Mindful Magazine April 2020 - Let Your Brilliance Shine

Let Go of Anxiety

• Invite

Self-Compassion

• Quiet Your Inner Critic

• Feel Calm

• Sleep Soundly

• Energize Naturally

APRIL 2020 mindful.org

38 Adventure Inward

Failure, inspiration, and mindfulness got mountain climber Georgina Miranda to the top of Mount Everest and beyond.

44 Going Deeper

There is a path to greater perspective, insight, and emotional freedom. Founding editor Barry Boyce calls on his four decades of practice to take us on the journey.

april

54 Spring Refresh and Renew

Give yourself a fresh start with three days of mindfulness, featuring practices from Sharon Salzberg, Mark Bertin, and Barry Boyce.

62

The Healing Work of Racial Justice

Rhonda Magee, professor of law at the University of San Francisco, shares how she mindfully navigates the difficult waters of racially charged conversations.

54

Let Your Brilliance Shine

feel happier find peace

Let Go of Anxiety

• Invite Self-Compassion

• Quiet Your Inner Critic

• Feel Calm

• Sleep Soundly

• Energize Naturally

44 Explore the Path of Mindfulness

Explore More Mindfulness

In “Going Deeper,” founding editor Barry Boyce shares his mindful path to greater perspective, wisdom, and emotional freedom.

You’re Invited

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 twenties. One of my first introductions came when I was a young editor, researching an article about something called Morita therapy that was based on three tenets: Accept your feelings, know your purpose, and do what needs to be done. I loved the idea that our feelings were like clouds in the sky, worth observing, but fleeting and impermanent. Experimenting with this view, I would walk to work in the morning along the East River in New York City, my footfalls and breath like a metronome anchoring me in the present, while I allowed my thoughts, feelings, memories, and fantasies to arise, moving across the sky of my mind. (Oh! The clouds that appeared on those walks!)

I knew that by the time I was crossing First, Second, and Third Avenues, I needed to check in with my purpose and by the time I was at Park and Madison, arriving at the office, I had a clear sense of what needed to be done. What started, then, as a daily experiment of observing my thoughts and feelings has shape-shifted over time. I‘d like to think that my perspective has shifted, too, perhaps to a state of “less me” as founding editor Barry Boyce describes in his deep tour of mindfulness (starting on page 44)—but always with an appreciation for the opportunity to go deeper, to feel more alive and aware of what is going on inside and around me.

With mindfulness, you are always invited to explore with curiosity and kindness as your companions. For inspiration and a sense of the possibilities, I hope you’ll check out Barry’s piece and the beautiful accompanying tree of practices on page 52 to see what beckons you.

Love,

Anne Alexander is a longtime meditator, yogi, and editor. She is the author of two New York Times best sellers and has had a hand in shaping magazines, books, apps, and websites for Rodale, National Geographic, and more.

What Guides Your Heart?

Your personal set of values, however you choose to express them, shines through your words, actions, and how you are in the world. What values give your life its own purpose and authenticity?

What personal values have changed for you over time?

How does your body respond when you act in a way that’s not in accordance with your values?

• I can’t tell: 2%

• Feeling sick: 48%

• Feeling clumsy: 19%

• Heart rushing, sense of fear or anxiety: 69%

What drives you to honor your values when it’s difficult to do so?

THE BIGGEST THING FOR ME IS COMPASSION. Having compassion for myself is very challenging for

me. I find it easier to be compassionate to my patients, my staff, my loved ones than I do, deep down, to myself.

But it’s a huge personal value for me, because I was my own worst critic. I was trying to do so much in achieving and succeeding by all these criteria I had. It was really when I started to see myself in a far kinder, more compassionate light, that I would just say to myself, like, Are you just trying your best? Just ease up.

DR. SALLY SAFA

• “My hope and belief that if I follow through with those values, I can help make the world just a little bit better.”

• “I owe it to my family to be my best, because they rely on me.”

• “Knowing that everyone is fighting their own battles.”

• “I want people to be honest, so I need to be honest myself.”

• “Being true to myself and having self-compassion.”

• “Remembering the web of connection: What we do to one person affects others.”

• “Love.”

Has mindfulness helped you succeed at sticking to your principles?

Yes, I feel it has helped

% I don’t think so

%

IN YOUR WORDS

What values do you live by every day?

“Fairness, kindness, and integrity, which I express through loving-kindness meditation: May I be kind to myself and others; May I show fairness in my behavior and decisions; And may I demonstrate integrity in my actions.”

JOSEPH ROCKAWAY, NJ

“Honesty, willingness to keep communication open in both my personal and professional life, love for nature and animals, and really appreciating the time I have.”

FLORINA CHICAGO, IL

“Helping and uplifting others, and gratitude, joy, and love.”

FAYE STANHOPE, NJ

“Kindness. I act by giving whatever I can to whomever needs it. The reciprocity of a smile or simply the act itself is worth more to me than what I have given, every time. We are both rewarded.”

JULIE BEAR DANCE, MT

Next Question

What’s a ritual you do that helps you connect to your own inner power?

Send an email to yourwords@mindful.org and let us know your answer to this question. Your response could appear on these pages.

Founding Editor

Barry Boyce

Content Director

Anne Alexander

Executive Editor

Heather Hurlock

Senior Editor

Nicole Bayes-Fleming

Contributing Editors

Teo Furtado

Katherine Griffin

Thank you!

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Please

Did you know Mindful is a nonprofit? We are dedicated to inspiring and guiding anyone who wants to explore mindfulness to enjoy better health, more caring relationships, and a more compassionate society.

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speak. The site doesthedogdie. com helps film and series buffs do just that: It’s an online database for content warnings. Users contribute info on what’s in a film or a show, from violence to strobe effects, ableism to clowns, and of course, dogs or other animals dying. Crowdsourcing lets viewers support each other in making informed decisions about their entertainment.

TOP OF mind

CONSCIOUS CURATION

Many major museums—like the Smithsonian, the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the British

Museum—are using 3D technology to replicate artifacts from prehistoric cave art in France to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, making art and artifacts

broadly accessible—and repatriating objects stolen from colonized societies. The Smithsonian, for example, 3D printed a whale hat from the Tlingit clan in southeastern Alaska. Museums can display objects concurrently, and anyone with access to a 3D printer can get the

digital files online and make their own copy. Plus, archaeologist Néstor Marqués says, “3D printing [can] create perfect replicas of the objects, or resize them if the objects are so small that their details can’t be seen properly,” a boon for education and research. And, since 2019, Google’s Arts and

Culture Institute, nonprofit CyArk, and 3D printing company Stratasys have collaborated on the Open Heritage project, which aims to “bring important monuments and artifacts around the world to life” by reproducing smallscale versions of cultural heritage sites.

THE SPOILERS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

When choosing what to watch, it’s often good to look both ways, so to

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A FREE RIDE

Kansas City is on track to become the first major US city with free public transit, after city council agreed to waive the fare on city busses for all riders. The joint initiative between the city and the local transit authority aims to make life easier for those on a low income, while encouraging others to make the eco-friendly choice to leave their cars at home. Doing away with transit fares is estimated to cost the city eight million dollars, and will save the frequent commuter one thousand dollars a

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIMOTHY KLINGLER/UNSPLASH, ANDRII LEONOV/UNSPLASH

year. Kansas City’s streetcars are already fare-free.

PLAY, BY THE RULES

To grow a garden and eat fresh produce; to play in vibrant neighborhoods, schoolyards, and parks; and to splash in the Chesapeake Bay are among the legal rights of children in Baltimore.

The city adopted a Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights in May 2019, one of 18 cities funded by Cities Connecting Children to Nature, which aims to fuel systemic shifts to make nature more accessible for children and families, especially those in underserved communities.

Mary Hardcastle, director of the Carrie Murray Nature Center, helped develop the Bill of

Rights and says it’s led to the start of a Nature Daycare, as well as bubbling up throughout government a proactive vision for nurturing healthy families through exposure to nature.

“In providing access to nature, we also want to address issues of equity, trauma, and healing,” adds Hardcastle.

PUT YOUR WORRIES TO SLEEP

A Guatemalan tradition—where children tell sorrows to tiny “worry dolls” before sleep— inspired Peter Wieben to develop the free Worrydolls app for smartphones. It displays adorable illustrations of worry dolls, along with space to type your troubles in. It’s simple, yet powerful: Studies show describing difficult emotions can help to resolve “an undefined cloud of anxiety,” notes Wieben. By observing that most worries tend to go away over time, Wieben says, we learn that we can “simply watch the worry arise and fall,” not taking it too seriously.

ACTS OF kindness

GOT YOU COVERED

Jeremy Locke drove past Jeannette MacDonald’s home in Glace Bay, Canada, regularly and noticed her roof was in terrible shape. Last spring he knocked on MacDonald’s door and offered to fix it for free, but MacDonald wouldn’t accept. Months later, Locke was back, saying MacDonald had won a raffle for a new roof. (The raffle was entirely made up.) Locke says MacDonald reminds him of his grandmother, and he’s hoping she’ll cook a meal for his crew. “I was betting she made homemade bread and was probably a good cook,” he told the Cape Breton Post

EXTRACURRICULAR KINDESS

A primary school in County Cork, Ireland, assigned its students a different kind of homework in December. Students were asked to perform acts of kindness, and to write kind notes to each other to be read aloud at a weekly school assembly. The school’s vice principal wrote on Facebook: “Our message to the children is very simple: They can be the reason somebody smiles today and they can definitely help make this world a better place for others and for themselves.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY THE CARRIE MURRAY NATURE CENTER, ILLUSTRATION BY WORRYDOLLS.APP

Research News

by B. GRACE BULLOCK

MINDFULNESS AT SCHOOL IMPROVES LEARNING SKILLS

New research from Australia shows classroombased 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 classroombased 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 mindfulnessbased 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 mindfulness classrooms were better able to pay attention, regulate their behavior, shift between tasks, plan, organize, and monitor their responses than the control group; teachers also reported the

former showed greater attention and concentration skills and more prosocial behavior.

DAILY BODY SCAN REDUCES STRESS

A daily body scan may reduce stress’s impact on mind and body, a new study finds. German researchers assigned 47 young adults to either a body scan group or an audiobook control group. Body scan group members practiced a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction–based body scan. Book group members listened to an audiobook of a novel. Both

Research from Griffith University, Ulm University, and Second Military Medical University in Shanghai et al.

groups were asked to listen to their recordings for 20 minutes per day for eight weeks. Before and after, researchers took strands of participants’ hair (to measure cortisol and DHEA, which are biomarkers of stress), and had them complete a questionnaire about their stress level. Cortisol and DHEA val-

Interestingly, people in both groups reported less psychological stress at study’s end.

BRIEF MINDFULNESS INTERVENTION MAY IMPROVE EMOTION PROCESSING

A new study finds just one week of meditation may loosen the grip of negative emotions.

ues found in hair reflect long-term stress patterns. After eight weeks, cortisol levels declined in the body scan group, but went up in the audiobook group. The body scan group also experienced a greater decrease than the audiobook group in their cortisol to DHEA ratio, meaning they showed less biological stress than did the controls.

Researchers in China assigned 46 college volunteers to either a mindfulness meditation intervention group or an emotion regulation education group. Meditation instruction was based on core concepts of mindfulness and the breath, and delivered via a short lecture on mindfulness theory, followed by seven days of 15-minute,

audio-guided group meditation sessions. The emotion-regulation education group attended a lecture on recognizing and regulating their emotions, then practiced alone for 15 minutes per day for the next seven days. Before and after, both groups filled out questionnaires about their depression and anxiety symptoms and underwent computerized tests that assessed their emotional intensity, emotional memory, and attention. After training, depression and anxiety scores didn’t change significantly for either group, but those in the meditation group had better emotional memory and were less likely to pay attention to negative emotion. They also reported feeling less positive and negative emotional intensity than the controls. More research is needed to see whether brief interventions can reliably boost people’s moods.

Classroom-based mindfulness can aid the development of skills for academic and social thriving.

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 MindfulnessBased 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 was stirred by seeing anxious patients, and theirs was

stirred by hers. She created a more comfortable environment in her clinic, such as practicing mindful listening and offering meditation sessions to her staff.

“With my patients on a day to day, I check my anxiety, I check their anxiety,” she says. “This is a human being. They are in pain. They deserve me to mindfully listen to them.”

Today, Safa works with groups including the Canadian Dental Association to teach current and future dentists about the value of mindfulness and managing stress. Telling her story to others made her realize she’s not the only dentist who has struggled.

“I realized by talking to people that so many people have various levels of anxiety,” she says, acknowledging that many dentists struggle with drug addiction, depression, and higher risk of suicide. “We have to help ourselves manage day to day in this quite stressful profession.”

Dr. Sally Safa

MINDFUL AT WORK

#MY MENTAL HEALTH IN 3 WORDS

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.

beginner MIND

QI 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?

