Enjoy more compassion, connection, and love
EASE INTO SLEEP
Bedtime practices to soothe your body & mind
Barry Boyce on how finding a great mindfulness teacher can draw out what’s inside of you and take you on a journey. p.56
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I love the opening line of our feature about women leaders in mindfulness: “This is why we practice.” It feels like a manifesto, capturing how to live now.
Because as the world convulses with turmoil, my mind convulses, too. My thoughts fly like a storm in a snow globe: pandemic, death, disease, fear, invisible air particles, racial violence, social injustice, micro- and macroaggressions, shouting, anger, political warfare, economic freefall, joblessness, uncertainty, anxiety—all are swirling in my snow globe. Yours too? I feel raw, unsettled, hurt, angry, sad, furious, compassionate, sorrowful. It’s all in there, around me, inside of me, all swirling. And I suspect you and your snow globe are swirling, too. I think we are all swirling.
And this is why we practice, so in the midst of the blizzard, we have some ability to sense the howl and gale and not be overcome, so we can find a moment when the snow swirls and we do not.
We practice so that when the known falls away, we can hold on to faith that something new will come. This is why we practice, so that as we feel the uncertainty, we can also feel the familiar ground of our cushion and our breath. We remember that we have been in deep uncertainty before and that slowly, somehowingly, we emerged somewhere that felt righter.
This is why we practice, so in the midst of a swirling snow globe of despair, anger, confusion, rage, fury, depression, we can see those thoughts and the stories we attach, and we can feel the constant, pulling weight. And perhaps a tiny bit, we can also see hope, love, and possibility.
This is why we practice, so we can recognize injustice and we can say, as Jenée Johnson says, “That happened, this is what I am facing.” And then, as she also says, “I’m moving on.”
This is why we practice, so people with hugely different backgrounds, viewpoints, experiences, can come together, snow globe to snow globe, and see each other’s humanity, dignity, and raw vulnerability with kindness and compassion, all laid bare through practice.
My mind is tired. I suspect all of our minds are tired. This is why we practice.
We have a long way to go, and our snow globes are deeply shaken—and no doubt many shakes lie ahead. But this is why we practice.
With love,
Mindful readers share that when gratitude infuses our lives, it uplifts us and those around us.
↑ Katie, a nurse in Petoskey, MI, used meditation and creativity to cope during the pandemic. This collage includes text from past Mindful issues.
How do you express gratitude toward those you love?
“Making them coffee in the morning.”
@RAY.MARI_
“Hugs. Lots of hugs!”
@ISHTA_IZLITU
“By being fully present, giving them my full attention when together, and listening deeply.”
@SELFCARESPECIALIST
“Sending homemade cards.”
@KIRA119
“I say thank you to them. I help them when they need help.”
@IMAGINATIVECREATIVEYOU
Does your mindfulness practice include gratitude?
89% - YES!
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According to his mother, Lucas (age 2) loves to look through Mindful as his bedtime story.
If you could tell one person you appreciate them, who would it be, and why?
“My two childhood friends, because they are always there.”
@THANKIOUS
“My little sister and mom. I’m never able to tell them how much they help and support me because of my anxiety.”
@GABSTERGABZ
“My dad, whose wisdom and teachings are helping me live my best life every day. Grateful!”
@PSYSQUARE
“My mother, because she worked so hard to raise us alone.”
@MISHPAT13
“My husband. He is so selfless and does everything to make me feel happy.”
@MRSMATTY5
“My daughter. She is my world.”
@JULIA.95.IV
Next Question
What regularly pops up in your mind while you’re meditating?
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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.
By reading Mindful and sharing it with others, you’re helping to bring mindfulness practices into the world where the benefits can be enjoyed by all.
We’re continually adding new kinds of live, virtual programming for the public, including workshops for beginners and seasoned pros alike.
And our twice-weekly Coffeehouse in the Cloud drop-in sessions continue to be our way of building community, feeling connected, getting centered, and highlighting the talented and experienced mindfulness instructors we work with—all from the comfort of your computer or mobile device.
For information on all these offerings and more, visit us at: harvardpilgrim.org/mindfulness.
Looking for on-demand offerings? Check out our YouTube page for archived episodes from our virtual offerings.
Like what we’re doing? Give us a shout on Facebook. Or drop us a line at mindthemoment@harvardpilgrim.org. We’d love to hear about how you’re doing, and how we can help!
In times of uncertainty, Mind the Moment is still here, with new virtual offerings available to everyone.
What has ten meditation pods, four wheels, and an iconic aluminum shell? The MeditationWorks
mobile meditation studio, of course. In early May, the new Canadian mobile meditation service guided a session for healthcare workers in Scarborough,
Ontario, equipped with its modified Airstream travel trailer designed to provide an out-ofthe-ordinary meditation space.
The mobile experience typically takes place inside the shiny, bullet-shaped “Mindstream,” however, in the face of COVID-19, meditating inside of a
closed vehicle was out of the question. Owner Traci Shepherd shifted gears, moving MeditationWorks guided meditations online and offering the mobile meditation session outside with the help of speakers, an FM radio broadcast, and chairs arranged six feet apart.
Often, our beloved pets help us to be mindful—but Nyxie the Labrador might have gone too far. As the Mirror reported, Nyxie’s family in Surrey, UK, noticed their meditation ball, which had a bell inside, had gone missing. After searching for days, they noticed a telltale jingling— coming from inside their feisty pup. Fortunately, a vet was able to remove the ball Nyxie had eaten, leaving her unharmed.
A program developed by the Institute of Noetic Sciences is changing the way people think about aging. The Conscious Aging Program encourages mature adults to embrace life by exploring self-compassion, forgiveness, and community.
In a six-session online workshop, people are able to shift their attitudes toward aging by engaging in lively discussions with other participants about making sense of the past. They’re also invited to work through activities based on inner and collective wisdom discussed in each meeting. The workshop offers sessions dedicated to developing selfcompassion and accepting a new phase of life, as well as exploring ageism and existing attitudes toward death. Visit the Institute of Noetic Sciences website to find out when the next Conscious Aging Online Workshop will take place.
Earlier this year, the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) launched a new initiative, Greater Good in Education. The online resource shares a free and growing collection of science-based information and practices, for use among educators and with students from kidnergarten to college. Topics include “Build Trust with Your Students,” “Gratitude Circle for Staff Members,” and “Mindful Reflection Process for Developing Culturally Responsive Practices.”
GGSC Education
Director Vicki Zakrzewski, writes that GGIE seeks to empower educators by providing a range of flexible, easy-to-integrate materials, allowing them “to choose what will best serve their students” and “to teach according to their values.”
Curated by scientists together with program developers in the fields of Social-Emotional Learning, mindfulness, ethical development, and more, the platform aims to integrate well-being skills into existing school subjects (learning empathy through literature, anyone?) to help foster thriving, resilience, and compassion in society.
A farmer in Michigan was behind on his planting as he recovered from COVID-19. Dozens of farmers came from around the state to help till the soil, plant seeds, and fertilize.
“ When people need help they come and help and I’m so proud… I’m so proud to be in a neighborhood where this works,” Steve Alt, who owns Alt Brothers Farms, told a local television station.
Service newsletter, she received thankyou notes from essential service workers all over the country—and beyond. Emerson’s dad, Hugh, told NPR: “There’s such a basic human need to be seen and to be known and to be loved. And she’s reflected that.”
Emerson Weber of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, sent her mail carrier a thankyou note. “I make people happy with my letters, but you do too,” she wrote. When 11-yearold Emerson’s appreciation made its way to a United States Postal
Some spring religious festivals looked different this year, but many communities rose to the occasion. One mosque in Scotland made its usual Ramadan feast, and offered it to the those in need, while congregants of a West Virginia church came together to make PPE for healthcare professionals using materials donated by the community. “ It’s gathering for Easter in a different way,” one congregant told reporters.
“There’s such a basic human need to be seen and to be known and to be loved.”PHOTOGRAPH BY PEGGY ANKE / UNSPLASH
Research from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, University of Toronto Scarborough, University of Colorado Boulder, Carnegie Mellon University, and others
Chronic stress increases inflammation, upping our risk of many chronic diseases. Two studies find that mindfulness practice may lower this risk in those most vulnerable to stress: midlife-to-older adults, and those with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more.
In the first study, 153 stressed adults attended one of three groups: Monitor+Accept; Monitor Only; or a Stress Management education control group. Participants provided blood samples before and after training to test for changes in C-Reactive
Protein (CRP), a commonly measured biomarker of inflammation. After two weeks of listening to recorded mindfulness practices, there were no differences in CRP among the groups.
In a followup study, 137 new adults attended either an in-person Monitor+Accept group or a Monitor Only group (both MBSRbased), or a notraining control group. Again, participants in the MBSR groups showed little change in blood CRP levels compared to controls.
Researchers then investigated whether people who tend to have higher CRP, adults over age 45 and those with a BMI of 25 or more, might react differently to treatment.
They found that older adults in both control groups had higher levels of CRP compared to the mindfulness groups. For those with a BMI of 25 or more, both mindfulness groups showed lower CRP following training than the control group. This suggests mindfulness meditation programs may positively affect biomarkers of stress for those most vulnerable to its effects.
ONLINE MINDFULNESS FOR DEPRESSION
MindfulnessBased Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) has been shown to help prevent a depression relapse, but for many, in-person
treatment isn’t within reach. The digital program
Mindful Mood Balance (MMB) was created to deliver MBCT online, making it more accessible.
To assess MMB’s impact, researchers randomly assigned 460 adults with a history of depression to receive
symptoms before and during treatment, then again one year later.
After 12 weeks, the MBB group reported less anxiety, more depression-free days, and better overall function than those who only received conventional therapy alone. Participation rates in
computerized experiments.
During each, participants’ brain and heart activity and respiration were measured and paired with test performance.
either conventional depression treatment alone, or a combination of conventional treatment plus MMB.
MBB’s eight self-led online sessions emphasize how to detach from habitual thoughts to prevent spiraling into depressive rumination. Each session combines mindfulness practice with video-based learning. Members of both groups completed questionnaires about their depression and anxiety
MBB were lower than expected, suggesting that online therapy may not be for everyone.
A groundbreaking study reveals you’re more likely to make decisions involving free will while exhaling than inhaling.
To see whether breathing influences choice, scientists at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland conducted three
In the first trial, 20 adults pressed a button on a keypad three times every 8-12 seconds. In the second test, a different group of people viewed a red dot going around in a circle and were asked to push a button after the dot had circled once. That group was also asked to watch a red dot and press a button when a green dot occurred, in a third experiment.
The researchers found people were more likely to initiate voluntary movements while exhaling, suggesting our ability to freely make decisions may be affected by input from the body as well as the brain This challenges a long-standing theory of “readiness potential,” which holds that decision-making is largely determined by brain signals alone.
You’re more likely to make decisions involving free will while exhaling than inhaling.
