwdriver; that’s just what we call it, and a rock isn’t a rock; we just call it that; that’s not grass; that’s just our word for it…” He went on for a while, then summed up his realization by saying something like, “These are just names we give to things. They’re not the things themselves.” I was studying rhetoric and semantics around that time and something called mindful speech, and I remember thinking how valuable it could be to carry that kind of childlike mind with us, so we might better understand the fuzzy…

MINDFULNESS AT SCHOOL IMPROVES LEARNING SKILLS New research from Australia shows classroom-based mindfulness lessons for young children can aid the development of executive function—a set of skills that are key to academic and social thriving—while also building stress resilience. Of 91 kindergarten- to second-graders who participated in a classroom-based program, two-thirds were offered mindfulness instruction during the first part of the study. The remaining third, serving as a control group, received lessons when the study was done. At set times each day, teachers (who had minimal prior experience in teaching mindfulness) had children listen to the sound of a gong. They could also add mindfulness-based activities like reading, making crafts, or taking mindful moments. Students also did breathing and body-scan exercises. At the end of the semester, students in the…

Q I reacted with anger, rage, and frustration when a difficult friend ignored my request for space. This person punishes and is unlikely to forgive. Do I apologize even though my words will likely fall on deaf ears? A It sounds as if you’ve already made the leap into more compassion through your own practice—you recognize you reacted in a way that doesn’t feel right. So it may feel helpful for you—to set your heart at ease, and if it feels like the ethical thing to do for your own self—to say to this person, “I’m really sorry I responded with so much anger, I lost touch with myself and I realize that was not fair to you,” or whatever you want to say. The trick here is to apologize without being…

“A man cannot step into the same river twice: The river is different, and so is the man.” So taught the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. But he didn’t say anything about women and mountaintops, so when mountain climber Georgina Miranda found herself just a few hours from Everest’s peak in 2013, an earlier attempt to summit was very much on her mind. “I got sick at the exact same place, the exact same elevation altitude, almost to the spot,” she remembers. Miranda was once again in hypoxia, a condition that interferes with oxygen absorption and had, in 2011, caused her to abandon her bid for the peak. “Think of somebody having an anxiety attack. Hypoxia is the same, you can’t process oxygen, you can’t breathe. The more you get focused on…

You cannot will yourself into particular feelings toward yourself or the world around you. Rather, you can simply remind yourself that you deserve happiness and ease—no more and no less than anyone else. The same goes for your child, your family, your friends, your neighbors, and everyone else in the world. Everyone is driven by an inner desire to avoid suffering and find a measure of peace and ease. IN THE MORNING • 10 MINUTES Tame Your Inner Critic The inner critic is like the two old guys on The Muppet Show endlessly deriding whatever is unfolding on your life’s stage. Attempting to reason with your inner tyrant only validates it, as if it deserves your attention. It’s really just an unhelpful pattern of thinking most of us pick up…

Dr. Sally Safa had her own periodontist clinic and was raising a family when burnout struck. “I woke up one morning and I could not go to work,” she says. “I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was trying to push through it. I was vomiting. I couldn’t get out of the house.” Safa was having a panic attack. The daughter of hardworking immigrants, she had always pushed herself to achieve—so when a therapist recommended mindfulness, she threw herself into it completely, despite having doubts. A course at the Omega Center led her to discover Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and everything changed. “This personal journey was happening, and I started to change as a [medical] practitioner,” she reflects. One of her biggest breakthroughs was realizing that her own anxiety…

La Passeggiata This Italian tradition translates directly to “the walk,” but it’s so much more than a simple excursion on foot. Italians get dressed up to “fare la passeggiata” in the evenings on weekends and holidays, when the whole town takes to the streets to see and be seen. While you may find it more comfortable to wear sneakers and stretchy clothes, you can still get the benefit of moving your body, feeling part of your community, and greeting passersby, no matter where and when you fare your own passeggiata. Fika Translated as a “coffee and cake break,” the Swedish tradition of fika is about more than just getting your daily caffeine fix. Fika can be done at any time of day, and involves sharing a pause with friends, family,…

I remember vividly the days when I first learned to drive. The sheer terror. I carried the responsibility of a two-ton death machine with me every moment I was in the car. All the dials, levers, and pedals I needed to focus on to make the thing go, to get me from Point A to Point B. And how quickly it became rote. The exhilaration of driving quickly dwindled. Now, with thousands of miles of road behind me, I just put that sucker into drive and away I go. It’s totally thoughtless, to the point where I can now drive somewhere and forget how I got there, distracted by whatever is going on in my head. Then came a birthday request from my girlfriend, who owns a car with standard…

Like any good spring cleaning, let’s get right down to the basics of mindfulness and meditation. One of the most foundational aspects of mindfulness is the ability to calm and focus the mind using your breath. By bringing your attention back to the breath each time you feel your mind wander during meditation, you can strengthen your brain’s natural ability to focus over time. Cultivate greater attention with these short meditation practices. IN THE MORNING • 5 MINUTES Tune In to Your Natural Awareness In mindfulness practice, you might often hear the term “natural awareness.” By natural awareness, we mean the awareness that simply comes with being a human being. It’s free from judging and characterizing—it’s just noticing and sensing the world. 1 Settle into your seat. Begin by taking…

THE JOY OF MOVEMENT How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage Kelly McGonigal, PhD • Avery McGonigal’s thesis is simple—as humans, we are hardwired for movement. She builds her case through a wide-ranging survey of scientific studies, interviews with movers of all kinds, and her own personal experiences as a group-fitness leader and enthusiast. She starts with the “runner’s high,” which lights up the same reward center in the brain as cocaine and other addictive drugs do. But since addictive drugs don’t seem to serve any evolutionary purpose, McGonigal digs into studies that reveal the runner’s high may be connected not only to our hunting-and-gathering past, but also to the kind of cooperation that saw us sharing the spoils of our endeavors, and thus surviving together. From…