@Weltzchmerz

@clemserrell

@ ninaandtito

AIt 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 attached to the result. If you’re hoping that they’re going to say, “I totally accept your apology, I love you, our relationship is wonderful,” you’re probably going to be in trouble. There’s another option, from the 12-step world. They talk about the concepts of direct amends—when we directly ask a person for their forgiveness—and living amends, when we make a decision to live our lives differently. It may just be that in a case like yours, that’s a better, kinder approach.

@ JPBrown5

@ buzy263 ”

Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. She is the author of several books, including The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering your Natural Awareness (Sounds True, 2019).

“Struggling but fighting”

“Just keep swimming”

“Dogs. Exercise. Therapy.”

“Happiness is internal”

“Searching for change”

Enjoy the Moment

You’ve gotten hygge with it, now check out these other hard-to-translate ways to take a refreshing pause.

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, or coworkers while savoring a treat. It serves to both strengthen your relationships and give you a break to refresh your mind and body.

Niksen

The Dutch practice of niksen involves doing nothing at all—that’s right, nothing. The idea is to let go of the need to be productive and give yourself permission to simply be in the moment, so you can reduce stress and relieve symptoms of burnout. How exactly do you practice niksen? Try taking a long break to look out the window, listen to music, or sit down.

Grab some fresh air. What’s outside?

Scan the vista for two or three signs of spring.

MINDFUL OR MINDLESS?

Our take on who’s paying attention and who’s not

by AMBER TUCKER

Performance artist David Datuna

shocked modern-art aficionados by eating another artist’s installation that had sold for $120K: a banana ducttaped to a gallery wall. “I call the performance ‘Hungry Artist,’ because I was hungry and I just ate it,” he said. Ooookay.

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.

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 State created a skirt out of her academic rejection notes—and wore it when she successfully defended her dissertation. “Sitting down...with your rejection letters to make a craft out of them is kind of therapeutic,” she said.

Vaping nicotine isn’t safer than smoking, as a spate of vapingrelated deaths and illnesses have shown. From April 2020, Nova Scotia is the first Canadian province to ban flavored e-cigarettes, which have skyrocketed vaping rates (especially among youth) across North America.

Police fined a Montreal woman $420 for not holding the handrail on a subway station escalator. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, who judged the police action as “interference with freedom of movement,” and awarded the woman $20K for all the fuss. ●

MINDFUL MINDLESS

Harvard Pilgrim is proud to support the creation of Mindful’s resources for pain, including specialized meditations and reviews of cutting-edge research on how mindfulness can help with pain.

Since 2005, Harvard Pilgrim’s Mind the Moment program and its team of expert instructors have been helping

• organizations bring mindfulness into the workplace

• providers bring mindfulness into the healing process, and

• individuals make mindfulness part of their self-care routine.

Now, we want to bring another sort of support system to anyone dealing with the complexities of chronic pain.

Featuring:

• Experts and researchers on mindfulness for pain

• Stories of healing, brought to you by Christiane Wolf, Steve Hickman, and Barry Boyce

• Meditation practices for pain, led by Tara Healey, Noriko Harth, Luis Morones, and others

Visit

Greyston Bakery makes more than great-tasting brownies. Greyston, New York’s first registered Benefit Corporation, is making an impact on the community, society, and the environment. At the very heart of Greyston’s operations are the tenets of nonjudgment, embracing uncertainty, and loving action. It’s a philosophy that extends beyond the bakery floor into the offices of the executive leadership

Compassion IN ACTION

How compassionate practices may be the secret ingredient to Greyston Bakery’s $21 million success.

team and the board of directors meeting room.

“It’s imperative that business leaders think about their communities. This is our time,” says Greyston’s President and CEO Mike Brady. “How are we ever going to close this income inequality gap if we’re not progressive?”

The commercial brownie bakery pioneered Open Hiring, a system that guarantees a job to anyone willing and able to work. By answering two questions about their legal status and physical ability, an applicant’s name is added to a first-come-first-serve hiring

list. When a position opens, the next person on the list joins a 6- to 10-month paid apprenticeship where they learn the skills to work in a commercial kitchen. If they complete the program successfully, they’ll earn a permanent position.

Greyston has created more than 3,500 job opportunities and employed as many people over its 38-year history, including former prisoners who struggle to find work once they finish their sentences. Almost half of ex-prisoners have no reported earnings in the first years after incarceration, and of those

who do find work, half earn less than minimum wage, according to a 2018 report by the Brookings Institute.

Out of the bakery’s 100 current employees, 70 came through open hiring, says Brady. “We trust that everyone can be successful on a job, and we invest in that trust,” he says. “Everyone gets a chance.”

The model has certainly proved successful for the business. Sales have doubled over the past five years, from $10 million to $21 million.

It also provides a compelling story to other companies getting “woke” to their role in society.

Kelle Walsh is a former senior editor with Mindful, and writes from Boulder, Colorado.

COMPASSIONATE ROOTS

In the early 1980s, Zen Buddhist teachers Bernie Glassman and Sandra Jishu Holmes started a bakery named after their teaching center and home, Greyston Mansion, as a way to employ their students. Inspired by the concept of right livelihood, or an ethical path to success that does not cause harm, Glassman also envisioned it as an opportunity to support the surrounding community, especially those struggling with homelessness or other barriers to employment.

The mayor of Yonkers caught wind of the idea, and asked Glassman if he’d consider launching his community development experiment there. Homelessness was at the time widespread in the city, among other social issues. Glassman sold the mansion and closed the bakery, and moved operations a few miles up the Hudson River into an abandoned lasagna factory. A few years later and funded by the bakery’s success, he and Holmes launched a nonprofit community development organization to address

needs beyond employment that keep people from thriving, including housing, childcare, social services, and more. Today this work is supported by the Greyston Foundation, which distributes bakery profits back into the community.

By the time Brady joined the team, first as a volunteer, then getting involved with the board, and then taking over operations for the bakery before moving into his current position, Greyston had long enjoyed the support of conscious capitalism vanguard Ben & Jerry’s, providing the key ingredient for its popular Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. But while attending a Social Venture Circle conference, Brady realized how far Greyston’s story had traveled. “I was blown away by the reception of others when I told them

where I worked,” he recalls. “I didn’t appreciate how highly regarded it was.”

He also realized that “there were a lot of business assets that were being under-realized.”

Today Greyston is the official brownie vendor to Delta Airlines, and has developed a line of products, including vegan brownies and blondies, for Whole Foods, among other clients. Some 35,000 pounds of brownies are baked each day at the Yonkers facility—that’s 6.5 million brownies annually.

Brady also often heard from business leaders intrigued by Greyston’s hiring model but unsure how it might work in their companies. “I saw that there was a lot more opportunity to make impact,” he says.

In June 2018 the Greyston Foundation launched the Center for Open Hiring →

A recipe for success: Open hiring practices create pathways for more people to enter and thrive in the workforce.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GREYSTON BAKERY

to develop best practices and advise other businesses on how to extend their definition of who is employable.  The goal, says Brady, is to “make Open Hiring a common practice throughout the world.” The center has already partnered with a similar foundation in the Netherlands, which is facing its own issues around refugee and senior employment discrimination.

Brady says that companies there are hungry for solutions to remedy social inequality, but American businesses tend to be more cautious. And while more and more have embraced corporate philanthropy and social benefit initiatives, Brady believes these efforts only go so far. “That volunteer day is great,” he says, “but it doesn’t change people’s lives.”

Instead, he wants to flip the narrative about who is employable on its head, and create pathways for more people to enter and thrive in the workforce. “I want to inspire every business in the country to hire 10 people who need a break.  To say ‘Let’s take a chance to hire someone who doesn’t fit,’” he says.  “Now I’m solving some real problems around income inequality and poverty and criminal justice.”

MINDFULNESS IN ACTION

“Mindfulness is, for lack of a better term, fully baked into the business,” Brady says.

Greyston Bakery BY THE NUMBERS

Brady explains the organization’s foundational belief in the concept of PathMaking, or that everyone is on their own individual life journey. If an employee is struggling in any area outside of work, such as with housing or childcare, the company is invested in trying to support them. Greyston works closely with social-service providers in the community, to make sure that employees get the help they need—something that hearkens back to Bernie Glassman’s original vision.  Brady acknowledges that this level of involvement in an employee’s life might seem like more than what many companies are willing to do, but he’s pragmatic. “We need our business to be successful,” he says. “I want this team member to overcome this issue so they can be successful in life, but also so they can come to work. If someone is concerned about childcare, are they going to be mindful on the line? The answer is no.”

• 3,500 people employed over 38 years

• 35,000 pounds of brownies made each day

• 6.5 million brownies baked per year

• $20 million in annual sales

On the other side of this human-to-human support, Brady says, “What I get is a team member, for as long as they’re at Greyston, they’re committed. They’re working hard.” He notes that retention levels at the bakery are higher than the industry average.

Not everyone who comes through the program ends up working for or staying at the bakery. “We take people in without judgment; we also let people go without judgment,” Brady says. The company will even connect employees to other types of job training if they’re ready to move on. “We often say the success isn’t when we give someone a job in Greyston. The success is when they leave Greyston for another job,” he adds. Retaining or losing employees, especially ones that you’ve invested so much time in, is a concern Brady hears often from business leaders. “There’s a lot of discussion about ‘churn’ at organizations,” he says. “But, if you think that you’ve given someone job skills, what a great thing to celebrate.” ●

“I want to inspire every business in the country to hire 10 people who need a break.”

Mike Brady, President and CEO of Greyston Bakery

YOU ARE NOT Your Depression

Learning what type of depression you have is the key to successful treatment. Here's when mindfulness can help and when it can't.

Depression is a classic example of what’s referred to today as an invisible illness. When you’re depressed, you may find yourself expending precious energy just so you can appear to the world as if nothing at all is troubling you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sara Altshul is an award-winning journalist who has covered natural and alternative healing for over 20 years. Her articles have appeared in magazines including Prevention, AARP, Arthritis Today, and Health. She is the author of Kitchen Cabinet Cures

This “it’s-work-to-seemfine” coping mechanism illustrates just one way in which depression complicates your life. Not only are you exhausting yourself pretending to be OK, you may find it hard to rally support from friends, family, and coworkers who only see how well you seem to be functioning.

While there is rapidly growing recognition of the very real difficulty and damage caused by depression, the stigma of past decades and centuries lingers. We often still hear the familiar no-

tion that you can just “pull yourself together and get on with it,” as though keeping a “stiff upper lip” should be enough to defeat depression. But strong neurochemical, social, and environmental factors contribute to this very real, physical illness, and successful treatment requires more than maintaining an “upbeat attitude.”

DEPRESSION IS A CHAMELEON

Our ability to recognize and effectively treat depression—

which 1 in 14 people will experience in their lifetime—is complicated by the fact that it manifests differently in everyone affected, according to the National Institutes of Health. Anything —your age, your gender, or the stage of your depression—can change what the illness looks like for you, meaning it’s not necessarily simple to get a diagnosis, or even recognize symptoms of depression, whether in yourself or in other people.

For women, depression is more likely to appear as sadness, worthlessness, and

guilt. Hormonal and life cycle-related changes, as in postpartum depression, can make women more susceptible to developing the illness. In fact, women are statistically more likely than men to experience depression.

For men, depression often looks like exhaustion, irritability, and sleeping problems. They also lose interest in things they once enjoyed. Men are also more likely to turn to drugs and alcohol, experiment with reckless activity, or become intensely devoted to work in order to distract themselves from their illness.

For teens and tweens, depression can look like extended and severe periods of sulking, getting into trouble at school, prolonged irritability, and an intense feeling of being misunderstood.

These are by no means the only ways depression can appear. Some people experience short, intense periods of depression, while others feel it as an unmoving cloud over their awareness; for some, it’s linked to difficult life events, while for others it doesn’t go away even when their outward circumstances seem fine.

MINDFULNESS AND MOOD

Various treatment options for depression exist, including drug regimens and talk therapies. However, the jury continues to be out on how effective antidepressants are for treating depression. A comprehensive 2018 study conducted by an international research team examined 522 studies, including

116,477 patients, to learn about the effectiveness of 21 antidepressant medications. The researchers discovered that, although nearly all of the drugs were more effective than placebos, their effects were still “modest” in most cases.

Complicating treatment is the fact that depression is often a chronic condition that tends to relapse, even with medication and talk therapy. According to research, relapse rates range from 50% to as high as 80%.

Interestingly, when mindfulness is added to the standard depression treatment protocols, relapse rates decline. But it’s unlikely that simply practicing basic mindfulness meditation will ease your depression symptoms. In fact, such an attempt could be supremely unhelpful, notes Julienne Bower, PhD, professor of health psychology at UCLA.

She tells us that the research showing that

mindfulness meditation improves symptoms of depression is, at best, vague. She also notes that it’s really hard to meditate on your own when you’re depressed.

Zindel Segal, PhD, concurs. The Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto, Dr. Segal has pioneered the use of mindfulness meditation for promoting wellness in the area of mood disorders. He was also one of the team who developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), a research-backed mindfulness protocol for depressive disorders.

CHRONIC UNHAPPINESS?

“When we talk about depression, and where mindfulness is strong and less strong as a treatment, we have to know what type of depression you have,” says Segal.