QWhen I practice loving-kindness meditation, I can’t tell whether it’s working. I feel like nothing is happening. Shouldn’t I be feeling something?
AThe first time that I ever did lovingkindness practice was without a teacher. I was on a self-retreat and I thought it was a perfect opportunity.
I knew that it was done in successive stages and I began with a week of sending myself loving-kindness. All day long, I would go around the retreat building—sitting in my room, sitting in the hall—saying may
I be happy, may I be peaceful, may I be liberated, and I felt absolutely nothing.
At the end of the week, something happened to someone in the community and I, quite unexpectedly, had to leave the retreat. Then I felt doubly bad—not only did nothing happen but I never
with Sharon Salzbergeven got beyond myself, which was really selfish. I was running around in the flurry of having to leave. I dropped a jar of something, which shattered into a thousand pieces. The first thought that came up was: “You are really a klutz, but I love you.” And I thought, “Oh wow! Look at that.” All those hours where I was just dry and mechanical and I felt like nothing was happening. It was happening. It just took a while for me to sense the flowering of that and it was so spontaneous that it was quite wonderful. So: Not to struggle, to try to make something happen. Let it happen. Let your mind rest in the phrases, and let the phrases be meaningful to you. It will happen.
SHARON SALZBERG is a world-renowned meditation teacher and is the New York Times best-selling author of Real Love and Real Happiness, as well as Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World (available September 2020).
BEGINNER’S MIND
This practice, from Sharon Salzberg’s book Real Change, opens a doorway in your heart to gratitude and receiving happiness.
Sit or lie down on the floor in a relaxed, comfortable posture. Your eyes can be open or closed.
Now bring to mind a pleasurable experience you had recently, one that carries a positive emotion such as happiness, joy, comfort, contentment, or gratitude. If you can’t think of a positive experience, be aware of giving yourself the gift of time to do this practice now.
Take a moment to cherish whatever image comes to mind with the recollection of the pleasurable experience. See what it feels like to sit with this recollection. Where in your body do you feel sensations arising? What are they? How do they change? Focus your attention on the part of your body where those sensations are the strongest. Stay with the awareness of your bodily sensations and your relationship to them, opening up to them and accepting them.
Now notice what emotions come up as you bring this experience to mind. You may feel moments of excitement, moments of hope, moments of fear, moments of wanting more. Just watch these emotions rise and pass away. All of these states are changing and shifting. Perhaps you feel some uneasiness about letting yourself feel too good, because you fear bad luck might follow. Perhaps you feel some guilt about not deserving to feel this happiness. In such moments, practice inviting in the feel¬ings of joy or delight, and allowing yourself to make space for them. Acknowledge and fully experience such emotions.
Notice what thoughts may be present as you bring to mind the positive. Do you have a sense of being less confined or less stuck in habits? Or perhaps you find yourself falling back into thoughts about what went wrong in your day, what disappointed you—these thoughts can be more comfortable because they are so familiar. If so, take note of this. Do you tell yourself, I don’t deserve this pleasure until I give up my bad habits, or I must find a way to make this last forever ? Try to become aware of such add-on thoughts and see if you can let them go and simply be with the feeling of the moment.
In Real Change, loving-kindness meditation expert Sharon Salzberg shares practical advice for engaging in challenging times with clarity, calm, and heartfulness.
Enter by November 1 to win a copy of Real Change at mindful.org/real-change
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End the meditation by simply sitting and being with the breath. Be with the breath gently, as though you were cradling it. Then when you’re ready, you can open your eyes.
A few recent and upcoming mindfulness projects in popular music.
Prolific Wu Tang Clan producer and filmmaker RZA recorded Guided Explorations, an album of guided meditations, to a backdrop of ambient soundscapes and light beats: “I’m looking to inspire and break that stagnation for artists and other creative minds.”
Admitting he “wasn’t always the best at prioritizing sleep,” Sean “Diddy” Combs shared that he’s become a convert to the power of a good night’s rest. The hip-hop mogul recorded “Honor Yourself,” a sleep practice (free on Audible) that offers gratitude prompts, breathing and relaxation techniques to help listeners relax before bed.
LEANN RIMES: THE HUMAN AND THE HOLY
Country singer and actor LeAnn Rimes is dedicating her voice to helping others find wellness. The Grammy-Award winner launches The Human and the Holy, an album of meditations and chants, in early September 2020, as well as a health and wellness podcast.
Grocery shortages and the news of COVID-19 outbreaks in meat-processing plants led many consumers to consider their food choices this year. In the first quarter of 2020, Beyond Meat, a plant-based meat company, reported a 141% increase in net profits
over the same period in 2019. Mindful eating can take many forms—from noticing how the food we eat feels in our body, to being aware of where our food comes from and what went into producing it. Mindful eating may have been on the rise throughout the
spring. American media outlets reported a 264% increase in plant-based protein sales over a nine-week period ending in May.
In Seattle, 20 miles of street have been permanently closed to motor traffic so people can bike and walk safely in the road. The Stay Healthy Streets project offers routes to essential services and expands the city’s parks system, part of “rebuilding better than before” after COVID-19.
Our take on who’s paying attention and who’s not by AMBER
TUCKERIs it a plant… or a plant ? A stayat-home mom was dismayed to find that the beautiful succulent she’d been taking care of for about two years was, in fact, plastic.
A volunteer campaign in Bolivia called Adopt a Grandparent encourages young, healthy people to protect senior citizens in their area. Volunteer “grandkids” help with food deliveries, paperwork, and words of support during quarantine.
To uphold the Roman Catholic tradition of blessing Easter baskets, while respecting social distancing, Rev. Tim Pelc in the Detroit area donned a mask, face shield, and rubber gloves and used a squirt gun to spray holy water into the car windows of parishioners as they drove by.
“Ghost kitchens” are hubs for several smaller businesses that rent space and sell food via apps like Uber Eats. There’s mixed benefit—ghost kitchens are adaptable and can help reduce traffic congestion of delivery cars, but many such businesses aren’t regulated yet. Caveat eater.
During a weekend Zoom call with friends, a Canadian dad jokingly set his name to “Chad Sexington” (a character on The Simpsons), but forgot to change it back after. Then, his 7-year-old son attended online class—where his teacher had some doubts about “Chad Sexington.” ●
Find more mindful ways to ease into sleep in our free digital guide.
Before the pandemic, 25% of Americans suffered from acute insomnia every year, according to a 2018 study from the University of Pennsylvania. We can only assume that number has gone up. Bills, chores, work, technology, and now a global pandemic all conspire to keep our brains constantly on, when sleep needs the opposite. We try anything in order to settle down and let go of the day, from cups of tea to writing in a journal. Here’s one more approach to consider: mindful movement.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Calechman is a contributing editor for Men’s Health and a writer for MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program. His journalistic writing has covered everything from handling stress like an Alaska bush pilot to computational neuroscience to mindfulness tips for tennis players.
Many studies have linked yoga with better sleep. Harvard Medical School sleep and circadian health expert, professor Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, notes that experimental trials have also shown meditative breathing can be a powerful sleep aid.
Khalsa has researched how meditative breathing can help with sleep, insomnia specifically, and he found that it increased sleep time and decreased wake time. The study had its limitations. It used a particular breathing pattern: inhaling for 4 counts, holding for 16, and exhaling for 2, but Khalsa says that he can make a larger recommendation. Slow, mindful breathing at around 3–6 breaths per minute—normal is 15–20— could be effective for falling asleep. “Anything that slows down the breathing rate will help with decreasing arousal,” he says. And since most mindful movement and yoga
By Steve CalechmanReach for better rest when you add these four bedtime yoga poses to your sleep routine.
poses are done with some form of slow breathing in this range, “putting two and two together, it makes sense,” he says.
And as Khalsa adds, there’s no reason to wait for double-blind studies. The fundamentals for any bedtime routine are consistent. One needs to unwind the mind and the body, so the autonomic nervous system is quieted down and the production of stress hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol, decrease. The slowdown also needs a certain time investment. “While there isn’t a magic combination of poses, doing yoga certainly falls into those parameters.” It’s gentle. It’s relaxing. And, most especially, it’s lying down, and “You can’t fall asleep standing up,” Khalsa says.
Bottom line: There’s little downside to trying and only positives to gain.
Jennifer Reis is a certified yoga therapist, faculty member at Kripalu Center for Health & Yoga, and creator of Divine Sleep Yoga Nidra. She suggests four poses, all done lying down, which can help encourage sleep. Do each for a minimum of five exhalations, having your mouth in an O-shape in order to elongate your breath.
Lie on your back and bend your knees with your feet close together but not touching. With your arms along your sides and palm facing up, press your feet into the floor, reach your tailbone to your knees, and lift your hips into the air, tucking in your pelvis and using a block or cushion for support underneath your lower back if preferred. This position opens up your hips and quads and allows you to observe your belly as you breathe.
Lie on your back with a pillow supporting your shoulder blades. Position your arms out at 45 degrees from your hips with your palms up. You can keep your legs straight or have your knees bent and together with your feet slightly apart. This will help relax your upper-back muscles and stretch your chest.
Lie on your back with arms out in a T formation and palms up. Start with straight legs, then bend your right knee and bring your right foot onto your left leg wherever it feels comfortable. Gently press your right knee to the left with your left hand, twisting your torso. You may feel a stretch in your shoulder, chest, lower back, hip, or thigh—it will be where you most need it. Return to the center and do the other side.
3 4 mindful living
In Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World, Sharon Salzberg shares practical advice for engaging in challenging times with clarity, calm, and heartfulness.
Whether you’re resolving conflicts with a neighbor or combating global warming, Real Change guides you to embody the fundamental principles of mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation to create a better world for both ourselves and our communities.
When it comes to memory loss, it’s not forgetting where you put your reading glasses or the car keys that grabs your attention. It’s hearing someone tell you, “But I already told you that.”
Dealing with a memory lapse like completely forgetting a recent conversation is an experience that can kneecap any aging adult—and by aging, I mean all of us. Recently, I faced this situation head-on when my husband shared details with me about a certain important event he was to attend. Somehow, neither the discussion nor the details entered my consciousness and I went on to make my own plan, one that directly interfered with his.
Domestic chaos ensued.
I’m aware that as I enter my seventh decade, living my very active life, new information is continually entering my brain, stuffing it with an infinite amount of data. So, I reassure
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
myself that I shouldn’t panic when some details occasionally slip away, kind of like when the new edits on a document I forgot to save disappear right into the digital ether.
Just as I long for a foolproof system to protect and preserve my computer’s memory, I’ve been seeking a solution to help protect and preserve my memory (not to mention my marriage!). There, just as close as my office chair, sat mindfulness.
When we refer to memory, we’re talking about the way we store information over time. In a sense, our memories make us who we are, because they allow us to reference what’s happened to us in the past to inform our behavior and understanding of the events we face right now, according to an article published online by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. →
By Sara AltshulHow we make and store memories is still mysterious, but research shows that mindfulness can help make room on the mental whiteboard that keeps us organized.