“Don’t consider mindfulness a treatment when you’re dealing with acute depression,” he advises. Depression “shuts down your concentration and disrupts your executive network

ability,” which makes practicing mindfulness difficult, says Dr. Segal. Instead, for acute depression, consider seeing a mental health professional for treatment with antidepressants, cognitive behavior therapy, or both. Mindfulness can bolster those treatments, but not replace them.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, however, was specifically designed to help people who are depressed or chronically unhappy. MBCT is a therapeutic protocol that combines cognitive therapy, which helps people interrupt the disturbing behavior or thought patterns that interfere with their lives, with mindfulness practices that help you learn to develop a healthier relationship to unhelpful thought patterns.

“Our research looked at specific ways that MBCT helps people work with rumination and worry in ways that are more generous and compassionate,” says Dr. Segal. “This therapy helps you learn to ‘de-center’ and allows you to see your thoughts unfold moment to moment. It helps you to not listen to the messages that depression is sending you.”

HOW MBCT HELPS

The goal of MBCT is to help you become familiar with the ways your mind and your thinking patterns contribute to depression, which helps you to develop a new relationship to your depression.

According to Dr. Segal, many people describe leaving the MBCT training with these two major insights:

1. Thoughts are not facts.

2. Depression is not me. →

At first, these points may seem overly simplistic—but when we pay attention to how we are thinking and feeling, over time we become better at spotting the buildup of difficult emotions and thoughts. In that way, we can deal with them more skillfully, instead of just reacting in ways that might not be good for us.

“Mindfulness practices—focusing on the breath and body, as well as mindful movement and developing greater mindful attention to everyday activities—help us learn to recognize the feelings and patterns of thinking that cause unhappiness,” says Willem Kuyken, PhD, the Ritblat Professor of Mindfulness and Psychological Science at the University of Oxford. “We learn that thoughts are just thoughts. They are not facts, and we can choose whether to give them power over our minds and hearts. In time they can even help us savor and enjoy all the things that give us pleasure and a sense of accomplishment,” adds Kuyken.

When it comes to depression that relapses after treatment, he suggests that MBCT has proven to be particularly helpful, if you adhere to the program. The program consists of eight weeks of classes, as well as at-home practices you do on your own for about an hour a day. “Many people [with depression] are trying to turn around very long-standing and ingrained habits of thinking and behaving, and that will take time and effort,” says Dr. Kuyken. He notes that a recent study by Dr. Segal showed that the more a per-

VIDEO

Calm Your Mind with Zindel Segal

Explore the Three-Minute Breathing Space in our 4-part online mini-course, Calm Your Mind, with Zindel Segal. mindful.org/ breathingspace

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The Three-Minute Breathing Space

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 the body as a whole and any sensations that are present.

son practices MBCT over time, the greater the benefits for easing depression.

To find a therapist who has been trained and certified in practicing MBCT, visit accessmbct.com

If you or someone you care for is having suicidal thoughts, these helplines in the US, Canada, and UK offer free, confidential prevention, crisis resources, and support 24/7/365.

US: 1-800-273-8255 suicidepreventionlifeline.org

Canada: 1-833-456-4566 crisisservicescanada.ca/en/ UK: 116-123 samaritans.org ●

Perhaps because of its flexibility and real-world focus, the Three-Minute Breathing Space is one of the most durable practices used by participants well after MBCT has ended.

–Zindel Segal

Loosen YOUR GRIP

When you relinquish control over how people and things ought to be, you can improve your relationships and decrease your stress.

Life offers many uncertainties that can threaten our safety and well-being. Controlling the mayhem makes a certain amount of sense, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everybody just did what

you said? Sadly, not everyone responds positively to being told what to do and how to do it. Even by you. The puzzling thing is, the more you try to control people—even for their own good—the more they push back. Why won’t they follow the route you so carefully Mapquested for them? Why don’t they eat their greens or vote the way you want them to? The more they resist, the more

you lean in—and then it’s resentment all around.

My mother once turned to me in the middle of a busy street and told me to stop trying to take her over. Wha? All I was doing was insisting that I carry her heavy bag of books from the library. She’s in her 80s! Helping her is a good thing. Why was my helpfulness making her so testy? As I clung tightly to her bookage, refusing to give anything

back to her, I suddenly noticed my dogged determination to do right, come hell or high water. I paused. I hadn’t checked in with whether she even wanted my help—I just assumed I knew best and took control.

My mother told me nicely but firmly to back off. That gave me the opportunity to be curious about my self-righteous presumption that my way was the right way, instead of waiting to →

hear what she wanted from me.

Stopping me in the middle of the street is one way to get my attention. My body also signals me when I am battening down my hatches and getting ready to go in for control: Jaw-clenching, stomach-tightening and an audible in-breath just before I launch in to offer my “great” suggestions are often my signature moves when I’m getting ready to take charge. Sometimes, if I really pay attention, I can hear my inner shower-voice belting, “You’ll do it My Way!”

The beauty is that once I catch myself playing the role of master and commander, I can do what I did with my mother. I can pay attention to where my need to control is really taking me.

Here’s the thing about our inner control freak: It is doing a valiant job trying to keep us, and those around us, safe. Sometimes. But other times, if we are acting out of habit, we close ourselves off from seeing and experiencing new things. We don’t necessarily need to banish our inner control freak, but we do need to stay mindful of how it’s motivating us to behave.

More than likely, your desire to control springs from the best of intentions. Please thank yourself. You probably do see a better, faster way, and that’s wonderful. Just remember to pay attention. Notice the body sensations that fire up when your inner controller starts to freak. Ask yourself if you really do need to take over or whether you can let things develop on their own. Learn to love letting go.

We can start this by practicing with small or large acts of letting go. We could allow someone else to load the dishwasher (their way!). We could relinquish control of the TV remote (occasionally!). We could allow for more noise—music, traffic, animals—in our environment than we think we are able to tolerate. When you let go of control, you give yourself permission to stop feeling that you need to do everything! Isn’t that a relief? Control mechanisms can even show up in our mindfulness practice. We bemoan the times that our minds wandered a lot, or that we were edgy or restless. On those days we can remind ourselves that we don’t need to control anything. Not even our breath. It is a tasty fantasy to hope that mindfulness will get rid of pesky humanness. At the end of the day, our practice is not there to tighten control or prevent us from thinking, but to help us watch the ever-changing, uncontrollable, remarkable flow of life, coming and going. We cannot control the flow, but we can be there and be present to it all— wanted and unwanted. ●

The beauty is that once I catch myself playing the role of master and commander, I can pay attention to where my need to control is really taking me.

Shifting GEARS

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 transmission. After six months of playing chauffeur, Sharon wanted me to take the responsibility of getting us places.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carsten Knox , a former associate editor for Mindful, is currently an associate producer with CBC. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Fair enough.

On a sunny, spring day she drove us to a largely unoccupied parking lot. I climbed into the driver’s seat, her into the passenger side. Right away, I felt that quarter-century-old anxiety return—maybe even more so this time.

Here I am, in my 40s, learning how to drive stick. Everything’s awkward and unfamiliar. Is it possible I’m less coordinated now than I was in my 20s? I certainly have a more chummy relationship with my own mortality. I’m a whole lot more fragile than I was then, back when I still clung to the illusion of immortality.

Sharon gave me a few pointers: Ease the clutch. You’re going to stall all the time at the beginning, everyone does. Don’t let it bother you. Listen to the engine, it’ll tell you when it’s time to shift.

It didn’t take long to get frustrated with both the car and the instruction. Once I understood the basics, being in the car with someone giving me pointers was the worst. It was pride—I didn’t want to struggle and

By Carsten Knox

What learning how to drive stick in my 40s taught me about my automatic behaviors.

The sense of vulnerability was intense. Whatever thought of control I’d enjoyed while driving automatic completely vanished with the stick in my hand.

screw up in front of her. It’s true what they say: Men will never admit to being bad at sex or at driving.

The sense of vulnerability was intense and humbling. Whatever thought of control I’d enjoyed while driving automatic completely vanished with the stick in my hand, suddenly gripped by an inchoate fear of hills, heavy traffic, or making a left turn in an intersection.

I stalled about a hundred times in the first, tentative few weeks taking the car out for test drives. Popping the clutch was the other frequent outcome, but at least that propelled the car forward. Anyone on the street who saw or heard that loud engine revving and wheel-spinning accompanying the “pop” would have thought me an idiot. Who’s the guy in the red subcompact looking for attention?

I actually said this out loud in a moment of shrill pique: “I’m never going to get this!”

But, slowly, I began to.

As I grew familiar with stepping on the clutch in tandem with the brake and accelerator, shifting the gears up and down, my relationship with the car, the road, and my surroundings started to change.

I looked at the speedometer and tachometer much more regularly. I listened to the sounds the motor makes, with a better understanding of what it’s actually doing in response to my commands. I found a new sense of control over the machine, one that required

I pay much more attention.

A breakthrough was realizing the more relaxed I am in the driver’s seat, the better I am at driving standard. Jerky, sudden movements lead to mistakes.

The vehicle responds directly to my state of mind. Easing from one gear to another, and remembering to breathe, really works. If I’m stressed or distracted, it chugs and creeps and lurches and doesn’t do what I want it to do. I need to always remember what gear I’m in, where I’m going, and at what speed.

Now it’s fun. I’m enjoying having my left leg and right arm engaged as part of the machine’s operation. I’m starting to feel a little bit of confidence.

But I’m also embracing being regularly humbled by this thing, driving being something I used to kid myself I had once mastered. I still stall, I still get frustrated in stop-and-go traffic, up- and downshifting to get where I need to be.

And I don’t expect driving stick will ever become as automatic as automatic was. It’s too demanding of my focus.

Frankly, I wouldn’t want it to. I now understand why driving can really be about performance and control, and how a genuine interaction with the car requires you to know how to manually shift. Getting to my destination, parking, and pulling up the handbrake: Those simple actions now trigger a sense of satisfaction I never knew before.

That gift for Sharon? It’s really a gift for me. ●

WHY WE Walk On By

The bystander effect revisited: Why decent people, seemingly indifferent to other people’s distress, don’t step up to help. ABOUT

With apologies to Dickens, let’s call these Two Tales of One City, unfolding within the span of a single week last September. In one, dozens of onlookers do nothing (except film the horror with their cellphones)

while at least seven assailants stab a 16-year-old boy to death in broad daylight in the New York City suburb of Oceanside. In the other, two onlookers jump onto a subway track in the Bronx to save a 5-year-old girl whose father had jumped in front of an oncoming train with her in his arms. He died, she lived. The Good Samaritans knew neither the father nor the girl nor each other.

For half a century psychologists have wrestled with what they call the bystander effect. Although the phenomenon is almost certainly

timeless, as a subject of scholarly study it took off after an infamous 1964 episode, also in New York, in which at least half a dozen people witnessed the fatal nighttime stabbing of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese. The research reveals a simple alarming occurrence: The greater the number of people who witness a stranger in peril (or simply need), the smaller the likelihood that any will come to her aid. If a single person had witnessed the attack, the chances would have been greater that that person would have intervened. →

By Sharon Begley

by Edmon de Haro

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Rising Above Our Base Instincts

The bystander effect provides a window into the mind, showing us a shameful side of human nature that undermines the sense of self-decency most of us hold. In probing its causes, researchers are shining a light on our default ways of thinking and feeling, hoping to raise awareness that those defaults are not inevitable—only the result of mindlessly failing to rise above our baser instincts. And after decades of ascribing the bystander effect simply to diffusion of responsibility, researchers have identified an additional underlying cause. Understanding it may help us, collectively and individually, mindfully overcome the bystander effect rather than being mindless slaves to it.

When psychologist and expert on the bystander effect Jay Van Bavel of New York University was on a Manhattan subway platform recently, he saw a man beating up a woman who appeared to be his girlfriend. Van Bavel is no weakling, but neither would you mistake him for an offensive tackle. Scores of people scurried by, almost embarrassed at what was happening, without intervening. But Van Bavel and a friend grabbed the attacker and pinned him to the ground, at which point someone finally did call for help.

Van Bavel’s awareness that a greater number of bystanders lowers the chances of anyone intervening was certainly a motivation for him to step up. But so was the presence of his friend, and not only because it decreased the risk that the assailant would pummel them, too: It also increased the “reputational cost” of walking on by. “You’re more likely to intervene if you think you’ll be diminished in the eyes of someone you know if you don’t,” Van Bavel said.

That offers a lesson for someone who is in distress, whether from schoolyard bullying or sexual assault

or any other attack, Van Bavel said. “Call out an individual rather than just yelling ‘help’ into the abyss.” Doing so increases the reputational cost to bystanders who, research suggests, would otherwise shrink from intervening, while also questioning their self-image as caring individuals. Calling out a specific bystander can therefore raise the likelihood of being helped.

When Are We Less Likely to Help Others?

The absence of reputational costs is a big reason the bystander effect exists at all. That explanation emerged when researchers began probing the bystander effect after the Kitty Genovese murder. In

The greater the number of people who witness a stranger in peril (or simply need), the smaller the likelihood that any will come to her aid.

classic experiments starting in 1968, John Darley and Bibb Latané at NYU found repeatedly that when lone individuals witnessed someone in need of aid, they almost always intervened. In groups of five, 62% did. That’s not zero. But whether it’s a serious accident or a simple request for help in a chat room, there is “a reduction in helping behavior in the presence of others,” concluded a 2018 study revisiting the bystander effect.

Decades of studies have confirmed that, so let me describe just one. Scientists in Germany had 86 participants watch what they thought was a live video feed from an adjacent room (in fact, a prerecorded video) where a man became violent and abusive toward a woman (both professional actors). When the participants were alone, half shot out of their chairs to help the woman in distress, the scientists reported in 2006. When they were with another person (who was, unbeknownst to them, a researcher) only 6% did.

The consensus explanation is that when many people witness a suffering individual, even one with simply a roadside flat, any sense of moral responsibility to intervene is spread over so many that no single witness feels enough responsibility to do so. Just to be clear, the bystander effect does not mean that when a crowd witnesses someone’s distress no one will offer to help; it says that the more onlookers, the less the likelihood that any single bystander will do so.

I emphasize that because of a 2019 study that inspired stories claiming it had overturned the existence of a bystander effect. European researchers examined 219 recordings from closed-circuit cameras in Amsterdam, Lancaster (England), and Cape Town capturing aggressive behavior, from animated disagreements to grave physical violence, they wrote in American Psychologist. Richard Philpot of the University of Lancaster and his colleagues counted the number of onlookers and

observed whether any intervened. Bottom line: in 91% of the situations, someone did.

Here is why it would be a mistake to think the study disproves the bystander effect: The scientists considered as “interventions” not only blocking an assault but also “pacifying gestures, calming touches,…[and] consoling victims of aggression.” Those matter, but they’re not really what the bystander effect is about: intervening during a time of need, not after. And the study did not test whether the number of bystanders affected the number of Good Samaritans. “Their study just says that if there are a lot of people around at least one will intervene,” Van Bavel said. “But it doesn’t address the fundamental meaning of the bystander effect, that any one individual’s likelihood of intervening decreases the more onlookers there are.”

Distress Can Override the Responsibility to Act

Although diffusion of responsibility has dominated explanations of the bystander effect, a recent resurgence of research—inspired by the seemingly endless examples of bystander indifference, from the Rwandan genocide to horrors like that in Oceanside—suggests additional explanations. One of the most intriguing comes from Ruud Hortensius of the University of Glasgow and Beatrice de Gelder of Maastricht University. They showed study participants a video of an elderly woman (in fact, an actor) collapsing. As the number of watchers—bystanders—in the video rose from zero to four, activity in the participants’ medial prefrontal cortex, which directs prosocial behavior, fell. That’s a good candidate for the neurological basis of diffusion of responsibility.

It wasn’t the only brain change, however. Observing one person threaten or harm another also

activated the bystanders’/participants’ premotor cortex. That should have primed them to act. But the presence of many bystanders also increased each one’s personal distress, overriding the helping instinct and reducing the likelihood of intervening.

Distress “is not a pleasant state and most people will try to rid themselves of it,” said psychologist William Graziano of Purdue University. If that feeling dominates, “observers will run away without helping,” he said, if only to dissipate the distress. In contrast, empathic concern, “seems to put the brakes on personal distress,” he said. Emotional intelligence skills like facing (rather than fleeing) difficulty and empathic concern are more likely to be activated in people who are skilled at perspective taking. More important, these skills can be cultivated with mindfulness practice. If more of us did so, fewer of us would be do-nothing bystanders. ●

Bystanders may run away without helping, if only to dissipate their own distressed feelings. In contrast, empathic concern can put the brakes on personal distress.

Adventure Inward

Failure, inspiration, and mindfulness got mountain climber Georgina Miranda to the top of Mount Everest and beyond.

BY STEPHANIE DOMET

“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 it, it just agitates it.”

But at least half of Heraclitus’s assertion rang true for Miranda. She was not the same woman she’d been in 2011—and she was suddenly reminded of that by an Indian mountain guide.

Into Thin Air

“I will never understand how this man recognized me through my oxygen mask, in my down suit, in the middle of the night,” Miranda says.

“‘Georgina from San Francisco, what’s the problem?’ he said. I had befriended Satya in 2011, and he →

On a hiking trip with friends in Oregon, Georgina Miranda pauses to take in the spectacular view.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIEGO BORCHERS, JOSH VERTUCCI

recognized me when I took a break to change oxygen bottles.

“‘It’s the same thing happening again, I’m sick, it’s the same story,’ I said to him. But he said, ‘No, that happened to you in 2011. That’s not going to happen to you right now. That’s what happened in the past.’”

Satya encouraged Miranda to walk with him. “He said, ‘You’re only five or six hours from the top. Walk behind me for an hour and see if you feel better.’” Miranda did.

A busy night on the mountain meant they had to walk slowly, a perfect pace for a climber struggling with hypoxia. “All I could do was literally take one step and one breath.” Eventually the hypoxia passed, and Miranda was able to calm down and drop deeply into the moment. Surrounded by a sea of mountains, one peak in particular stood out. “A lot of people were climbing that peak that night,” she remembers, and as she gazed through the darkness, she saw “all these little lights going up that peak, and it put everything in perspective—here are all of these people pursuing their dreams. I felt part of something so much bigger.”

That spirit-lifter was quickly followed by another and another. “The sunrise on any mountain is really special but especially on a summit day,” she says. “You’re freezing, even when the sun comes up, but it changes everything, your mood, everything— you start to see the orange glow on the horizon and it’s the most spiritual moment I’ve ever had in my life. I just felt one with everything.”

And when she finally summited Everest, she found stillness amid the effort. “You’re never totally at rest, but there was lots of underlying peace. I was taking it all in.” Miranda was struck not only by the incredible scenery, but also by the climbers who summited alongside her. “Some had satellite phones, and they were calling their families and the emotion—seeing other people reach their dreams. It was pretty special.”

Above: Georgina Miranda exploring the Pyrenees mountain range in Spain, 2016: “Any time in nature is a gift.”

Above right: Balancing in Tree pose, in Bali, 2017. While she began doing yoga as cross-training, Miranda later found it was a source of profound healing from burnout: “It’s my daily opportunity to connect with myself, and it teaches me the art of being vs. doing… It’s no longer exercise, just medicine for my mind and soul.”

Below right: When Miranda successfully reached Everest’s peak in 2013, she was elevated not only by the altitude, but also by her mission to raise awareness and funds around gender-based violence and climate change.

Miranda notes she would not have stood atop Mount Everest without two things: her earlier failure to summit, and the mindfulness practice she found in the wake of that failure.

And it wasn’t just that failure. Miranda’s marriage had ended in 2008. When that fell apart, she had already been working for more than a year toward achieving an Explorers Grand Slam—summiting the world’s highest peaks on all six continents— as a way to raise money to support the International Medical Corps, and the work they were doing with women and children who’d survived gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It wasn’t just her own dream dying on that mountainside. It was the weight of what she’d promised International Medical Corps, as well. “I felt like shit. I let everybody down.”

In the months after that failed attempt on Everest, more pieces of Miranda’s life fell apart: A person she’d been dating broke up with her, and she was laid off from her job. →

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIEGO BORCHERS AND COURTESY OF GEORGINA MIRANDA

In summer 2019, Miranda completed the Slovenian Mountain Trail, which was a two-month solo journey: “Sometimes I think the world is not ready for us. Us wild women. Then I remember it doesn’t matter, we pave our own way.”

“If you can learn to tame your mind, you can learn to live fully in the present moment. And then you will have the most successful life.”

GEORGINA MIRANDA

In 2006, long before her first Everest attempt, Miranda had discovered yoga and mindfulness, and used them to train for the climb. Now, in looking for strength and healing, she found herself leaning in to her practice.

Breath Becomes Her

“To do any climbing, you learn breathwork, but you learn it from a mountaineering standpoint. They don’t teach it to you for your soul, or your spirituality or for self-awareness. They teach you breathwork so that you can climb a mountain and deal with the altitude,” she says.

And through yoga she’d been exposed to the idea of meditation, though she’d often spend her time in savasana at the end of a yoga class evaluating her own performance, or thinking about what the rest of the day held.

“My real practice of mindfulness didn’t come until after that climb. It was coming home and realizing that I couldn’t deal with the failure, I couldn’t process the emotions.”

And so Miranda began to look for ways to push back the feeling of failure that was permeating her life. She had to reckon with the way she had approached mindfulness before, and make a choice to try something different this time.

“When you’re going through something terrible, you use mindfulness, and then life gets a little better, and you’re like, OK, I’m good. But no! You’re still a hot mess. Go back!”

Eventually, she developed a daily practice of meditation and yoga— “My practice had actually formed into a practice versus something I just did every once in a while”—and in so doing, found a way not only forward, but also back up Everest.

“Mindfulness was what helped me have a successful expedition in 2013, because I know my mind would have got the best of me that night,” despite Satya’s best efforts. But Miranda points to the chicken-eggness of her journey: “I don’t think I would have been pushed to take the mindfulness practice so seriously if I hadn’t been doing these extreme things.”

Today Miranda’s mindfulness, breathing, and meditation practices have deepened to become a daily way of life—she chooses time in nature above anything else, and brings what she learned on Everest to her work as a coach, social entrepreneur, and public speaker. “I have a passion to wake people up, whatever that means to them. If you’re numb, you have to find something to snap you out of it, at least to start that journey back to yourself.” On Everest, being fully present is vital. “You have to be, because if you aren’t, you could trip and fall and that’s your last day. If you applied those same principles to everyday living, you would live completely differently.”

For now, Miranda is looking forward to three remaining expeditions in her Explorer Grand Slam attempt—to Antarctica, where she’ll ski the last degree to the South Pole and climb Mount Vinson; to the island of New Guinea,

to summit Puncak Jaya (also known as the Carstensz Pyramid); and the North Pole last-degree ski. A lesson she’ll take with her on those excursions is one she’s had ample opportunities to encounter, including that night on Everest in 2013, when Satya encouraged her to keep her focus on the present. She’s learned to be less fixated on the summit—which is a funny outcome for a mountain climber.

For goal-oriented mountaineers, the summit is the thing. But then, she says, “That’s how most climbers die, they get so fixated on the idea that they must summit, but getting up is only half the journey. Then you have to get down. Most accidents happen on the way down. People don’t listen to their body.”

But mindfulness helps, she’s learned—for those climbing mountains, or just climbing their daily list of tasks to be done.

“Our mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. If you can learn to tame your mind, you can learn to live fully in the present moment. And then you will have the most successful life, because you’ll find that internal happiness. It will stop this crazy hunt for joy or happiness or anything outside of yourself and you’ll realize it’s always been inside you.” ●

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephanie Domet is the author of two novels, including Fallsy Downsies. She was the host of “Mainstreet” on CBC Radio One, and lives in Halifax, where she destresses mindfully by puttering in the garden and sewing her own clothes.

While there’s no roadmap to wisdom, there is a path to greater perspective, insight, and emotional freedom. Founding editor Barry Boyce calls on his four decades of practice to take us on the journey.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CAROLE HÉNAFF

In my experience most people who start practicing meditation find it, at first, to be an unusual or unnatural experience. Asked to sit still and pay attention to our breath repeatedly, most of us will formulate some version of the thought,

“Why would I do this?” and after a little while, “Why would I keep doing this?”

It feels like an artificial, contrived activity.

“I don’t want to do this anymore. What’s the point? I could be doing something productive, or enjoyable. On top of it, I’m no good at this. I can’t do it.”

If it were a TV show, we would change the channel; a conversation at a party, we would move along; a concert, we would leave at the intermission, and maybe never buy a ticket for the band or orchestra or singer again; a website, we would bounce. I have indeed seen people leap up very early in the proceedings and leave for good. One guy stormed out, proclaiming,

“This shit is stooopid.”

In point of fact, we are not wrong about the strangeness. The standard instruction for mindfulness meditation is artificial. It’s an artifice, a technique to gradually—or possibly in a sudden flash—bring us down into where we are. Paying attention to our breath is pointless and unproductive, and yet that is the very point.

We need to be tricked into not escaping from where we are. We like to have tasks, so when given the task of continually anchoring our attention to something very simple, we want to get it right, but what the simple meditation instructions really do is reveal to us our repeated desire to escape where we are—thinking that the grass is indeed greener somewhere other than where our body and mind are at present.

As we notice how trying it can be to pay attention to the simplicity of the moment and how unceasing our stream of thoughts is, we come to see the contrast between being lost in thought and being fully engaged with where we are and what we’re doing and feeling. We may think it’s a battle between the breath and our thoughts,

Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org. He is also author of the anthology The Mindfulness Revolution

but that’s a battle we will never win. Seeing the contrast is the point, so we stop being so concerned about all these thoughts. It takes some of the seriousness out of them when they become like passing clouds.