How your brain stores memories is still not perfectly understood. Even though neuroscientists now have the knowledge and the tools to tackle the mystery, various experts’ theories abound.
There’s nothing simple, though, about the process involved when we recall that stored information.
In fact, memory is a dual-process system involving working memory and regular memory, says Sara Lazar, PhD, assistant professor in psychology at Harvard Medical School and associate researcher in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Routine thought processes, those that occur more or less unconsciously, are the first aspect of our memory system. The second aspect is the conscious brain work we employ to solve problems. Both these aspects
100 by 3, interspersed with counting up from 0 by 8 (e.g. 100, 0, 97, 8, 94, 16, etc.),” says Dr. Lazar.
To understand how mindfulness might be able to support one’s memory, Dr. Lazar and her lab team at Harvard Medical School studied how mindfulness reduces workingmemory problems.
Her theory was that overcoming interference to your working memory can help improve your abilities to reason and problem-solve. And one step to overcoming that interference is being able to distinguish older from newer memories. Dr. Lazar and her team began their study with the hypothesis that mindfulness training, which focuses on maintaining attention in the present moment, could be an effective way to reduce something called “proactive interference.”
At the end of the study, the participants in the mindfulness group had significantly lower proactive interference rates compared to people who took the writing class. The people who took the mindfulness training also increased the volume of their left hippocampus region of the brain, which is involved with longterm memory. A larger hippocampus volume has been linked to improved memory performance.
The researchers concluded that practicing mindfulness promotes attention to the experience of the present moment, while minimizing interference from past events. Voila, an improved working memory.
are impacted by the way we get our information (called encoding), how we retain that information (storage), and how we use it (retrieval or recall).
But how your brain stores those memories is still not perfectly understood. Even though neuroscientists now have the knowledge and the tools to tackle the mystery, various experts’ theories abound.
One clear distinction we can make, however, is this: “Regular memory is facts and information, what we ‘know.’ But working memory is being able to juggle two or more tasks or pieces of information at a time. For example, counting backwards from
As Dr. Lazar tells me, proactive interference is defined as the “tendency of previously learned material to hinder subsequent learning.” Chances are, we’re all able to relate to classic examples of this hindrance: “Things like your old address popping into your mind when you have to write your new address for a few months after you move. Or (uh oh) calling your current partner by the name of your ex,” says Dr. Lazar.
In her study, 79 participants took either a four-week web-based mindfulness training program or a creative-writing class, which served as a control group. The classes were one hour and contained 30 minutes of practice along with 30 minutes of general instruction and Q&A. The mindfulness training group’s practices included body scans, mindfulness of breath, and open awareness meditation.
It’s a relief that mindfulness can help us learn our new ZIP code faster, or effectively retain project updates in a work meeting—however, it’s not only past information that puts our working memory to the test. Stress also tries the limits of memory. Focusing on people engaged in high-stakes work, such as first responders and soldiers, many researchers are still exploring the best ways to salvage working memory from high stress.
Amishi P. Jha, PhD, is the director of contemplative neuroscience at the University of Miami’s Mindful Research and Practice Initiative. She and her team have studied the effects of mindfulness on soldiers during the high-stress period before they were deployed for active duty. While they have not yet studied precisely which kinds of mindfulness practice best help working memory, the training included practices rooted in four themes: concentration, body awareness, open monitoring, and connection.
How can high stress affect your memory? “It doesn’t matter what your
It’s not only past information that puts our working memory to the test. Stress also tries the limits of memory.
profession is—a soldier, an accountant, an undergrad, a firefighter, a lawyer—if you’re enduring a period of prolonged stress, and feeling overwhelmed by being unable to achieve all your goals within a period of time, your working memory will be compromised,” says Dr. Jha. This means you’ll have less brain capacity available for memory to function at a normal level, she notes.
Dr. Jha believes that mindfulness helps the memory because it’s protective. “Our results suggest that the practices we do with mindfulness training actually strengthen working memory.”
Here’s how she explains it: “Think of your memory as a mental whiteboard. Whatever we need to pull from long-term memory shows up on its surface so we can use it efficiently in the moment,” says Dr. Jha.
But, during periods of high stress, when rumination, worry, regret, and anxiety are top of mind, this internal chatter “writes over” what’s on your “whiteboard,” cluttering it so that there’s not enough space available to actually use it for what we need to do, Dr. Jha says.
“When you practice mindfulness, you focus on one thing and tune in to what is going on in your mind. When old memories or random thoughts start to pop up, you disengage from them and go back to focusing on the breath,” says Dr. Lazar. So, you’re training your mind to stay focused on the task at hand and suppressing random thoughts as they pop up, including the ones (such as those old addresses or ex-lovers) that might interfere.
No matter how much mindfulness you practice, however, you may never become the person who can entertain a room by memorizing and reeling off long strings of facts, says Dr. Lazar. “It’s most likely that after following a mindfulness program and practicing for a half hour every day, most people will notice some improvement in their ability to stay focused on the task at hand without getting distracted,” suggests Dr. Lazar. ●
the ultra light meditation seat that breaks down and reassembles in one swift, magnetic motion
And that’s all right. Thinking we need to be perfect before we act is a trap—but it’s one we can free ourselves from.
I guided the meditation with fewer words, leaving ever more space. The air seemed to crackle with restless silence. Afterwards, several students said they prefer more guidance—otherwise, they felt they were floundering. I grew curious and asked the group, “What’s wrong with floundering?”
Floundering can make you feel excruciatingly vulnerable. It feels threatening and as if you’re out
of control. It drips with embarrassment, weakness, a sense of being off-kilter. Everyone’s agreed then. Avoid floundering!
But since we’ve all had to grapple with many destabilizing factors, off-kilter is what’s on the menu lately. Perhaps floundering with grace and openness is the next big skill we must learn, to be resilient in the face of uncertainty and distress.
It’s inevitable that we’ll flounder when we can’t see the way forward. We flounder until we collect
enough experience to proceed with more clarity. You might flounder in the face of what you’ve never had to do before and have to figure out in a hurry. Maybe you’re suddenly homeschooling your child, re-orienting your job life, or choosing to listen and learn to allow the deep and necessary work of having conversations about racism help change the world. You might be very smart and still flounder incompetently the first time you have to run a Zoom meeting or help your dad—or someone else’s dad—understand that the joke he just told is inappropriate. You might flounder when someone holds you
accountable for something you thought was fine yesterday, but now you understand differently. Floundering can feel very awkward, so have some compassion for yourself. If you can stay with it, eventually you’ll likely find firmer ground. This is not to say that floundering forward is seamless. There’s no certainty that you will find anything solid, but this is also an excellent practice and it can yield amazing fruit.
Floundering is often how leading-edge thinkers
and creators find the next big thing. They flounder around in the murky waters of not knowing where the heck to go from here until something shiny beckons, and curiosity pulls them forward, out of the murk.
Innovation requires the wisdom to flounder and stay present even when you want to cut and run. So hang in there, baby.
In The Art of War, the advice is to know your enemy. Sometimes, our most intimate enemy is our own ignorance, Once we recognize this, we find grace by
courageously feeling the destabilizing qualities of floundering. This helps you fall more gently when your knees suddenly give out. Relax with what is beyond your control, but stay alert to opportunities, from job leads to better listening. Watch for what’s out there waiting to be discovered.
Mindfulness trains you to let go of habitual reference points and splash around in the creative space of not knowing until you find what you need. We figure things out by trying things out, floundering and finding it. It’s a master skill to trust that life coalesces out of formlessness. It comes from letting curiosity pull you from helplessness to mastery. ●
1
Get comfortable with tolerating the flailing insecurities that are the fins of floundering.
2
Flounder with presence and intention: Instead of resisting, check out what happens when you allow life’s inevitable moments of helplessness to be part of the picture. Learn and grow for the benefit of all.
3
Remind yourself that floundering is a natural part of life. I’m not suggesting you invite floundering to your next party, but you can offer it some tea if it stops by. Flounder. Find it. Fly.
You’ve probably found yourself, on occasion, spending long uninterrupted hours with digital technologies, particularly during months of social distancing. Just as our smartphones are always close at hand (both to serve and to distract),
the feelings engendered by digital tech have become our frequent if not constant companions. There is an almost palpable pain when boredom approaches, as it does if you are briefly alone with your thoughts—a sensation all the stranger, now, for our ease of escaping it. There is a loneliness that creeps in when you wonder if virtual friends and digital conversations are really the equals of those IRL. There is a narcissism that yearns to cry out to the world, via tweet or Instagram post, I’m over here! Observe the wonder that is me. And there is the anxiety about being out of the loop, felt by so
many, so often, that it merits its own acronym: FOMO.
Of all the consequences of digital technologies, few are as profound as those related to our emotional lives. That is not to minimize their effects on the cognitive part of our brain, including the ability to remember and focus, as I wrote about in a 2017 column. Call me biased, but my feelings feel more like me than do my powers of attention and recall. So when historian Susan J. Matt and technology scholar Luke Fernandez of Weber State University in Utah (a married couple) told me that “a new →
By Sharon Begley by Edmon de HaroEmotions are changeable and culturally constructed—which means we get to choose how we feel about how we feel.
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American emotional style...is taking shape today” as a result of digital technologies that have “radically remade” our feelings and sense of self, it resonated.
At first, I thought theirs was a now-commonplace observation about how the internet stokes anger (have you managed to resist an irate retort to a political tweet?), narcissism (of course the world is interested in a photo montage of your breakfast), and loneliness (why don’t I have more Facebook “friends”?). But for Matt and Fernandez, those observations are only a starting point. Their analysis, as laid out in their 2019 book Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter, is—to use an overused but, in this case, apt term—meta.
People have always experienced boredom and loneliness and a need for recognition, as Matt and Fernandez discuss through fascinating historical citations. For make no mistake, earlier generations, too, felt the emotional consequences of tectonic technological shifts. When people “fell in love with” photography and factory-made mirrors in the 19 th century, pundits also worried about rampant narcissism. And if you think Reddit is the first form of communication to encourage anger, let Matt and Fernandez introduce you to the “Indignation Meetings” of 150 years ago, where attendees decried everything from the acquittal of an accused murderer to monopolies.
What has changed is how we process and interpret those feelings. That is, the immediate feel of the feelings is the same as it has been for as long as emotions have been part of our neuro-repertoire. But how we process them cognitively is different than it was for generations that preceded us. What has changed is how we
feel about those feelings (that’s the “meta” part). As they scoured history for clues to people’s emotional lives, Matt said, “what became clear was that boredom and loneliness and narcissism were changing today.”
In particular, Fernandez chimed in, “the language we use to describe our feelings has changed. We used to be resigned to boredom and loneliness, for example, but now we pathologize them; we think of them as afflictions that need to be cured.”