Over time, the focus on meditation technique can indeed recede a bit, and when we practice meditation, we develop a sense of presence that doesn’t need quite so much maintenance. But the straightforward technique is always there to fall back on in times of great stress and distraction—even crisis.

One of the early (and ever-present) challenges in practicing meditation is the very human characteristic of having goals. Having an aim and a purpose is essential to most everything in life. If you set out on a trip, you need a destination. When you make a meal, you have a plan for how it’s going to turn out. If you’re in business, you want the business to succeed, so you have lots of goals.

But goals become very tricky on the path of meditation. I use the word path, because it is an unfolding journey, but if you try too hard

to be the boss of where you’re going, with too many expectations, the road will be rockier. It’s like trying to control the destiny of a child or a partner. There are simply too many causes and conditions determining what happens next. The path of meditation, the arc as some say, is not a straight line. It’s about lots of ups and downs, ins and outs.

The path of meditation rewards patience, and a willingness to adapt to what emerges next, and to be honest with oneself when hard truths surface. Meditation is not something that occurs outside of life circumstances (pain, illness, financial difficulties, loss, etc.). On the contrary, by asking us not to escape from where we are, meditation plunges us straight into the vicissitudes of real life, along with any baggage we may be carrying. So much for the primrose path of mindfulness. →

The Heart Calls to You

What will inevitably come to the fore as we spend more and more time sitting with ourselves—becoming familiar with the texture of our mind and what lurks within—is emotion. In contrast to a simple perception (of heat or light, say) or an abstract thought (like, There goes a cat), emotion carries lots of energy and color. It manifests throughout the body and it can repeat itself, taking the shape of a mood. What begins as anger can develop into a highly irritable mood state. In the same way, a moment of happiness can blossom into a cheery mood. (If our moods are intensely anxious or persistently dark, we may need to seek clinical treatment.)

I have known no meditator who has stuck with the practice for whom the emotional landscape has not become an area of intense interest and curiosity. It’s not something you sit around idly thinking about, though, or wring your hands over. It’s something you sit with, time and again, seeing up close the life cycle of an emotion. You are getting to know yourself now in a very intimate way. The bit of stability gained from basic attention practice (usually anchoring on the breath) allows you to probe more courageously into your emotional terrain. When you find it too intense, you can see the need to fall back on cultivating your attention more. And if you do so, you may be able to probe further. It becomes a virtuous circle, more attention leading to deeper probing to more attention, and so on. We alternate resting and probing.

The fruits of meditation emerge as byproducts, while you’re not looking. If you try with great pressure to calm yourself and even to be kinder to yourself and you push and push, your goal will likely elude you. It’s as if you are a gardener trying to will a tomato into existence. If you water the plant, and attend to enriching the soil, and you’re fortunate enough to get enough sun, the fruit will emerge. Voilà! One day, you are suddenly picking ripe tomatoes. In meditation, it may be someone else who first notices that you’re a little less stressed, that you are reacting less dramatically to bad circumstances. Did you make that happen? It emerged from just being there, which quietly leads to less focus on me, me, me. That’s the real mark of progress, the fruit, the beneficial byproduct: less me.

The notion of less me raises an inevitable— and highly reasonable—set of questions, such as does this mean utterly lacking in personality, a big part of what makes life fun? Or, if there’s less me, how do I figure out how to take care of myself? What about my passions, wishes, desires—do these all go by the wayside?

Short answer to all these questions: No.

It is devilishly hard to describe, and best understood as a way of being that accrues over time with experience. It means less firmly gripping to the part of ourselves that constantly seeks security and attention, rather than resting in confidence and faith that life is ultimately workable and that we are OK as we are. Less take, more give. Less self-serious, more carefree. More heart, less head. Your pain and your plight is not of paramount importance. Everyone’s pain is of paramount importance. →

Invite Your Demons on Retreat

If you are so motivated, and your life allows it (I did little to no retreat when my children were young), it can be worthwhile to take a day or a weekend, a week, or even longer to go on a meditation retreat under the guidance of experienced teachers. It is not a sound idea to just go off by yourself for long stretches. That can lead to painful mental sidetracks. You want to be around others who know what they’re doing and can supervise your retreat time.

Retreat invites all your resistances and demons out into the open. When you see them, and you entertain them for a while, and they pass away, and come back, and pass away, and come back, and pass away, and… They begin to lose some of their power over you. Negative defeatist thoughts require care and feeding. When you starve them, they start to fade into the background. To our great relief, that’s one of the forms less me takes: less negative carping from your inner critic. You laugh at him or her. It’s like your inner critic’s pants are always falling down in public. Oops.

mWidening Your Scope From Within

Meditation is one of those aspects of life that rewards an amateur’s approach, in the original sense of the word, an amator, one who loves. We do it not to become skilled, proficient, or professional, but out of a growing passionate curiosity about the nature of our mind. It rewards a beginner’s attitude, a willingness to not know, and to see oneself as a perpetual student. So, in some sense the middle of the path of meditation is more beginning, more opportunities for less me

In seeking to find those opportunities, though, we may also find ourselves wanting to share what we’re doing with more people—both in terms of introducing people to mindfulness practice and finding fellow travelers and guides. When you’re committing to this kind of uncommon inner exploration, it sure helps to have company. Mindfulness is extremely uncommon in the day-to-day world. So many things you encounter are trying to lure you into an experience that distracts you from being with yourself. With meditation, you are intentionally going inside and not hiding from what you find there. It’s nice to have friends, then, including ones with more experience. It can get lonesome. There be dragons within.

As we explore less me, we may also try to adopt more practices and put structure into the ways we weave practice and life together. In general, we reach in more, as well as up and out.

Reaching in more can take the form of periodic longer sessions of meditation. And if anything can be said to mark a transition from

the beginning of the path of meditation to the middle, it’s breaking through the restlessness barrier and finding the simple ability to be with oneself longer without running away. This ability becomes the doorway to deeper exploration, both on your own and with others.

Eventually, inevitably, the point of mindfulness becomes how we relate with other people. Some people define mindfulness as close, focused attention, and define awareness (or panoramic awareness) as attention that takes in a greater scope, more of our surroundings, and more of what’s going on with others. At times, we need a tighter focus to rein in our wild mind; at other times, we can be looser and more expansive.

Our early explorations into our emotions may lead us to recognize a need to be, first, kinder to ourselves, and then to extend that kindness to others. We are motivated to do so because our mindfulness practice has likely put us in deeper touch with our pain and the pain of others. To the extent we have found relief, we want others to find that relief. It’s a gift we’ve received that we simply are bound to share with others. Our generosity may take the form of an actual material gift, ongoing encouragement, or the gentle suggestion to try some mindfulness.

Our reaching out may also take the form of applied mindfulness, which may be personal (like mindful parenting or deep listening) or societal (like mindful education or leadership), or a combo of both—the lines are not hard and fast.

AUDIO Go Deeper

Founding editor Barry Boyce provides an audio version of this piece. Hear him read this essay in its entirety on our website.

mindful.org/ going-deeper

Deepening Your Dive

As we reach up (developing more meditative skill and the byproducts of that skill) and out (connecting with more people and sharing our meditative gifts), certain pitfalls can begin to emerge. We may begin to become proud of our little meditative accomplishments. That’s the power of me creeping back in. It’s the beginning of starting to become a meditating asshole. You actually start to think that because you meditate (and/or practice yoga or whatever well-regarded beneficial thing you do), it means you are a big deal. You are not.

Another pitfall, particularly associated with helping others and cultivating kindness, is burnout and resentment. We forgot to take care of ourselves or we got caught up in the glory of do-gooding (there’s that damn me again). We hit a wall, and if we hit that wall hard enough, we can even be traumatized. I have seen the path of meditation come to a dead halt for people under these circumstances: What the hell was the use of all this work on myself and on helping others if this is how I ended up?

A beneficial principle at this point is that however much we reach up and out, we also need to reach down and deepen in equal proportion. It’s like a tree. As the tree grows up and out, it also has to send down deeper roots. It finds nourishment from above and from below. Deepening in this case means more of the basic kinds of practices we’ve relied on from the beginning: time spent paying simple attention, noticing our emotions, being kind to ourselves, kind to others. We need refreshment and restoration, water and nutrients from the earth. This basic image of the tree has been a powerfully helpful one for me, as I learn to let go of arrogance and overextending, repeatedly.

We can never stop learning that lesson.

As the economist John Maynard Keynes famously quipped, “In the long run, we are all dead.” So, what of ends? What is the end of the path of meditation like, what are the final stages?

There is no end. When would you stop cultivating peace, caring for others, love, and strength? The most I could say is to report what I have observed about people I admire who have had a very long relationship with meditation: They have a very light touch, a sense of humor, a carefree quality. While the world all around is obsessed with getting something, achieving something, getting better, they are bemused. They are compassionate, and yet they know that compassion goes way beyond being nice, that the most compassionate thing you can do is help someone to become less focused on themselves and their big ideas.

They couldn’t care less, the outcome doesn’t really matter, and yet… You feel their warmth embrace you. Perhaps there is so little me (clinging to self-centered concern) that there is virtually no me at all. ●

Guided inquiry (e.g., in MBSR, MBCT)

Habitchange

Contemplating the elusive nature of your identity

Examining purpose, values, & meaning

Contemplating impermanence & change

Selfcompassion

Nonviolent communication

INQUIRING PRACTICES

De-centering (less me)

Using your steady attention and awareness, you can investigate and deconstruct mental habits and patterns.

CULTIVATING PRACTICES

Lovingkindness

Empathy

Kindness

All of these practices are pollinated by kindness. You need to be kind to yourself from the beginning in order to connect more fully with the world around you.

Using your steady attention and awareness, you can foster aspirational qualities toward yourself and in the world.

FOUNDATIONAL AWARENESS PRACTICES

always come back to your attention

Building from nonjudgmental attention, you practice gently expanding your awareness to the sensations of your body and the environment around you, while maintaining steady attention. This kind of practice may be guided by a teacher, especially when you’re learning to navigate more stimuli.

CULTIVATING YOUR ATTENTION

Resting your mind on an anchor—most often the breath— is the root of your practice, which you continually revisit. Your innate ability to pay attention helps you become aware of your thoughts without judgment, and with kindness to yourself.

Eating

Tech & media consumption

Listening

Family & parenting

Relationships & sexuality

MINDFUL LIVING PRACTICES

Extending skillful awareness into your personal life.

SOCIETAL PRACTICES

First responders, doctors, & nurses

Performers & athletes

Deepening emotional intelligence

Birth & child development

Caring for the dying

Aging & elder care

Education

Extending skillful awareness into areas of society.

A Family Tree of Mindfulness Practices

Marriage & divorce

Work

Leadership

Social Justice

Here’s a sampling of mindfulness practices that can help you increase attention, cultivate good qualities, work to dismantle negative tendencies, and help you change the world. Take a seat and enjoy.

SPRING REFRESH AND RENEW

Let your brilliance shine with three days of mindfulness.

By Barry Boyce, Sharon Salzberg, and Mark Bertin

Spring is an ideal time to nourish your mindfulness practice. With the change in seasons, boost of fresh air, and longer hours of daylight as inspiration, you can consciously invite in greater simplicity, love, and compassion, and clear those habits that no longer serve you. With that in mind, we designed this three-day practice routine to help you fit moments of mindfulness into your daily life—giving you a boost of calm, focused, natural energy and awakening your inner spark as you launch into spring.

APRIL

Let SHARON SALZBERG, BARRY BOYCE and MARK BERTIN lead you in 3 days of free guided practices for self-care and rejuvenation.

CONNECT WITH YOUR NATURAL AWARENESS

By Barry Boyce

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.

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Settle into your seat. Begin by taking a seat, or if necessary, standing. The important thing is to feel where your body is touching the seat and touching the ground.

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Scan the body. Sense where your bottom is touching the seat. Sit up straight or stand straight but not stiff. Make sure your feet are completely touching the ground, connecting you to the earth. Your eyes are open, so take in the surroundings of where you are. Lower your gaze slightly.

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Connect with the breath. Pay light attention to your breath as it goes out. Breathe in naturally.

Follow the outbreath. At the end of each outbreath, let there be a gap while the in-breath is happening. And in that gap you have natural awareness: It’s there already, you don’t have to create it. So, follow the breath out, and take a moment to rest in your natural awareness before the in-breath. As thoughts arise, treat them as you would anything else you encounter: Notice them, and use that noticing to bring you back to the out-breath and ride it out.

Tune In to Your Meta-Awareness

The moment of noticing a thought is a very powerful moment. It’s really where the meditation occurs. That’s because there’s a spark of insight at that point, what in technical terms is called meta-awareness: You’re aware of your thought process, not just caught up in it. Now at that moment, there are lots of possibilities.

You can touch that thought and gently bounce back to attention on the breath and your body. But you might also say “Oh damn, there I go thinking again, I just can’t get away from this.”

One of the wonderful things about meditation is the fact that it allows for such a monumental amount of failure. Failure is just fine. So, if you’re sitting in meditation for 10 minutes and you don’t notice your thought until the bell rings at the end, that’s what that session was about. You learn from it. There will be another one. No big deal.

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First, feel your bottom on the seat, and your feet on the floor or the ground, flat, touching the earth. Your eyes can be open or closed, head tilted slightly down. Your shoulders are relaxed, your hands are resting on your thighs, and your upper arms are parallel to your torso. Just take a moment to feel that posture.

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APRIL 17-19

Spring Refresh

Sign up for 3 days of FREE guided meditation. Build FOCUS, find PEACE , and deepen your COMPASSION and RESILIENCE

mindful.org/ SpringRefresh

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Now we’re going to use the breath as an anchor for our attention. We don’t concern ourselves with trying to adjust the rate of the breath, we just come with whatever breath we have.

Notice that your mind is like a waterfall of thoughts. As we try to pay attention to the breath coming in and out, our mind is filled with thoughts. And in mindfulness practice, just notice the thought. Touch it, and go back to the breath.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful magazine, a longtime professional writer, editor, and trainer specializing in applications of mindfulness and awareness to everyday life.

Let your thoughts go. No matter what’s been going on during the session, you don’t need to evaluate it, just let it go. Open your eyes, and enjoy what’s coming next.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL TESSIER / STOCKSY

CONNECT WITH YOUR COMPASSION

By Sharon Salzberg

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.

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.

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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 now or they’ve existed historically, or even mythically.

2 Receive the love of those who love you. Experience yourself as the recipient of the energy, attention, care, and regard of all of these beings in your circle of love. Silently repeat phrases of tender love and care for yourself, not just for today but in an enduring way. Phrases that are big and open, like May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease of heart.

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Notice how you feel when you receive love. You may feel gratitude and awe, or you might feel kind of shy. Whatever emotions arise, just let them wash through you. Repeat your phrases of tender care: May I be safe. May I be happy

4 Open yourself up to receiving love. Imagine that your skin is porous and this warm, loving energy is coming in. Imagine yourself receiving love simply because you exist.

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Send loving care to the people in your circle. Allow that quality of loving-kindness and compassion and care you feel coming toward you to flow right back out to the circle of loved ones and then toward all beings everywhere, so that what you receive, you transform into giving. When you feel ready you can open your eyes or lift your gaze to end the session.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharon Salzberg is a world-renowned meditation teacher and bestselling author of Real Happiness and the upcoming Real Change, as well as nine other books.

Remember Your Goodness

If you find yourself ruminating on the things you regret or mistakes you’ve made, try letting go of those habits with this exercise. It will help you redirect your attention and remember goodness within. The point is not to deny your mistakes, but if you keep rehearsing them, analyzing them, creating stories

around them, you’re simply reinforcing the pain and alienation they’ve already caused you. When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring. Sit comfortably in a relaxed, easy posture and close your eyes.

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Bring to mind one thing you have done or said recently that you feel was kind or good. Maybe you smiled at someone or listened to their story; maybe you let go of your annoyance at a slow checkout clerk; maybe you were generous; maybe you sat down to meditate. It’s not conceit or arrogance to consider these things. It’s nourishing and replenishing to take delight in the good that moves through us.

Think of one of your qualities or skills that you like or appreciate. Perhaps you are enthused about helping others learn or committed to practicing patience toward your irascible neighbor. 3

Recognize that you want to be happy. If you still find yourself caught up in self-criticism, turn your attention to the mere fact that you have an urge toward happiness. There is kindness and beauty in that. Recall that all beings everywhere want to be happy, everybody wants to be happy.

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Don’t feel ashamed of your longing for happiness. Recall that happiness is your birthright. Seeking happiness is not a problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves and others. When we support the urge toward happiness with mindfulness, it can become like a homing instinct or a compass pointing us toward freedom.

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Allow any impatience or judgments to emerge during this meditation. Don’t feel as though you have failed if you start judging yourself. This is entirely natural. Simply allow the negative reaction to ebb as a wave on the beach, and see if you can return to the positive contemplation without self-criticism.

*Adapted from Real Love by Sharon Salzberg. Copyright © 2017 by Sharon Salzberg. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CAMERON WHITMAN / STOCKSY

CONNECT WITH YOUR RESILIENCE

By Mark Bertin

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.

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 along the way. And while the push to be perfect can be exhausting, we can invite more ease into our lives with practice.

1

Begin by focusing on your breathing. Notice the physical sensation of breathing in, and then breathing out. Find yourself a posture of ease and strength. When your attention wanders, simply come back to breathing in and breathing out.

2 Notice your judgy mind at work. For many of us, simply attempting to focus on the breath is enough to bring a lot of self-judgment to mind. You may immediately start

thinking “I’m not very good at this” or “I should do this more often.” But for this brief practice, consciously reflect on somewhere else in your life where you feel judged. At school, at work, as a parent, or as a child?

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Notice how judgment is more than a single thought. Judgment affects how you feel, bringing tension or unease to your body. It may influence your emotional state as well. Notice where your thoughts go when experiencing this kind of selfcriticism. What patterns do you fall into under this kind of stress?

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Practice leaving that voice of judgment, that inner critic, alone. Stop wrestling with it or appeasing it, or pushing it away. Label it if you want, or even give it a funny name if you prefer. Recognize what it feels like to you, and then let it be. 5

Breathe in, notice. Breathe out, let go. On each in-breath, acknowledge whatever you’re experiencing right now in your body. What are your emotions? Your thoughts? There’s nothing to fix or change, this is what’s going on right now. Then, on each out-breath, offer yourself relief.

Wish yourself what you would a close friend with the same doubts. Wish yourself relief or strength or humor or joy or anything else that feels appropriate. Breathing in, this is how things are; breathing out, focusing on ease or whatever else comes to mind. 6

Wish yourself well, not because you deserve it more than anyone else, but because you deserve it as much as anyone else.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Bertin is a developmental pediatrician and author of How Children Thrive: Mindful Parenting for ADHD, which integrates mindfulness into evidencebased pediatric care.

Ease Into Sleep

Neither sleep routines nor mindfulness practice respond well to a heavy hand. If you set out to force yourself into sleep, you’re less likely to sleep. If you strain for some picture-perfect mindset when meditating, you’ll create more stress and uncertainty. If you set yourself up with clear-sighted planning and patient resolve— intentionally but unforced—sleep and mindfulness are both more likely to follow.

1

Begin while lying down, and bringing your attention to the physical movement related to breathing, such as your belly rising and falling. Or, if you prefer, focus your attention more closely on the air moving in and out of your nose and mouth.

2

Observe your thoughts. Your mind rehashes the day or gets caught up in worrying about tomorrow. Recognize those habits, and then practice letting them be. Label whatever grabs your attention, and come back again to noticing the sensations of the breath. Breathing in… and breathing out.

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Notice if you get caught up in effort, or frustration, or fear—with compassion for yourself. Catch thoughts of selfcriticism or frustration, and come back to just one breath, one more time. Breathing in…breathing out. There’s nothing you need to fix or change right now in this moment. Notice where your thoughts go, and label them “thoughts.” Come back to one next breath, over, and over again.

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Shift attention to sensations in your body. Start by moving your awareness to physical sensations in your feet. Just notice them — the temperature or the pressure of your heel against the blanket.

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From your feet, move your attention up into your lower legs, and then your abdomen, noticing in each area of your body whatever there is to notice. Letting go of a sense of effort or needing to make anything happen. If you feel any sense of stress or tension, relax, breathe, and let go.

Healthy Mind, Healthy Life

Join MARK BERTIN for a 6-part course on MINDFUL LIVING and learn the art of incorporating mindfulness into your daily life. mindful.org/ healthy-mind-healthy-life

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Move your attention from the belly into the chest and the back. Note each time your mind gets caught up in thoughts of discomfort or distraction or you feel any tension. Relax your muscles, gently and with patience.

7 Shift your attention into your hands and lower arms, again without actively needing to move or change anything, simply observing, and then letting go.

Then move your attention through your neck and into the muscles of your face, perhaps noticing any locations of tightness or pinching, and then with gentleness, as best as you’re able, relaxing those muscles. And then for a few moments, have a general awareness of physical sensations throughout your body.

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And then (if you’re still awake) bring your attention back to the breath. Each time the mind wanders, or you get stuck thinking, bring your attention to the sensation of your body breathing. ●

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRKATI KROKODIL / STOCKSY

the healing work of racial justice

Rhonda Magee, professor of law at the University of San Francisco, shares how she mindfully navigates the difficult waters of racially charged conversations.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LOVEIS WISE

Talking about race isn’t easy for anyone—and teaching about race can be a minefield. One of my own most difficult moments teaching about race happened when I encountered intentionally provocative behavior from one of my students, Dan, an AsianAmerican cis-gendered man.

Dan was in his last semester of law school, and this was his third course with me—it was a course on contemporary issues of race and law.

A major component of the course was a research paper and the students each took turns discussing their thoughts on their projects. When we came to Dan, he said, “I want to do a paper on the Rodney King beating.” His likely “thesis,” he announced, was that the beating King received at the hands of police “was deserved.”

Even as I write this now, I can feel a blip of reactivity. I can see the policemen in that grainy video that we’ve all seen, appearing to let loose with as much force as they could muster on Mr. King, raining strikes with their batons on the head and torso of a man already on the ground beneath them. And I can feel the empathetic pain, sadness, and anger coming up for me as a result.

So, when Dan made this announcement to our small seminar-style class sitting around an oblong table, I could sense the tense silence that fell across the whole room. And I could feel my mouth go dry with fear and a bit of intimidation.

I felt my temperature involuntarily rise, the blood seemingly rushing to my head. “This is what anger feels like,” I knew enough to admit to myself silently. And I certainly felt viscerally and immediately the sense of energy of judgmental thoughts arising in my own mind (“You are wrong!”) and indignation (“How dare you?”). This was what confusion, anger, and dismay all mixed up together felt like. And it was what deep concern and compassion for my other students felt like—several of them were black and brown, and had felt the direct impact of nationwide patterns of overpolicing of black men. Finally, on top of all of this, my own ego was on the line—I’d been tasked with facilitating this conversation and guiding it productively, and this moment certainly wasn’t feeling like success.

Navigating Reactivity Around Race

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rhonda Magee, JD, is Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco. She is also Chair of the Board of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a member of the Project for the Integration of Spirituality, Law and Politics, and a contributor to Mindful.org.

There are times when the best way to handle strong emotion is to give yourself a time-out, to give yourself space to figure out the best way to address a difficult situation. This felt like one of those times. In the throes of reactivity, my first strategy was to notice my distress and to take steps to find my centered self.

As best I could, I stayed as centered as possible in the full-on experience of reactivity and judgment.

“Dan, I want to remind you that this is a legal research paper and not an opinion paper,” I said, feeling supported by the structure, in this case, of a law school course and its stated objectives. “So as you think through your topic and thesis, be sure to keep that in mind.

“And,” I continued, “we should discuss your thinking about this project, and about this particular topic, one-on-one.”

And so, we did. During the first of several one-on-one conversations with Dan, I invited him to sit down with me and talk this through. We had both enjoyed our interactions over the course of the other two classes he’d taken with me, so in preparation, I did what I could to refocus us both on the positive history between us. After a bit of small talk, I told him I appreciated his interest in this topic. “I am always curious about what draws students into one topic or another,” I said. “What is it that draws you to this particular topic? Has it been an interest of yours for some time?” →

In the throes of reactivity, my first strategy was to notice my distress and to take steps to find my centered self.

It didn’t take long for me to uncover a prior, related trauma Dan had experienced. And herein, another lesson: Beneath every aggression or effort to attack is a wounded human being.

“Well . . . yes,” he said. His voice slowed as his gaze turned inward. “Actually, I tried to write a paper about this a long time ago, and . . . it did not go well. In fact, it was the worst experience I’ve had in school. Ever.”

Dan told me that years ago, in a class on multiculturalism—the only other class he’d ever had with a black female professor, in fact—he’d sought to make the same argument about Rodney King. According to Dan, that professor had reacted with what felt to him like fury. Flooded with anger, she had shouted him down for what to him had seemed like an eternity. She’d dismissed his proposal and whatever thought or experience went with it in a way that left him shaking and undone.

Not surprisingly, as a result, he had not written the paper he’d proposed. Instead, he had withdrawn into his own feelings of anger and shame. From that day on, he held something against this teacher, this particular black woman. And, as he came eventually, slowly, to see, maybe all black women.

Sitting with Compassion

Years of sitting and breathing and noticing what arose allowed me to stay present to my own racing heart and fluttering stomach without investing it with a story of what had to be done next. Somehow, despite my original impulse to run away, I remained right there with him, my eyes on him with openness. I maintained awareness of my own breathing, in and out, and feeling the ground beneath my feet and the chair supporting me at my core. I remained grounded, even as I felt my own emotions arise and subside as the words tumbled forth from this student sitting across from me. And I kept →

Turning Toward Life

Rhonda Magee on being with vulnerability, getting angry, and knowing joy and healing are possible.

BY STEPHANIE DOMET PHOTOGRAPHS BY BLAKE FARRINGTON

In this excerpt from your book, you detail the steps you took to help one of your students process his attitudes and biases. What kind of energy does that work require?