Loneliness, for instance, was once seen as part of the human condition; some 19 th-century Americans chopped down telegraph poles in a futile attempt to maintain solitude. But today “being disconnected makes an increasing number of Americans uncomfortable and anxious,” as the social distancing required during the COVID-19 pandemic made all too
People have always experienced boredom and loneliness and a need for recognition.
What has changed is how we process and interpret those feelings.
clear. Solitude is widely seen as synonymous with loneliness, which has been turned “into a formal malady with purchasable cures,” Matt and Fernandez write.
Although they do not use the word in their examination of how feelings about feelings have changed, they are describing a form of mindfulness. And what gave me hope that we are not doomed to experience the negative feelings about the negative feelings provoked by digital technologies is something Matt and Fernandez experienced as a result of their research. Through that process of immersing themselves in the history, sociology, and psychology of meta-feeling, they found ways to “better navigate our feelings and make more informed choices about when to be narcissistic, lonely, bored, inattentive, awed, and angry.” Emotions, they add, “are not natural, inevitable, or fixed; they change and are changeable.”
That assertion comes from the fascinating theory of “constructed emotions” pioneered by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University. “How you interpret emotions depends on the cultural context,” Matt said. “Different emotions have a different meaning and feeling due to cognitive processing.” If the cognitive part of the brain imposes on the raw feeling of boredom or loneliness the interpretation, “something is wrong here, do all you can to escape this negative emotional state,” then the feeling of boredom or loneliness becomes doubly painful. “Feelings do arise organically,” Fernandez said. “But we then impose cognitive interpretations on them.”
Consider the cognitive interpretation of boredom. The word did not even exist until the mid-1800s. When people received no cognitive stimulation from the outside world, which is
how we understand boredom today, they did not take it as a sign that they needed to frantically find external stimulation to awaken their synapses. They filled it with an interior life. “We search so ceaselessly for constant diversion, our ability to sit still has gone,” Matt said. “There is an almost frenetic search for stimulation.” Many of us would rather be subjected to an electrical shock than “do nothing” for 15 minutes, as was true of two-thirds of men and one-quarter of women in a 2014 study.
But this raw feeling that our thinking mind has been taught to label as boredom “need not be an affliction,” she continued. (By “raw feeling,” I mean the immediate, felt emotion, before the cognitive mind imposes an interpretation on it.) “It can be a time for random thoughts to pass through your brain,” and a time for creativity, Matt said. This invitation to transform the way we feel about boredom—actually, scratch that: let’s start calling it an absence of external mental stimuli that can in fact be a glorious gift—is one that’s been visited time and again in Mindful’s pages, by teachers including Barry Boyce and Manoush
Zomorodi. With effort and perspective, and aided by mindfulness practice, we can perform a cognitive jujitsu on the raw feeling of boredom and turn it into a gift of mental quietude to be filled with a richer interior life.
The same goes for emotions as seemingly disparate as narcissism and loneliness. Narcissistic self-promotion runs rampant on social media platforms, encouraging us to regard every thought and experience—I was here! This is what I think!—as worthy of sharing with the world. (While Twitter, Instagram, and selfie sticks have many constructive uses, their ubiquity also points to narcissist culture.) Even as the pandemic has infected millions across the globe, we’ve created fake backgrounds for our Zoom images.
But the background to this typically self-centered behavior is, to a great extent, not knowing how to be alone with ourselves anymore. Matt observes that our anxious longing for connection spurs us to become curators and promoters of our image, hoping to accumulate likes, followers, and “friends.” As the evolution of digital technologies has helped us “connect” more and more, our emotional tolerance for being alone has plunged. According to the Google Ngram Viewer, which counts the frequency of words and phrases in books, the use of “solitude” has plunged since the late 1920s (when radio and then television entered homes) while the frequency of “loneliness” has risen.
Digital technologies made users “relabel” and “reinterpret” the feeling of being alone, Matt and Fernandez argue, and in so doing changed the actual feelings that go with aloneness. But that’s not irreversible. Rather than interpreting the sense of aloneness as one that demands redress—let me just check my Facebook feed, it’ll take just a sec—we can accept it as part of life, even as an opportunity. “Humans can collectively shape these feelings that digital technologies give us,” Matt said. “We do have some agency.” ●
With effort and perspective, and aided by mindfulness practice, we can perform a cognitive jujitsu on the raw feeling of boredom and turn it into a gift of mental quietude to be filled with a richer interior life.
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Guided Practices
Special for subscribers: find meditation practices from some of the world’s foremost women leaders of the mindfulness movement. mindful.org/ power-up
BY STEPHANIE DOMET
This is why we practice. As climate change, a global pandemic, a racial justice reckoning, and suffering of all kinds wrack our world, we remind each other: This is why we practice. In our second annual focus on women leaders of mindfulness, we invited these twelve women—teachers, researchers, writers, and activists nominated by their peers—to share with us what they’ve learned from their years of deep practice. In these pages they reveal the insights and experiences that help them navigate troubled times, guide others, and make transformational change in their own lives, the lives of others, and even the organizations and structures we live and work within. We hope the wisdom they share inspires you—not only to sit and practice, but also to rise and act.
Twelve women of the mindfulness movement share how their deep practice has shaped the world they see—and the one they’re working toward.
about anything you want.”
DIANA WINSTON Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLAOne of the first, basic mindfulness practices to resonate with Diana Winston still guides her today. She was 21 years old, on a ten-day meditation retreat, learning various principles. “And one of them was there’s praise and there’s blame, and you can’t escape the two of them. And I heard this and something lit up inside me. And I knew that I was really interested in: How do you escape? I’m always seeking praise and running away from blame. And they said, well, there is an answer, and that is to develop a mind of equanimity. And here’s how you do it, you meditate.”
It’s equanimity Winston, a renowned writer and meditation teacher, reaches for when life gets stormy, it’s equanimity she’s striving to help her young daughter learn, and it’s equanimity she believes can help steady us all in troubled and troubling times.
“Just coming back to my practice, going back to my breath and cultivating that equanimity. I try to remind myself that things are as they are, not to bring impassivity, but to help me grapple with and hold space for the fact that there is tremendous suffering going on and lots of forces of greed and violence and delusion that are causing more and more of it.”
Holding that space, Winston says, can change the world. “I think that bringing mindfulness out into the world is moving our planet in the direction we want to go. It transforms individuals, which transforms our communities and transforms institutions. It’s what we can do to help transform the world in the spirit of love, compassion and justice.”
Jenée Johnson’s mindfulness practice has been a place for her to root and remember who she is. “I am not who you say I am,” says the Program Innovation Leader at the San Francisco Department of Public Health Mindfulness, Trauma and Racial Healing. Johnson says her mindfulness practice—begun in childhood as Christian prayer—helps her remember who she is amidst the chaos of modern times, including the “psychic warfare” of racism.
Much of Johnson’s work focuses on race. “Not by choice, I speak about racism,” Johnson says, but she knows the work is vital
because of the nature of racism, and how it operates. “You begin to question your worth. And that’s essentially what racism does. It’s a dehumanization process.”
So for Johnson, connecting with her mindfulness practice allows her spaciousness, and an opportunity to rest. “The body needs to rest, which is also part of the reclamation of mindfulness for a people that were brought here to work and where rest is not often a part of what we get to do with ease. And there is no healing without rest. And so I am these days so thankful for the practice.”
A practice, Johnson notes, that has roots in
“Once you have access to the fullness of your worth and your humanity, then you can do just
JENÉE JOHNSON
“I think that bringing mindfulness out into the world is moving our planet in the direction we want to go.”
DIANA WINSTON
Africa, though it does not belong to any one group of people—it’s part of the human experience, “thereby increasing access and relevance to people of African ancestry and others. Once you have access to the fullness of your worth and your humanity, then you can do just about anything you want. You can have anything.”
For Johnson, mindfulness isn’t just rest—it’s also hard work. “Mindfulness is that roadway to emotional intelligences, to this ability to navigate the triggers and potent emotions, to have empathy and compassion, to know my value, to be resilient, to have a way of
explaining things that don’t diminish me.”
Johnson emphasizes the work to her colleagues in public health when she’s teaching. “This is not about making excuses. This is stepping fully into what is possible.” That includes, Johnson says, a reckoning with one’s circumstances, no matter how painful and traumatic they may be— and it’s not about turning away from that pain and trauma, but to say yes, that happened, this is what I’m facing. “And that’s more and more of what I speak about in my work, this ability to not make an altar at Black pain, but to say yes that happened, and I’m moving on.”
Tita Anganco cofounded, along with Patricia Rockman, the Centre for Mindfulness Studies. Anganco knew mindfulness meditation could help those who practice be gentler, more open, less reactive, and more resilient—and that could be a boon for people who are involved with government systems like corrections, health, housing, and more.
“I really am very interested in system change because that has the greatest impact for a lot of people,” Anganco says. She’s retired from the Centre she cofounded, serving now on its board. Now she’s involved in a project in the Philippines, providing mindfulness training through schools and universities. “The global mental health field is making innovations in areas that would be anathema or would not be acceptable within the western setting where we’re up against established order and established ways of thinking,” Anganco says.
The three-year pilot project in the Philippines is simple in its concept. “Right now we have a program that’s training frontline workers to do both preventive and treatment work with marginalized youth. And we’re hoping to get another grant for working with the youth themselves, to train those that are interested, to be peer-support workers.”
Anganco knows that though the pace of change will be slow, it will come—and it will come from the bottom up. “What’s really important is to change the very fundamentals of our values, and our beliefs about each other. It’s serious work and it needs to get done.” says Anganco. “We need leadership at the top as well as grassroots movements at the bottom.”
“What’s really important is to change the very fundamentals of our values, and our beliefs about each other.”
TITA ANGANGCO
Cheryl Jones became an expert at using mindfulness to navigate difficult times out of sheer necessity. She was in a marriage with a spouse who was “a stressful person” when she read Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. “I lit up like a Christmas tree. It just resonated with me at such a core level.”
And while her mindfulness practice couldn’t change the outcome of her marriage, it was a pillar for her in the aftermath. “My mindfulness practice enabled me to break down the madness into manageable moments, and get through the most turbulent time of my life,” Jones says.
“We don’t trust that we have within us the capacity to withstand the fear and the rage and the grief. But my mindfulness practice helped me to trust myself. And it was that willingness to be with those really, really strong emotions and allow myself to acknowledge how bad it was, and how scared I was. If we don’t do that, we end up working too much, drinking too much, eating too much—all kinds of things that don’t help us get through.”
Jones became a certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction instructor and today she provides mindfulness training to businesses, organizations, retreat centers, and more. She says it’s vital to remember that small steps can be huge. “A willingness to stop for even one minute is a powerful place to start. Stand up and do some gentle stretches, even if it’s just for one minute, sit down and be willing to be with yourself as you are with love and compassion.”