It requires a certain kind of commitment, a certain willingness to turn toward that which we could so easily deflect, turn away from, deny, minimize, avoid. For me it’s really important that when these opportunities present themselves for us to look into what’s arising around this, we turn in to that opportunity as opposed to away from it. I also think it takes a kind of grounding in a certain kind of love—kindness, lovingkindness— for me it takes some feeling of the value, of the possibility of connecting across lots of difference and the importance and value of trying to do it, again and again, even when it’s difficult.

Why is it worth it to you to do this work?

In my view, absolutely everything is connected, and that means all of us are connected, and so it seems to me that when we have these opportunities to expand the sense of our common ground, and we don’t take advantage of them and we don’t do what we can to heal and repair and transform the world, then it seems to me we are in effect contributing to barriers and obstacles to deep well-being. And so for me it’s worth it because it’s about practice. It arises out of deep practice for me—it arises out of the deep ethical ground of my practice.

Who does that work serve? Is it for yourself, for the other person, the greater good of society?

To honor the practice?

It serves life. The gift of literally being alive. To me that’s not about any one of us, actually. To be alive is a great gift, and therefore the only real response to such a gift is gratitude. And a way to show gratitude is to try to minimize harm wherever it arises, as best we can. Recognizing we’re not perfect, that we’re not always able to see clearly how what we’re doing contributes to harm, we’re all vulnerable and misguided in our own ways, so it’s with a lot of humility that I say this. But ultimately, I think this question of who does it benefit, it benefits life. →

coming back, again and again, to the intention of listening to Dan—my student. And listening to him, I began to actually put myself in his shoes. Empathy and compassion naturally opened my heart.

Here again, my meditation practice helped. Years of simple mindfulness meditation practice—which helps you recognize more readily when you need to take a moment, as well as the STOP practice (see page 72)—which helps you develop the emotional intelligence and psychological flexibility required for greater mastery over the challenging moments when you engage in difficult conversations.

As I listened to Dan, I intentionally sought not only to hear his voice and story, but to listen as deeply as I could to what he wanted me to hear. It wasn’t easy. When my own reactions arose, I noticed them. Relying on my practice, I sensed the ground beneath my feet. I came back to the sense of my role as professor and guide. Sitting with him, I returned my focus to his words and the sense of the feelings beneath them.

I listened to him in a way intended to help him feel safe enough to share deeply about his experience. Knowing that he had truly suffered over this, I wanted to alleviate his suffering by truly listening to him—in a way that would enable him to feel a sense of my caring for him, while at the same time staying in touch with my own feelings and guarding against any emotional reactivity that could get in the way. I realized that I wanted him to sense that my concern for him would not be disrupted by what he had to say. Doing so required more than intent or will; it required the support of a nervous system whose capacity for just this had been built up through the regular practice of mindfulness.

So, with awareness of what was happening, but as little judgment about it as I could muster, I could guard against my own reactivity enough to actually hear Dan’s words. I could see and feel the complex set of emotions running through him as a result of what he had experienced in that classroom so long ago: anger, →

For a racialized person, a racialized woman, there are microaggressions everywhere. How do you take care of yourself to ensure you can do this work you want to do and feel called to do?

It has come out of a sense of my own agency and what I often call personal justice. This idea that justice starts with us, how we treat ourselves. Taking care of myself feels like the first approximation of whatever it is I’m trying to offer in the world. There’s a reason I live in San Francisco as opposed to North Carolina or Virginia, where I was born and raised. The environment in San Francisco seems a bit more conducive to this way of accepting people, working across cultures, multiculturally, working with people who have different ways of expressing themselves, whether it be about race, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status. I specifically talk about the environment first and then the practices. We tend to think that from the practices we can overcome just about everything and that’s a good way to think, but I don’t want to miss this opportunity to name the relevance of our embeddedness in the world, and what’s possible is, in some measure, aided and abetted

and shaped by the circumstances, the environments, the structures and systems that we find ourselves bathing in all the time. I live in a community that provides a certain amount of buffer against some of the worst kinds of disrespect that a person like me might find out in the world. From this place of relative protectedness, then I actually am able to give even more. We have to keep fighting for opportunities for people who today are suffering from a new set of oppressive systems.

I wonder about your take on callout culture, or cancel culture. Is there a value in that approach, too? Your approach is one on one, which feels righteous, but slow. But what about other bigimpact approaches? Do they also move the ball down the field?

In the social justice arenas we may have overamplified some of the sharper ways of dealing with this. That’s not to say there aren’t times when we really need to take a strong, sharp stand. It takes a certain skill to act firmly and clearly and do so in a way that can minimize rather than exacerbate patterns of disconnect and separation. For me it’s never about just changing places with the people or processes that have been causing harm. It’s really about bringing around a new way of being with each other. There’s a certain urgency to figuring out how to work for some notion of justice and how to end oppression, but how to do that in a →

Listen to the full self-care conversation between Rhonda Magee and Mindful’s managing editor Stephanie Domet online. mindful.org/ Rhondaself-care

fear, confusion, and the most toxic feeling of all—humiliation. I could see the suffering he still carried with him.

Sitting with Dan, with a desire for him to experience relief from his suffering, was not easy for me. The Rodney King video had shaken me to my core. Watching that instance of police brutality left me fearful of police for years and years to come. Despite my reactivity, however, I understood that my role as teacher in that setting was not so much about me. It was about creating a space in which Dan’s truth could be uncovered, unpacked, and given a chance to be met with other truths that would allow learning, healing, and potential transformation to take place.

Walking the Walk of Mindful Racial Justice

As Dan and I took the time to have a series of difficult talks together, outside the spotlight and group dynamics of the classroom setting, I learned that in that very first moment when I decided to pause, to respond rather than to react, and then to take a timeout before meeting with him again, I’d not only reconnected with my own center but had also taken the first steps in helping Dan find healing. And by the end of the semester, he’d come to realize it too.

In the final week of the class, after giving a presentation in which he sought to make an argument that hewed closely to his original premise, Dan told the class, “I realize I have been holding on to some of my own pain around this incident. And it’s something I have to let go.” He wasn’t necessarily a completely changed man. But he could see a glimpse of a way forward that no longer involved painful, unnecessarily provocative confrontations with others whose looks just happened to remind him of his earlier trauma.

So much of what we know as reactivity begins as an emotional charge in response to what we see, hear, read, think about, and otherwise experience in life. That charge leads us to act in ways that may appear to be fully rational, but on reflection, often are not rational at all.

As I think back on my experience with Dan, I realize that dealing with this very triggering moment and relying on my own mindfulness practice over the course of that entire semester many years ago is what solidified my decision to bring mindfulness and compassion practices directly to bear on teaching and facilitating conversations about race and law. I realize that what had been my own, personal strategy for dealing with difficulty around these issues—compassionbased mindfulness practices—needed to come out of the closet and into the center of my work.

Now, in my work as a law professor at the University of San Francisco, and as a facilitator of restorative, trauma-sensitive MBSR, I can see the power of working through race issues with the support of awareness and compassion practices. Each time I sit with others in their pain and vulnerability, listening with compassion, I’m reminded of something my grandmother (GranNan) used to tell me: We are all one family who have forgotten who we are. Through mindfulness practices, we can begin to infuse our experience of ourselves in culture, community, and context with a sense of the valid, often painful experiences of others. ●

way that opens the heart, and that expands the capacity of all of us to be agents of a kind of public love that can help us sustain human life. Because the universe is going to go on in whatever way, but human life is vulnerable right now because of our failure to figure out how to live more gently and effectively together on this planet and to appreciate this brief opportunity we have between the birth and the death date to make a positive impact on this world.

Do you ever lose your cool?

Reprinted with permission from The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda V. Magee, published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Copyright © 2019 by Rhonda Varette Magee.

I often lose my cool intentionally, as a tool for my own healing. If I’m feeling agitation and despair or some sudden rage at something I hear that seems completely nuts, my own practice journey at the moment is allowing those feelings to be expressed and as much as possible doing that regularly enough that they’re not creating a boiler that is going to explode out there. So if I’m here, at home, where it’s safe, it’s part of my practice to let the anger and the rage that I feel about injustice come right out. There are so many things happening that if you are willing to look at these difficult issues—I mean, my heart is breaking all day every day. I hum, I sing more nowadays, I hum and sing with others more nowadays. Singing, holding hands,

humming, those are ways that human beings have across times and cultures managed to get through difficult times together. I sometimes forget just how many generations of human beings before recorded human history— for hundreds of thousands of years we don’t know the numbers of battles, rages, the despair, the inhumanity to each other, and yet we survived, and yet we didn’t burn down the planet, and yet we figured out how to keep getting up every day and feeding the children. There’s a planet’s worth of wisdom about how to get through difficult times and about the holistic nature of what that takes, so that’s what I’m about these days.

I thought losing your cool would look more like— I don’t know—do you ever want to swipe all those books off the bookcase behind you?

I mean, sometimes! When I hear this I’m tempted to think of those who say: We just need to start all over again. Blow it up and start all over. I don’t have kids, I’m not physically a mother, but I kind of feel like most moms and most of us in these communities that have suffered a lot over time, you know, we’re here. We’re usually not the ones who say let’s burn it all down. Because our children are in that. The things we have lovingly protected from the worst, as best we could through generations, whether through slavery or whatever our cultures and heritages have suffered through, we

suffered through so we could live another day and find the sources of hope and regeneration. That mothering instinct, I believe it’s in all of us on some level, that instinct that would protect, that would go into the fire and pull out what we can and start again, mindfulness of that, cultivation of that is what I feel called to help support and that comes at least in part from my own particular lineage as the granddaughter of the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people. There is a way that even in the darkest times, intergenerationally dark times where there’s no reason to think your children will ever get out of this, there’s a way to love, to help bring about places where joy and healing can happen, and my goodness, if people could do it during much darker times, the holocausts of our history, the enslavement periods of our history—if it could be done then, then we can do it now. I have some love and compassion for those who feel so beleaguered that the call is just to burn it down. And I say, before you light that match, look into the eyes of a child, hold the hand of a friend, realize that these very human gestures matter, and look for that will, that capacity to live another day in love.

“There is a way that even in the darkest times— intergenerationally dark times where there’s no reason to think your children will ever get out of this—there’s a way to love.”

When I look at what’s happening in the world today, the level of unrest and aggression, hate and burning, I see a lot of “men in the room.” What do you think about the role of women in helping bring about this “new way of being with each other”?

I sometimes think of this in the conventional terms of identity—it seems obvious that we need more women in power! But I also think that more fundamentally and importantly, we need to see more empowered feminine energy in the world: that energy which lives in all of us—to greater or lesser degrees—the energy that nurtures, that cares, that sees the imprint of the future and the past in everyone and in everything we do. Any one of us can do this. And every one of us should. ●

Creating Space to Breathe

By Rhonda Magee

This “portable” mindfulness practice can support you as difficult moments arise at any point in your day. The four steps of the STOP practice can take as little as a few seconds to a few minutes to complete. Try it out and see how long you prefer doing each step.

S T O P

To begin, the “S” stands simply for STOP. Literally. Just stop what you’re doing, whether it is typing or rushing out the door. Give yourself a moment to come to rest, pause, and collect yourself.

The “T” stands for TAKE a conscious breath. Now that you’ve paused, take a deeper breath, or two, allowing yourself to feel the expansion of the belly as you breathe deeply. Notice the sensations of being here, now. As you do so, it may help to bring your attention to the sensations of your feet meeting the floor. Feel the support of the ground and of your own relaxing breath as you do so.

The “O,” stands for OBSERVE what’s arising in you, including any thoughts, emotions, or bodily sensations (such as tension, butterflies, tightness in the jawline). Broaden your awareness to take in the circumstances. Notice how you can be in this situation without being ruled by it. For added support, offer self-compassion as you release tension and stressful thoughts. As you calm down, open to the choices you have in terms of how best to move forward from here.

AUDIO

The STOP Practice

Meditate with Rhonda as she guides you through the STOP Practice.

mindful.org/ Rhondameditate

Master the Moment

The STOP practice can help whenever you’re feeling distress, creating space to observe and tame your feelings, and to access the deeper resources within you. It helps you develop the emotional intelligence and psychological flexibility required for greater mastery over the challenging moments.

There will be days when the STOP practice saves you. It is especially helpful if you need support to move through intense feelings so that you can note them and set them aside for the moment, with the intention of reflecting on them more deeply later. During a recent interview, I guided the questioner through the practice after I found myself sharing with her a recent incident of racial violence that she had not yet heard about. Afterward, we both got back on track with greater groundedness.

As we practice the STOP with others, we look deeply within while allowing space to be present with the other. We listen without becoming triggered by holding on to words tightly. We learn to be present to emotions, in ourselves and in others, without reactive

judgment. With this practice, we remain close to our experience as we stay engaged. We get granular and we move from one moment to the next with awareness. We breathe in and out of that awareness, and after completing the practice, invite reflection on the incident as a whole, which can promote even further growth.