SEBENE SELASSIE Mindfulness Teacher, Author, and Speaker
As a teacher and writer (Sebene Selassie’s first book, You Belong: A Call for Connection will be out this August with Harper One; see review on page 68), Selassie is looking outward at what she calls a “huge movement in spiritual consciousness raising that is probably unparalleled in modern history.”
Even before COVID19 further shone a light on deep inequities in our political and social systems, Selassie notes, more of us were becoming more aware of the depth of human suffering.
“The way I relate to what’s happening is a lot is being revealed that was maybe hidden—and particularly hidden from particular people for a long time. Dominant culture— white culture, more privileged people—are becoming aware of suffering that they hadn’t been aware of before, and becoming privy to information that people from other places or other social locations have known for a long time. So there’s a certain amount of resiliency that we have to build up to be able to take in this news, and have a sense of perspective and possibility within it.
“I don’t think things are worse now, I think things are just being seen more clearly now.”
Selassie finds hope in the voices that are being amplified now—voices of young people, people of color, and women in particular. “There seems to be a strong return to looking towards Indigenous people—knowledge keepers and wisdom keepers who’ve been dismissed by modernity and scientific materialism.”
Still, she notes, that optimism is underpinned with a clear-eyed vision about what this moment is calling for. “It’s an opportunity for a really different change, not just the Band-Aids or shifts that we tried in the past, that were lock-step with systems of oppression. But we actually need major changes and shifts. And this is our opportunity.”
Selassie says we have choices about how and why we turn to mindfulness.
“I hope we don’t use mindfulness only for its attentional quality, to be better, more efficient at paying attention to business as usual, but that we use this capacity for embodied awareness, for feeling with our minds, our hearts, and our bodies, what’s most needed in the moment.”
For Selassie, “mindfulness presents the opportunity for us to be more fully present for ourselves, our loved ones, and the earth.”
“Be willing to be with yourself as you are with love and compassion.”
CHERYL JONES
“Mindfulness presents the opportunity for us to be more fully present for ourselves, our loved ones, and the earth.”
SEBENE SELASSIE
Find a comfortable posture— walking, standing, lying down, or seated. With open eyes, move the head side to side, breathing in and pausing when the chin is over a shoulder, breathe out as the head moves, pausing with the chin over the other shoulder.
Notice your space—the colors, shapes, height, width, and depth of the room, the elements of nature.
Rest the eyes—open, but with a soft gaze, looking down, or close them. Breathe, and feel into the moment.
How is the mind? How is the body? How is the breath? And how is your heart? Feel into the posture of your body.
Feel gravity pulling down, rooting this body, connecting it to the Earth. Feel the sense of solidity, knowing this body as Earth element. Feel Earth holding Earth. In this stillness, you might begin to feel the sense of movement. It could be a little vibration, a shimmering. Or you could feel a bigger movement. Perhaps the body is rocking, soothing itself. Whether it’s in the stillness or the movement, you might feel a sense of ease in the body—a place where you can rest. A place that allows you a sense of ease and peace. Keep coming back to this anchor.
Begin to open up to the emotional body. Is there is a presence of, or an absence of? Without getting caught up
in the narrative, without anything needing to make sense.
Find softening and widening into the experience, and see if the body can follow you. Is there contraction or tightness? Heat or coolness? Stillness or vibration?
If we begin to create stories or narratives around it, can we come back to the anchor? Allow this emotional body to move through us at the speed of trust.
How do we know the presence of this emotional body? Is it moving throughout the body or is it staying put?
Is it getting bigger, or is it getting smaller with our attention placed upon it? Is it solid or is it breaking apart?
Are you able to see all that it’s made up of—the fear and sadness, the joy, the happiness, the grief. Can you see impermanence as the emotional body moves through?
How is the mind responding? Is there a pulling toward or pushing away, a confusion?
What is the quality of a heart and mind when holding on, grasping, clinging, or identifying with a strong emotion? What is the quality of a heart and mind when there is a knowing that this arises, and this will pass away.
Is there a sense of ease, of spaciousness, of an opening? How is the body now? How is the breath? How is the heart?
Breathe the breath in, and breathe the breath out.
Leslie Booker found her way to yoga and meditation in her twenties, and from there, began working with young people of color who were incarcerated. “There is this narrative when you’re locked up that you’re an animal. And that’s how they treat you. And, I was like, no, you are a human being. And you need to be treated with dignity. And so I began to see a lot of dignity begin to arise in my young people. Just having these mindfulness practices really allowed them to have a sense of care and love for themselves.”
For Booker, that deep understanding of humanity is guiding her through turbulent times.
“When I see people who are really harmful to other humans, it helps me to have compassion. No one who is free from greed, aversion, or delusion would cause harm in the world. People who are free from these poisons don’t spread hate. They don’t lock people up. They don’t murder people. They don’t sexually abuse people.
“And it’s been really helpful for me to be like,
“I want you to see my color. I want you to know that I’m queer. I want you to know that I’m racialized and politicized.”
LESLIE BOOKER
hurt people hurt people. And that’s been giving me enough space, so that my heart and mind don’t get colonized by these poisons as well.
“Whatever name we attach to it: anger, fear, grief, sadness—we need to move this stuck energy through our bodies so it doesn’t set up residence and start colonizing our hearts and minds. It’s imperative for us to scream, shout, cry, create art, lift our voices, and to rest, so we can feel our hearts again.”
But that doesn’t mean that our identities, in all their complexity, don’t matter. “I want people to know that I’m Black—I want you to see my color. I want you to know that I’m queer. I want you to know that I’m racialized and politicized. It’s really important for me to name that, because I see people who are queer, who are trans, who are folks of color, I can feel their bodies begin to rest, knowing that I’m with them. I got their back and I’m not in denial about who I am. And that’s what I’m bringing forward.”
SONA DIMIDJIAN Clinical Psychologist
Sona Dimidjian is the Director of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. She’s especially interested in how people navigate transitional times in their lives and how people can extend beyond caring for themselves to caring for their communities.
“For me, the practice of mindfulness has always been about ways in which we can learn to work skillfully with our own thoughts and emotions and our own bodies, as well as be part of a broader community.” The community element is key.
And, she feels, it’s more important now than ever. “We are living in a time of profound uncertainty where assumptions that we took for granted, didn’t even realize that we held about how the world worked or how people interacted with one another have been called into question or have been in some cases pretty radically violated. And I think that level of uncertainty and groundlessness can create an incredible amount of anxiety and insecurity.” In turbulent times, Dimidjian says, basic awareness practices can provide an anchor that allows us to get to work.
“These times call upon us to look inward with self-awareness and to really reconnect to our core intention and ask yourself how you can be a benefit to the people around you and your community— to the world at large?”
“I got you, I see you, I see you bleeding, I see you open, I acknowledge you, I’m holding you, and now I’m going to get up and take care of you.”
GHYLIAN BELL GHYLIAN BELL Founder, Urban Yoga Foundation
When Ghylian Bell talks about mindfulness, she can’t help but talk about interconnectedness. She remembers how hard her elders worked. “Understanding the hard life they had, that was carried in their bodies but not in their spirit, was another vehicle of mindfulness for me. It just blows my mind to recall the kind of love and commitment to family and to work they had, even carrying those bodies that had kind of fallen apart.”
Bell started Urban Yoga Foundation in 2007, naming it intentionally. “The urban environment to me is multifaceted and multicultural. And yoga is union. With our practice we’re bringing back the union of multifaceted, multi-layered, multicultural communities—it’s an opportunity to reclaim our community as integral, diverse. Because people are feeling it. They are either going to feel included, or they are going to feel excluded by the nature of how we step in.”
Bell also sees an opportunity for healing, if we’re willing to acknowledge our pain. “When a child falls and that booboo is raw and bleeding, the first thing that kid does is grab that knee and hold it, probably puts their head and face down near it to kiss it. There is comfort in the holding, there’s acknowledgment in the rawness, there’s direct connection to the pain. When a parent says: ‘Oh get up, you didn’t hurt yourself,’ that child can say: ‘But I did, and I get to see my knee, and say I got you, I see you, I see you bleeding, I see you open, I acknowledge you, I’m holding you, and now I’m going to get up and take care of you.’ And then I can walk, and then I can run, and then I can keep going.”
“The more women are mindful, the more they’ll be able to bring their voice forward in the most skillful and strategic ways creating inclusion and a kind of an embrace that doesn’t leave anybody out.”
TAMI SIMON TAMI SIMON Founder & CEO of Sounds True, Writer, and Podcast HostTami Simon learned to meditate when she was in college, studying philosophy and religion, and it changed her life. “I had a sense that I belonged on the earth for the first time. That I was welcome here, I was welcome in myself. I was welcome in my body. I never had that feeling before. I was able to connect with a sense of, you could call it embodied immediacy or presence. The pleasure of presence. And I thought I just always want to be in touch with this and I want to share it with other people because it’s so available.”
When circumstances— whether personal, environ-
mental, or political—feel out of control, Simon turns to her practice to restore herself, so that she can be of service.
“I think the first thing is, be a force of sanity in the room. Be a light and a torch of sanity yourself,” Simon says. “You have a very powerful impact on every single person you come in contact with. In every conversation and every interaction, you’re a light. You’re rebalancing other people, you’re realizing oh, this is the time to give this person a hug. This is the time to pause and maybe look someone in the eye and take a few extra seconds and ask them how they are. We can be there
for others if we’re centered inside ourselves.”
And though Simon has had a hand in amplifying the voices of mindfulness teachers like Jon KabatZinn, Kristin Neff, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, and others, there are voices yet to be amplified. “We need to hear the voices of women more and more and more and more and more. Our world is not going to have the kind of sanity and balance—values of the human heart and relatedness— that’s not going to be our operating way as a culture until the voice of women is equal to the voice of men,” Simon says. “The more women are mindful, the
more they’ll be able to bring their voice forward in the most skillful and strategic ways creating inclusion and a kind of an embrace that doesn’t leave anybody out.
“There’s something natural with mindfulness that it sees the validity of every perspective. And that’s so important because we don’t need a bunch of angry, polarizing people of any gender. We need strategies that don’t create further polarization, but create inclusion and a kind of an embrace that doesn’t leave anybody out. We need women to be the most strategic, the most skillful, and the most inclusive. And those are mindful women.”
CARA BRADLEY Mindfulness Teacher, Speaker, and Author
Cara Bradley’s been a teacher for forty years—she started teaching ice skating when she was just 15 years old. “What I noticed as a fifteen-year-old teaching adults how to skate, was that they came on the ice and their bodies and their faces looked very tense and constricted. And over the course of the lesson, I noticed their faces change and I noticed people become more child-like. They just came alive.” That made Bradley come alive, too. “I like being able to help people feel more alive. My whole life, I’ve been moving bodies—and training minds.”
As a motivational speaker and trainer for organizations and companies, Bradley teaches about balance and flow. “In business and in life, you have to have a balance of the yang energy to get things done, along with the yin energy of supporting people through transformation,” she notes. Bradley is also a firm believer that empowered women empower women. “My practice has allowed me to step outside myself enough to really support women, wholeheartedly. While also recognizing that male or female, we all need the balance of the yin and yang energy.”
Bradley knows that peace is available to anyone who reaches for it. “What breaks my heart is when people think they’re bad at something. ‘I’m bad at yoga, or bad at meditation.’ People say that ALL the time, and you know it goes so far beyond being good or bad. The practice is about coming home to our natural state.”
Michelle Maldonado was just seven years old when her great-aunt—her Titti—introduced her to meditation. Titti placed her hand on Maldonado’s head. “Quiet here,” her auntie said, and then moved her hand to Maldonado’s chest, “so you can be here.” Maldonado didn’t recognize this as meditation until much later, but she knew its power.
She carried these skills into her career. “I remember my managers would say, What is it that you do that makes your team so high performing? And honestly, at first I wasn’t really sure.” But after Maldonado attended a mindful leadership retreat the pieces fell into place. “I went to my boss and I said, It’s not what, it’s how. And he was like, I don’t really understand this, but it seems to work. Keep doing it.”
Maldonado is a lawyer and she founded Lucenscia to bring mindfulness and emotional intelligence training to business and organizational leaders. “Organizational ecosystems impact everybody. We all shop at a grocery store. We all buy gas. We all interact with law enforcement. And so I felt that the best way to make a difference was to move into those communities, to create sacred and safe spaces, for people to be okay, to recognize their vulnerability, their humanity.”
For Maldonado, it’s vital that she’s doing this work as a Black woman, not only for people of color, who don’t always see themselves reflected in mindfulness offerings, but more broadly for social change. “When we see the spectrum in front of us, then we start to break down misperceptions about who we think people are and what they can and can’t do.”
JESSICA MOREY Founder, iBme
Jessica Morey finds all kinds of hope and inspiration about the future in the teens she works with on retreat with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme). Morey was working at the World Bank, with two master’s degrees in sustainable development and international affairs (“I was fully on a track of international climate policy and finance and clean energy,” she says), when the opportunity to start a nonprofit retreat program for teens presented itself.
Quitting the World Bank to run a nonprofit was a scary step, but it also felt, in a way, inevitable. She’d been volunteering with Insight Meditation Society’s teen retreats each summer. “When I was on teen retreat, it was the happiest and most meaningful time in my year. And there was never a moment when I’d be like, oh, is this worth doing? Is this impactful? Whereas with my job, I was always feeling that way. Was it having any impact in the world?” The impact on teens was obvious, meanwhile: “I love myself. I want to live. I can see that I have a purpose in the world.”
These days, Morey’s thinking about ways to tap into the wisdom and energy of the teens who come to iBme retreats. “I have some
ideas about having a youth climate contemplative retreat themed around: how do we address the internal and external experience of what’s happening?”
For Morey, her mindfulness practice is helping surf the uncertainty of all that. “I just like the fundamental clarity, the potential for connection and care of every mind, heart, and also of healing—that’s just inspiring.”
Morey is also inspired by “the wisdom and insight teens have—and the transformation that I get to see in them. It’s not that hard to create the conditions under which people’s best qualities can emerge and where they can live in integrity with their deepest values.”
That’s what gives rise to Morey’s optimism. “These young people having a direct lived experience of safety, acceptance, love, belonging, and possibility. And that’s both in their own mind, and how they learn how to relate to their own thoughts and feelings and body, and in the experience with their peers and this group of adults who are mentors. It’s a trust in what’s possible in the world, because you’ve experienced it.” ●
JESSICA MOREY
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.
“Trust in what’s possible in the world.”
The ground beneath your feet may be shifting, but mindfulness can help you return to what is true: Your breath. This moment. Your heart. Let your practice be your guide.
By Jeremy Hunter
After 17 years of living with a life-threatening kidney disease, at the end of 2008 I received a new kidney from a generous former student. The surgery extended and revolutionized my life. My skin turned from a sad yellow to a vibrant pink. After years of a diet restricted to what seemed like filtered water and saltines, I treasured the moment my teeth sunk into a succulent beef-tongue taco. For the first time in years, I could meet the day with vitality and dream about a future.
Since most organ rejections happen early on, the first few months were tenuous. Once it was clear the procedure was a success, the next six months were exuberant. Were this a Lifetime Channel special, the credits would roll at the happy ending. However, without warning I sank into a deep and anxious depression. It dragged on for the next 18 months and I felt aimless, worthless, and hopeless. Though my health was better than it had been in decades, there were times I lost the urge to continue living. I knew something was up and began to look for answers.
I found my experiences mirrored what many wise people have said about what happens during transitions. I discovered a rich literature and tradition around transitions, containing maps and guides for how to navigate them.
I learned that changes are distinct from transitions. Changes are events. You get married. Your company is taken over and ceases to exist. A global pandemic breaks out. Your dog dies.
Transitions are the inner shifts of identity, possibility, and belief that occur to help us assimilate and adjust to changes. Some are easy, others are difficult. They don’t occur automatically, and they often require consistent and specific efforts. Like a video game where you slay a demon to move to the next level, transitions throw down a series of monsters that must be overcome before you can move ahead.
As I navigated the transition occasioned by my new circumstances, mindfulness proved an essential ally for me. It created the ability to keep me moving ahead through a bewildering territory and into a renewed sense of purpose, wonder, and joy.
Changes are inevitable. I’ve observed there are five Ds that propel us into reconsidering our lives: Death, Disaster, Disease, Divorce, and Downsizing. They are the harbingers of transition because they signal that something familiar—a role, a way of living, a relationship—has come to an end. In a culture like ours that sees time as a straight line moving from past to future, these changes seem like finalities, the end of the road.
Endings can come with despair, grief, and a sense that a future is impossible. A ten-year old girl from a well-to-do family comes home from school in El Salvador to find her 40-year-old father has died. The family plunges headlong into wrenching change. Her mother leaves her and her siblings behind to work as a maid in America, sending money back home for a decade. Eventually, the family is reunited. The little girl grows to be a successful finance executive, but says her father’s death ended the sense of safety, security, and family she had known.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeremy Hunter, PhD, is Founding Director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute and Associate Professor of Practice at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management in Claremont, CA. His goal is to help leaders develop the best of their humanity.There are other kinds of changes. Graduations, births, and promotions are also moments when the old and familiar dissolve into something new and unknown. These are the changes that can take us by surprise because even though they are ostensibly “positive,” there is →
Instead of seeing time as a straight line, if we see life as a series of cycles of growth, maturation, and death followed by rebirth, we can better understand why endings are necessary for new beginnings.
still some sort of reformatting taking place, and with that an old way of life passes into history.
Maybe you miss the quiet days before children or the frivolity of student life or the flowlike pleasure of contributing to an organization without the heavy responsibilities of being a manager. Your sullen feelings, or longing for some previous way of being despite moving into a new and wider world, may feel mysterious and even incongruous to you.
Endings need to be acknowledged. We need to give them attention, accept that they are taking place, and appreciate the experiences that led to them. They ask us to bring things to closure. Instead of seeing time as a straight line, if we see life as a series of cycles of growth, maturation, and death followed by rebirth, we better understand why endings are necessary for new beginnings.
After the end of the familiar, it can seem like you’re stepping into a void. In this foggy maze, there are no signposts with arrows assuring you, “This way out.” You can feel lost and zombielike or at least unmoored and disoriented as you wander the earth. The old rules don’t seem to apply anymore. What used to work well no longer does. You feel strange and not like your old self but not yet something fully formed. Does the caterpillar in its pupae stage on the way to butterfly-hood ever think to itself, “What the hell is going on with me?!”
A common feeling here is anxiety that takes the form of a desire for answers and a rush to a settled future. A student of mine who had worked for the same organization for decades found herself unemployed. As we sat together at lunch with two half-eaten Cobb salads separating us, she ask plaintively, “How can I get through this as fast as possible?”
What distinguishes this middle period is doubt, discomfort, and disorientation. Learning to return to the present and accept uncomfortable sensations is one of the monsters to be faced at this stage.
We sometimes think it would be preferable to give up on life because the story of who we are doesn’t fit anymore. When we believe our story too much, we feel like not only has the story come to an end but maybe we’ve come to an end. Why not just get out of the misery? In my case, mindfulness allowed me to recognize and be with depression and uneasiness without getting swallowed by it. →
Ask yourself these questions as you contemplate how you move through change and transition. It may help you to make note of your answers in writing.
Pick a significant change in your life. What transition took place as a result?
Do you have a pattern in how you deal with endings? Do you just keep moving or make space to mourn or acknowledge what was lost? Do you accept that something or someone has passed?
What endings are incomplete?
How can you create a way to bring closure to unfinished business?
How do you handle sensations of discomfort in transitions?
What happens when you lessen your resistance and increase acceptance to not knowing?
Try new things, go to new places, meet new people, learn new skills as if you’re trying on new clothes, asking, “Does this feel right?”
Create a system of support. Sense what enjoyment or being refreshed feels like in the body. What do you know now that you didn’t before?
—Jeremy Hunter
The depression and the desire to isolate oneself might be our system’s way of asking us to slow down and take stock. What rules apply now? What do I need to let go of?
Letting go of what doesn’t work anymore is the next monster. Maybe what needs to be released is a belief, a resentment, or an identity. The process is deconstructive.
A utilities executive who was a war refugee as a child came to terms with letting go of her view of herself as an underdog who always has to fight to get what she wants. She realized by not seeing life through the lens of a constant battle, she can live easier. Just as a hot-air balloon must drop the weight of sandbags to soar, letting go of the old and unworkable is the only way to keep from sinking. It makes space for something new.
Though you may be sloughing off the old, at some point you realize you’ve hit bottom. Choices become very simple. No matter how much you may want to, you cannot return to the familiar old world. If you choose not to founder on the rocks, the only way is forward. The growth aspect of this middle period is intentional exploration. So the task here is to balance letting go with the search for something new: new relationships, new places, new ways of thinking, seeing, and living. Like trying on new clothes, looking in the mirror, and asking, “Can I pull this off?” This process can feel wasteful and indulgent. There can be many false starts, further compounding the sense of hopelessness.
This is only part of the monster’s bag of tricks. Perseverance is essential. Put one foot in front of the other. Do the next thing, even if you’re unsure what the next thing after that is. Enlist the support of others—we don’t walk the path alone and rarely is the path straightforward. It’s a journey of discovery.
An architect at mid-career feels his game is up. He’s tired of clients asking him to churn out variations of his “greatest hits.” So he takes a pilgrimage to the offices of avant-garde architects. Through his conversations he glimpses possibilities. He realizes he must let go of his old habit of focusing only on himself and advancing his vision. He embraces collaboration and dialogue with the communities he builds for—an orchestra conductor instead of a visionary auteur. From these interactions come dramatic designs unlike anything he’s ever done. He revitalizes himself and his work.