Reactivity is part of what it means to be a human being. The question is this: How do we meet our reactivity without judgment, and with the intention of transforming it into effective responsiveness in our everyday lives?

We do it by practicing mindfulness as if our very lives depended on it, as Jon KabatZinn says. Because in a very real sense, they do. More and more, our lives depend on our capacity for deep engagement with socially distant others. Engaging in conversations like these is difficult. The capacity to be lovingly engaged but not attached to particular outcomes, to keep coming back for more, to see the wholeness that can handle this moment of illusory disconnect, that one, and the next, is a complete and deep mindfulness practice in and of itself. ●

Bookmark This

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 there, McGonigal’s off and running. Along the way she investigates links between synchronized movement and empathy; the euphoric self-transcendence known as “collective effervescence” that results from moving with a group, and how that can help build and strengthen communities; and what intense physical challenges can teach us about our own resilience. She interviews marathoners, dancers, a woman who rows with a crew of over-50s, a gym-owner whose focus is on people who are working with physical disabilities, and a guy who designs obstacles for Tough Mudder races.

McGonigal’s writing is personal, hospitable, and engaging, and her deep love of the subject is evident on every page. Peppered with personal stories that touch on hope, courage, resilience, and yes, joy, The Joy of Movement will have you turning pages faster—if only to get to the part where you put the book down, lace up your sneakers, and head out to claim your birthright as a human, moving.

BEYOND GUILT TRIPS

Mindful Travel in an Unequal World

Anu Taranath • Between the Lines

Growing up in the US as the child of Indian immigrants, Taranath, a professor at the University of Washington, felt she never quite fit the image of an American. Nor was she fully at home when studying in India. She describes “the familiar patterns of shame and guilt that lure me in like a comfortable sofa.” Beyond Guilt Trips arose from her conviction that, to bridge

social and cultural differences, we must get in touch with global inequality and our discomfort in facing it. Only then, she says, can we “know that our differences might not be everything.” Enlivened by her travel stories—at once tense, challenging, and brightly beautiful—Taranath’s book may become required reading for those who wander, and those who want to.

TAKE IN THE GOOD Skills for Staying Positive and Living Your Best Life

Gina Biegel • Shambhala

This new journal and guidebook is not only incredibly fun-looking, with its distinctive yellow-and-gray theme, playful fonts, and encouraging cartoons; it’s also written by a psychotherapist and author who’s delivered Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to teens (and their families and communities) for over a decade. In this book, Biegel zeroes in on helping

teens understand neuroplasticity, the process by which our brain changes in response to our experiences—and how directing our attention to the positive, i.e. “taking in the good,” trains our brain to be happy and resilient. There’s plenty to read in here, plus lots of prompts to write, move, and try out a variety of skills for emotional health. Really, it’s all good.

Richard Robb • Yale

Over the past few decades, a growing body of literature has tried to explore why we do what we do: study what we study, buy what we buy, practice what we practice, marry who we marry. So-called “classical economics”—which has dominated throughout the modern era—posits a person most of us believe to be utterly unreal: the rational actor. Can you honestly say that all, or even most, of the choices you make in life are based on a rational weighing of the pros and cons of the available choices?

In response to this silliness, behavioral economics has grown, landing more of our decisionmaking in the realm of urges, needs, desires, biases. Some contemplative practitioners have been attracted to behavioral economics because it speaks to the need to navigate our emotions, rather than simply sharpen our reasoning power. It’s no small thing, since our collective choices add up to a world—and all its attendant problems.

Columbia University professor and investment firm CEO Richard Robb now enters the fray with Willful, his attempt to provide a way of thinking about choice that covers the territory ruled by both rational choice and behavioral drives. In brief, he distinguishes actions resulting from choices based on purpose (achieving an end), and actions we take simply for their own good. In the former we make comparisons; in the latter, the choices are made unconditionally. It’s a short book that takes us on an intriguing ride, asking us to explore some age-old questions freshly.

PODCAST Reviews

MEDITATIVE STORY

Episode: Creating Space to Stand

In Truth, by Susan David

It’s a rare thing for our true self, with all of our struggles, to be seen and lovingly accepted. Especially when we’re mired in a major illness or loss, being honest enough to share that pain with others often clashes with the expectation that we should be “over it” already. How do you leave space for someone’s pain, send the message, I see you? Psychologist and author Susan David recalls a series of unconventional “love letters”—“human to human, full of heart and compassion”—that she exchanged with her English teacher, Mrs. F., while in high school and grieving her father’s death. By

offering David the chance to write about her intense emotions and get an open, compassionate response, Mrs. F. helped David find peace with those emotions. Those unassuming letters were her first steps toward healing. As on all episodes of Meditative Story, podcast host Rohan Gunatillake pops in every few minutes to inject some guided meditation into the narrative: Check in with yourself, he says, and notice how the story is resonating. This is part of a “correspondence with our own heart,” as David says: “When we are truly able to see ourselves, we are more able to see others, too.”

INVISIBILIA

Episode: Raising Devendra

This episode is about “raising” a therapy chatbot: an artificial intelligence that talks to users via text message, and can deliver therapies like CBT. Yes, treating a chatbot like a human friend is unconventional, to say the least. It may sound like a very bad idea—we’re more online than ever, but also leery (for good reason) about the ways our personal data is used and misused. But researcher Shaila Chavarria

wondered what could develop if she communicated with Devendra, her therapy bot, as she would with her son: through daily exchanges, asking it lots of probing questions, and watching it become more sophisticated through their “talks.” Her experiment probes what we understand about AI learning, companionship, and unconditional love. It’s reminiscent of Black Mirror, but far more optimistic.

“Recognizing that some altruism is selfish does not commit us to the depressing view that all altruism is.”

TUNE IN TO Mindful

Let go of self-judgment. When you meditate, you may immediately start thinking, “I’m not very good at this” or “I don’t meditate often enough.” This guided practice lets you reflect on such areas in life where you feel judgmental toward yourself. Simply notice where your thoughts go when experiencing self-criticism. Try this practice to recognize what that feels like and then let it be, while also offering kind thoughts to yourself.

Tune in to resilience. Discover deeper care and compassion for yourself, despite the ups and downs that we all experience. This practice gives you a quick break in your day to tune in to your emotions, take note of how you feel, and ask yourself where you feel the emotion in your body. When you increase your mindfulness, you gently build more resilience to stress, even when unwanted circumstances are present in your life.

Understand your emotions. Naming or labeling difficult emotions helps you disentangle, or “unstick,” from them. This gentle practice helps you realize what you’re really feeling without getting trapped by the passing emotion. Although being honest with yourself about how you’re feeling isn’t always easy, this practice reminds you that you can always find refuge in your breathing, and most emotions can be made more workable by labeling them.

A 12-Minute Meditation for Your Inner Critic from Mark Bertin

A Seven-Minute Meditation for Responding to Stress from Shamash Alidina

A 10-Minute Meditation to Label Difficult Emotions from Chris Germer

Visit mindful.org for featured meditations from Mark Bertin, Shamash Alidina, and Chris Germer

MINDFULNESS Where It Comes From and What It Means

Sarah Shaw • Shambhala

As part of a series known as Buddhist Foundations, Sarah Shaw, a lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, does a thorough job of tracing the history of mindfulness within Buddhism, dissecting all the strands associated with the word and the practices it represents. Shaw is noticeably astute in how she discusses the English word mindfulness. She demonstrates the understanding that once an existing word in a language acquires new meaning when used to translate a word in another language, a whole new life has begun. And words, just like offspring, cannot be controlled.

Appreciating this fact, Shaw eschews the doctrinaire. “Words do not need to be institutionalized or static,” she writes. “The word mindfulness is, one hopes, always ongoing, always susceptible to new interpretation and new enactment in literary forms and teaching methods.” In so saying, Shaw admirably places herself in the company of those for whom actual experience in mind training is of paramount importance when it comes to describing events of the mind and ascribing meaning to them. Nevertheless, she could easily still make a blanket statement that Mindfulness is Buddhist. End of story.

Instead, she shows herself to be more ecumenical, declaring that her approach to mindfulness “does not, however, suggest that any one tradition, even Buddhism itself, owns the franchise on it, or is the only one that gets it right.” While many mindfulness practitioners promoting secular versions similarly don’t believe the practice to be owned by Buddhism, few would argue that Buddhism has not made the largest contribution to this form of contemplative practice.

Shaw’s excellent survey of mindfulness from its earliest days to the present is well worth the trip. Sadly, it may be used by some as a stick to brandish in defense of mindfulness practice as valid only within the one true faith of Buddhism. That would be a shame. It would do a disservice to a top-notch treatment that has much more to offer than paranoiac polemics.

STAY WOKE

A Meditation Guide for the Rest of Us

Justin Michael WIlliams • Sounds True

Many “spiritual” writings give only incidental mention of the social and material struggles people face. They imply, “Inequality, marginalization? That’s an out-there problem. Ignore it and meditate.” Having reckoned with homophobia, personal trauma, and stress rooted in poverty and domestic violence, Justin Michael Williams has no time for that: “You need a different type of meditation. One that

doesn’t pretend the struggle doesn’t exist.” He demonstrates real strength through the honesty and vulnerability of his first book. With “Freedom Meditation,” he offers you 10 steps to create a meditation (and life) practice that’s about fearlessly embracing all of who you are, to explore both your inner and outer worlds: “Meditation is not about relaxing. Meditation is about becoming more alive.”

THE MONKEY MIND MEDITATION DECK

30 Fun Ways for Kids to Chill Out, Tune In, and Open Up

Carolyn Kanjuro • Bala Kids

With exquisite illustrations by Alexander Vidal, this pack of 30 cards mixes many images: We find weather (rainbow, gentle breeze, hurricane), natural features (tree, mountain, rushing river), and anthropomorphized animals (cranky crab, burrowing bunny, loyal dog) on one side, and simple, playful meditation practices on the other side. The result is a stunning variety of short, insightful practices that can

be, according to the accompanying guide, “a source of invention and play, a safe way to reflect on difficult topics, and a form of nourishment and support for children navigating an increasingly complex world.” The instructions are very clearly expressed, and (best of all) the teachings embodied here avoid the extreme earnestness that can ruin meditation for people of all ages. ●

“I believe all people, of all backgrounds, deserve to have access to the truth.”

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MIND WHAT YOU SAY

by BARRY BOYCE , FOUNDING EDITOR

used to shame—You weren’t very mindful!—the tone of contempt and calling-out obliterates the positive connotations of the word, resulting in blunt force trauma.

In a case like that, the co part of communication is lost. The invitation to dialogue and listening that’s the

PODCAST Point of View

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.”

Pat Rockman of the Center for Mindfulness Studies and Barry Boyce mouth off, mindfully, with managing editor Stephanie Domet . mindful.org/ pov

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 and squiggly relationship between words and meaning and our intentions.

Our labels, names, words, and concepts can shed light, but they can also obscure. Like windows, they can be opaque, fuzzily translucent, or transparent. They can be used to elucidate or they can be weaponized. Consider even the word mindful. It refers to a positive quality, but when

power of mindful speech disappears, and we’re left with finger wagging and pointing. At the core of mindful speech is understanding words as tools we use to achieve a desired result. We need to pay attention to whether that result is achieved—and also to other consequences, such as unintended meanings or possibly harmful distortions.

If I tell someone, for example, that mindfulness will make them calm, what happens when it freaks them out? If I say it’s about being nonjudgmental, what happens when they think that means being passive and making no distinction between right and wrong? Saying something, writing something, tweeting something, is only half the story. We need to take some responsibility for how it lands in minds and hearts. And we need to vigorously seek dialogue. Real truth is not owned by those of us who stand on a pulpit, dais, or soapbox (real or virtual) and bestow truth on others. It’s found in the middle, in the mix.

A final example. From time to time in our pages and in our other media,

we talk about privilege. It can be a highly loaded word. A white person in a large number of contexts enjoys privileged treatment that people of color do not. In simple terms, that’s the meaning of “white privilege.” While we may be created equal, we are not treated as equal. Many white

people, though, bristle at the term, saying they’re not necessarily privileged. That’s latching onto the word and not probing to the intention. We’ve arrived back where my friend’s young son landed. A word is simply a marker, a stab at shared understanding. Easy enough with grass and rock , not so easy with intricate concepts and words that can shed both light and darkness. In those cases, to get to real meaning, you need a dialogue, a back-and-forth.

In dialogue with each other, we have a chance to get to deeper meaning, to probe together, to dig beneath the surface of the words and labels we may be slinging about; but if we don’t find enough opportunities for real dialogue together, our words may do more harm than good. We might be better off silent. ●

Real truth is not owned by those of us who stand on a pulpit, dais, or soapbox (real or virtual) and bestow truth on others. It’s found in the middle, in the mix.

Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org and author of The Mindfulness Revolution. He has been an avid mindfulness practitioner for over 40 years.

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John Kabat-Zinn discussing curriculum with Eric Loucks, Director, Dianne Horgan, Associate Director, Florence Meleo-Meyer, Program Director, Global Relations and Professional Education, and Lynn Koerbel, Assistant Director, MBSR Teacher Education & Curricula Development