Eventually something sticks. The despair is replaced by a tentative sense of aliveness. Not sure of this sensation, we are suspicious that something could feel fulfilling or enjoyable. We question it. Could this be real? Am I being duped and betrayed? However, a new equilibrium can begin to emerge. There are often confirming events that dampen doubts and signal a new way forward with a sense of resolution, commitment, and possibility.
In my case, I won a series of teaching awards reaffirming my love of working with people. In addition, I received a promotion that would allow me to focus on teaching. That set in motion a different life from the one I had before my surgery. I emerged into a new role and learned that what I did had value for others. I received invitations to lecture in Europe and Asia. I met a kind and beautiful woman who became my wife. This emerging life bore little resemblance to the one that had ended.
I’ve found that dreams can sometimes shed an interesting light on transitions, as archetypal ideas bubble up from deep in the mind.
My own new beginning was marked by a dream of encountering a glowing Tokyo Tower standing in hills near where I live. It pulses with otherworldly power. Kids wearing black sneakers I’d just purchased in real life walk by. They tell me it takes 20 years to be a success. I touch the tower and powerful sensations course through my body. I wake up—20 years older than I was when I was first diagnosed with kidney disease.
It makes me optimistic to see the resilience people have in the face of enormous changes. Through working with people in transition I’ve become a cautious optimist about human possibility. In class, we spend a day listening to each other’s transition stories: What ended? What was let go? What was gained in return? The repeated exposure emphasizes that we’ve all been through this before and we can do it again. ●
Eventually something sticks. The despair is replaced by a tentative sense of aliveness. There are often confirming events that dampen doubts and signal a new way forward with a sense of resolution, commitment, and possibility.
PHOTOGRAPH
How do you face endings? Create a mess to break things off and run away? Silently ghost yourself from the scene? Endings remind us that we are not in control, that things could get unpleasant and emotional—and there are so many diversions on Netflix to escape into instead.
However, cycles of renewal, shedding, and transforming are ever-present in nature. Life is nothing but a series of transitions from the very moment you left your mother’s body.
Letting go creates the space for the next stage to unfold.
Rituals officially demarcate the ending and time of transition. A good ritual will shift your consciousness so you see yourself and the world in a different and expansive way. In my work with clients, I often guide them through a Letting Go ritual.
A client of mine faced retirement from her job of many years as the head librarian for rare and special books at an august institution. She was resisting her leaving, though there was no escaping it. For our next meeting, I asked her to bring a favorite book. While discussing why she loved it so much, her hand stroked the cover while she spoke of the scent of the old paper and its heft in her hand. Her eyes gazed faraway when she talked about the
ideas and flights of adventure the book had sparked for her. It was clear the book was more than a valued object and closer to an old companion.
Then, about a meter in front of her, I set a waste basket. She flashed a look of terror while slowly shaking her head in resistance.
“Let it go,” I encouraged her softly. “As you do this, do it very slowly, and watch closely what happens in your body.”
We sat silent for a few minutes. Finally, she stood up.
One halting step, then another. She slowly, tenderly placed the book inside and just as slowly returned to her chair.
She sat silent, feeling what was happening inside her.
Then the convulsions started.
As tears flowed, she said, “I’ve been living in denial, trying to pretend this isn’t happening. I can’t keep doing this forever.”
In the end, she felt lighter, more honest. The release, while painful in the moment, helped her get unstuck and take steps forward. Soon after, she and her husband moved to Arizona, where she spent her final years traveling to all the places the books told her about.
—Jeremy HunterUse this three-step practice to help you let go and move on.
Ask yourself: What do you need to bring to an end in your life? What needs closure? What bow do you need to tie, what letter needs to be written, what in the closet needs to be put up for sale on Ebay? Identify an object that represents this needed transition. 2
Sit with the object you’ve identified.
Bring to mind the thoughts, emotions, and memories associated with it. Allow space for whatever arises. 3
Let the object go— into the recycling or donation bin, if appropriate, the waste basket if not. Observe what happens in your body as you release it. What does letting go make space for?
You could wing it on your own, but, as Barry Boyce writes, great mindfulness teachers can help crack you open, giving you the confidence to let your inherent wisdom take flight.
Inmy college days, a thousand years ago, I used to hang out in part of the library that contained a large multivolume work: Pokorny’s Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. I would idle away hours looking up the derivations of words and tracing their meanings as they wended their way through many languages and cultures. It instilled in me a spirit of looking beneath the surface of a word to find the depth and breadth that lay within.
When I first discovered that the word “education” derives from an ancient root roughly meaning to draw out, to lead out, it lit up my mind. At that point, education had seemed mainly to be a process of having information and ideas poured into you, or wisdom bestowed on you
from on high. This deeper sense of education conveyed both something being drawn out from within as well as the prospect of being led on a journey of discovery. It was a revelation, and an inspiration.
Even if I was overthinking the etymology—we can’t really know what people thousands of years ago meant when they used a word; the great Julius Pokorny was only making educated guesses—I came to find teachers who met this deeper standard of education. They were teachers who elicited something within that was ready to be brought out. For sure, they led me to new information, but with a spirit of inquiry and examination, rather than indoctrination. Many of them taught me mindfulness.
When it comes to learning meditation, having teachers who guide you in this facilitative way is vitally important. Meditation lies somewhere between an intellectual pursuit and skills training of the kind that athletes, martial artists, and musicians, among others, rely on. It involves techniques that have physical aspects, and it is indeed a bit like building up a muscle—at first the “attention muscle”—so some coaching and coaxing are integral aspects of real teaching.
Nowadays a lot of resources are readily available to get us started and help us along the way. Instructions for how to practice mindfulness and related practices abound— in books, magazines, apps, podcasts, and in video and audio form. The practice itself, as any number of teachers have said, couldn’t be simpler. In fact, it seems too simple. “That’s it? That’s all there is to it?” (One of the reasons it’s nice to have teachers around is to help us navigate that paradox.)
In addition, authors regularly offer insightful commentary on the sorts of things that occur when one practices meditation.
If you think you need a teacher, chances are you already have one—or many, for that matter.
If you can afford it (or get financial aid), you can go to conferences and meditation programs to learn more and deepen your practice. Some of these ways of getting instruction can feel pretty intimate: Listening to a teacher on an app or podcast can make you feel as if you’re being spoken to directly, and in videos teachers can instruct with a lot of gesture and expression. When you’re reading, you can return again and again to a passage that speaks to you especially.
All of these supports actually are a form of having a teacher, or many teachers. So, if you think you need a teacher, chances are you already have one— or many, for that matter. It’s helpful to have some gratitude for that fact. Countless people in the world do not have the leisure or opportunity to access a wealth of meditation teachings.
Patience also pays off. Desperately rushing to find “the teacher” who solves it all results mostly in frustration. As Jessica Morey, cofounder and lead teacher at Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (read more about her in “Agents of Change” on page 44), says, “Meditation practice can lead you to become striving-oriented, obsessed with trying to get somewhere, to gain experiences.” Being a gardener, patiently planting seeds and allowing nature to take its course, rewards better than being a
driver speeding to get to an appointment.
Eventually, however, no matter how patient we are, obstacles and challenges arise that ruffle our feathers. Mindfulness, awareness, kindness, and compassion practices do not simply work in a linear fashion: x amount of time and effort yields y results. They involve ongoing exploration of how we see ourselves, the world around us, and our relationships. They challenge preconceived views and fixations. They turn us toward life’s ups and downs, rather than away from them. They take us to difficult places.
This is where support from someone outside yourself who can hear you and what’s going on in your mind—not a generic mind—can make a difference. This is where a teacher can provide true education: drawing out what’s inside us and leading us on a journey, not a journey that is prepackaged in a book or on an app, but a journey we cocreate. It’s not a paved road. It’s a trail that we must blaze—with help.
As longtime meditation teacher and author of You Belong: A Call for Connection, Sebene Selassie (read more about her in “Agents of Change” on page 38, and see a review of her book on page 68), says, while →
ACCESS MBCT is an international listing of mental health professionals who are committed to excellence in the delivery, training, and dissemination of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. accessmbct.com
The International Mindfulness Teachers Association is a certification and accrediting body and membership organization that includes a member directory of Certified Mindfulness Teachers and Accredited Mindfulness Teacher Training Programs. imta.org
Mindful Directory Ltd —a collaboration with mindful.org—is a platform where mindfulness teachers and other professionals register their credentials and list their events. mindfuldirectory.org
The Mindfulness Center at Brown University maintains a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher Recognition List, which includes teachers who have provided appropriate documentation of their teaching credentials. brown.edu/public-health/ mindfulness/learn-more/ mbsr-teacher-recognition
Mindful Leader offers an MBSR Certified Teacher Directory provided to the organization by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, which has verified the credentials of the teachers listed. mindfulleader.org/mbsrcertified-teacher-directory
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Support from someone outside yourself who can hear you and what’s going on in your mind—not a generic mind—can make a difference. This is where a teacher can provide true education: drawing out what’s inside us and leading us on a journey.”
some people are “natural self-teachers, most of us benefit from guidance and instruction… We’re not practicing to become super-meditators. We’re practicing to gain some insight and wisdom. So, I’ve found it’s definitely helpful to have some insightful and wise people around.”
Such wise and insightful people come in various forms. They can simply be fellow practitioners with whom we have common cause and a developing bond of trust. They may be in a local group (formal or informal) or online, perhaps supported by an occasional gathering at a group program or retreat.
Finding human beings to support our practice, either as fellow travelers or teachers, may not be an easy prospect. It depends to a certain degree on the availability of teachers and practitioners who are compatible with the kind of path you would like to follow.
For most of the history of meditation practice, it has been transmitted largely through religious organizations. The methods of teaching and supporting practitioners varied from tradition to tradition, but they have included everything from simple fellowship to intense forms of followership, with students taking very explicit directions from teachers in the form of commands, supported by vows on the part of students. As these religious traditions undergo many changes in the mod-
ern era, non-religious ways of teaching and practicing mindfulness and related practices have broken through. The expansion of these forms of practice is the reason that Mindful and mindful.org were founded.
Secular forms of practice have been happening explicitly for about 40 years, so while there are a fair number of teachers, this movement has not developed to the point that there are many secular places to go on retreat with an optimal ratio of teachers at varying levels of ability to students, which would allow for widespread, ongoing individual attention. The supply of teachers is growing, but nowhere near as fast as the number of people interested in taking up meditation. And someone doesn’t become a teacher overnight. Think of wine— it can take decades for a vintage to become finely aged, and not every wine is up to the task. Still, many are very drinkable on the way to becoming fine. Teachers are like that—mastery may be decades off, but many have wisdom and insights to share even at early stages.
As many teachers have noted, people often come to a weekend program, go on a retreat, or take a mindfulness-based course such as MBSR, and then drift away, without finding the ongoing support—and human interaction—they need to truly integrate mindfulness into their lives. Mark Leonard of Mindfulness Connected, who played a key role in establishing the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, →
PHOTOGRAPHS BY YAROSLAV DANYLCHENKO / STOCKSY AND YANA136 / ADOBE STOCKbelieves that the lack of ongoing connection with others, in favor of a kind of private mindfulness, cuts us off from more profound effects at both the personal and societal level. Presenting at the 2020 Mindful Society conference, he emphasized that “well-being is a social function, it’s not a psychological process.”
I look at the guidance we receive from others on the path of meditation as coming at three different levels, with each a bit more intimate and intensified, and placing more trust in the teacher: fellowship, mentorship, leadership. The lines between them are not hard and fast, and one is not better than another. They work together.
As I mentioned above, we already have a teacher—in fact, many teachers—in the form of resources full of instruction and insightful guidance available via so many channels. But one of the principal elements we need is something that keeps us coming back to meditation regularly, and in this case, fellow meditators can make a great difference. As we get trapped in old habit patterns or fall into ruts, lose our inspiration to keep going, or start to
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mfeel we’re the only one who has difficulties, connection with meditating friends—in person, online, or both—can make all the difference.
It’s not that we’re all leaning on each other so that we’ll all fall down together. Rather, we help each other stand on our own two feet, as it were. We may do retreats together or find ways to integrate practice in other areas of life, such as starting a mindfulness program in a local school or hospital. There is great power in learning together.
Tara Healey, program director for mindfulness-based learning at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, is a strong believer in the efficacy of ongoing small doses of support, because as she says, “Mindfulness is self-correcting. As we go off course, it will guide us, as will our fellow meditators and friends. The ability to appreciate the quiet and listen to how you’re being guided gets clearer and clearer the more you practice. The practice itself serves you the life lessons you need.”
Fellowship, being in community with others, becomes an important foundation for going forward on the path of meditation, because it gradually encourages us to think less of mindfulness as a personal pursuit and more as collective pursuit, the social well-being that Mark Leonard talks about.
Caverly Morgan, who founded Peace in Schools in Portland, Oregon, and established the groundbreaking
for-credit Mindful Studies course in the high schools there, is committed to encouraging students to find how the personal expands into a greater whole, how mutual awareness leads to mutual understanding:
In the same way a teen experiences a sense of empowerment by discovering that she, he, or they can direct their attention to the moment versus a conditioned internal story, we have the capacity to do so collectively. The result: collective empowerment When we are practiced at seeing where and how our attention moves personally, internally, in the privacy of our own minds, it becomes easy to see how our attention moves and is directed collectively. In our communities. In our culture. In our world.
At the level of mentorship, there is much more personal give-and-take with a teacher. It may also occur in a group, but is also often enhanced by one-on-one time. Many of us have experienced an inspiring talk by a teacher, perhaps to a crowd of hundreds or even thousands—what some people call “the sage on the stage.” That’s OK for getting an inspirational boost, but a mentor comes down off the stage and sits down with you at eye level, for extended periods. →
How well is the teacher prepared and how well do they cover the curriculum content of the session? Can they balance the needs of the individual, the group, and the requirements of teaching the course?
You want to find more than simple compatibility in a teacher. These Mindfulness-Based Intervention Teaching Assessment Criteria were created in 2008 by researchers from three universities in the UK. You can consider these skills and abilities when choosing a teacher.
2 3 4 5 6
Consider the interpersonal connection between individual participants and teacher. Characteristics of a good teacher include empathy, authenticity, compassion, warmth, curiosity, and respect, among others.
To embody a practice of mindfulness is to bring the core attitudes of mindfulness practice—nonjudging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go—to the practice of teaching mindfulness.
How well does the teacher describe what participants are being invited to do in the practice, including all the elements required in that practice? The teacher should guide students in recognizing when their minds have wandered and bringing their attention back, for example. The teacher’s language should be clear, precise, accurate, and accessible while conveying spaciousness.
Does the teacher convey the themes of the course interactively to participants, using a range of teaching approaches that make the themes come alive?
A competent teacher creates a learning environment that “holds” the group and within which the learning takes place. The teacher should be able to “tune in to,” connect with, and respond appropriately to shifts and changes in group mood and characteristics.
Adapted from “Summary Version of the Mindfulness-based Interventions Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI:TAC)”, Crane et al, 2016.The way that meditation mentors lead people is probably best described as facilitation. It can happen at an individual level, but quite often it occurs in small group programs, such as MBSR or MBCT or any meditation class, really, where personal instruction and group work combine. Facilitating is the act of making it possible for students to find their way. While in fellowship, there is a danger of incestuousness and group think, mentors can cut through that, since part of their role is to draw our habit patterns out into the light, to be examined with care in a safe space.
The skillful means that effective mentors use to facilitate learning are too many to enumerate. They’re inexhaustible, in fact, since they often emerge creatively in the moment, so the marks of effective mentorship are often spontaneity, humor, and a sense of play. While mindfulness involves work, a good mentor conveys that it is definitely not drudgery.
While the skillful methods are endless, two examples—inquiry and stewardship—may help to convey what these kinds of skills are about.
Patricia Rockman, MD— senior director of education and clinical services at the Centre for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto, and co-author of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: Embodied Presence and Inquiry in Practice—is one of the foremost articulators of the power of inquiry, which she describes as “an interactive process, a reflective process, on an experience that has just occurred.” She goes on to say that “what we’re trying to do... is enhance people’s ability to be with their direct experience versus what we normally do, which is to immediately have interpretations, ideas, conclusions, judgments about our experience.” In addition, she says that inquiry enhances people’s “capacity to reflect on the unfolding nature of experience and learn to track that experience with-
out running off into storytelling or narrative or other ideas and conclusions.”
Rockman also points out that encouraging people to inquire about what’s happening moment to moment in their minds helps them “develop a language of experience, a vocabulary of experience—whether that’s describing their sensations, being able to describe their thoughts versus analyzing them, being able to name emotions in an attempt to manage them better and make them less overwhelming, and to begin to see how the body is a source of information” and the place where the sensory correlates of emotion (such as a tightening chest, when we are anxious) reside.
Don McCown, co-author of Teaching Mindfulness: A Practical Guide for Clinicians and Educators, has written extensively →
The marks of effective mentorship are often spontaneity, humor, and a sense of play. While mindfulness involves work, a good mentor conveys that it is definitely not drudgery.
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about the process of teaching mindfulness, particularly in small groups. In a chapter in Resources for Teaching Mindfulness: An International Handbook , he talks about how, in his view, the primary skill of a mindfulness teacher mentoring small groups is to be a steward who tends to the atmosphere of the class.
While McCown acknowledges the atmosphere in a room may seem like a vague notion, still, he says, “We all walk into the room and know, through body sensation and affect, that the atmosphere is tense, or friendly, or calm, or maybe a little sad.” In fact, he goes on to say that “a group can agree on, and even engage in dialogue about, what it is like in the room at a particular moment.”
A skilled teacher of mindfulness-based programs is the steward of this quality of atmosphere, “tracking the unfolding of a class session moment by moment,” paying mindful attention to something that is “evident not only to teachers but also to participants, making it a valuable and valid measure for the relational state of the group.” In this way, the quality of a mindfulness group is something the teacher and the group give rise to together.
In stewardship, McCown points out, the teacher uses all the care at their disposal to pay attention to the setting, how people relate to each other, the interplay between silence and
talking, maintaining ethical behavior, and a number of other elements. In this way, he says, “Atmosphere not only teaches participants, it teaches the teacher.”
The ultimate—and the most intimate—level of teaching is when the teacher transmits, rather than simply teaches. Transmitting is embodying and sharing, most often by example, whatever understanding a teacher has. It’s not a highfalutin idea. In fact, quite the opposite. We see transmission happening in the most mundane of places. In describing a French baker he studied with, Bill Buford wrote in the New Yorker recently:
For Bob, farms were the “heart of Frenchness.” His grandfather had been a farmer. Every one of the friends he would eventually introduce me to were also the grandchildren of farmers. They felt connected to the rhythm of plows and seasons, and were beneficiaries of a knowledge that had been in their families for generations. When Bob described it, he used the word transmettre, with its sense of “to hand over”—something passed between eras.
A teacher committed to transmission cares little about their own stature as a teacher. Like the master baker, they care only about
the results, the quality of the bread. They long to see students bake bread even better than they could bake. They don’t seek acolytes, a kind of permanent one-upmanship. They seek colleagues. They wish not merely to teach students but to learn together with them.
In so doing, like a good martial arts master, they will challenge the student to find the way by themselves. They also pay close attention to what’s going on with you, always alert to teachable moments, to turning points and possibilities for opening. It’s like the Deacon says in Season 4 of the HBO series The Wire: “A good church man is always up in everybody’s shit. It’s how we do.”
Their main tool is rarely the simple answer and more often the hanging question. Steve Hickman, executive director of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion and a longtime mindfulness teacher, spoke with me recently about how the most powerful teaching involves highly attentive listening and probing: “Students benefit the most not from simply having their questions answered,” he said, “but from seeing the example of your ongoing warmth, curiosity, and attention, as you listen and inquire, so they find handholds and pathways of their own. Then, they are empowered, not just taught.”
The mark of the teacher’s work succeeding is that the world itself and your circumstances become the
teacher. When you have a setback, such as a financial loss or the death of a friend, there may be less discursive mental drama surrounding the event. It becomes more a message to you of how to let go further of the story of what you have to have, to find more simplicity. If in the midst of being isolated in a pandemic, your partner tells you, “I wish you would clean up more after yourself,” you may skip the steps of resisting or beating up on yourself, and simply see the opportunity for attention and mindfulness and kindness to reach into more areas of your life.
You yourself may begin to become a teacher, even simply because of your example. You may become a great source of fellowship to others, and even a mentor and leader. Your interactions with your teachers, your friends, even strangers—the grocery clerk or a fellow passenger on the subway— and yes, those you fiercely oppose, have a tendency to draw you out of your shell of self-cherishing. You are more vulnerable and yet more resilient and confident. Every day brings discoveries, as if you’ve baked a fresh loaf of aromatic bread to share with the world. These messages from the outside are really messages from the inside, what you’ve internalized from your teachers, your friends, and your experiences. The inherent brilliance of your natural state of being is drawn out.
That is real education. ●
The Psychology of Boredom
James Danckert and John D. Eastwood • Harvard University PressA plethora of books that attempt to rehabilitate boredom as a normal, even valuable, experience have found their way to the Mindful offices in recent years. The benefits of boredom are still trending. This tome by Danckert and Eastwood, both professors of psychology (at University of Waterloo and York University, respectively), stands out because it explores not just what boredom can do for you, but what boredom is and why it (paradoxically) deserves our attention.
“Boredom reveals an important aspect of being human: We have a strong need to be engaged with the world around us,” they write. It’s the interplay between our circumstances and our brain’s response to them—being stuck in an airport, for example—that leaves us “caught in a desire conundrum, wanting to do something but not wanting to do anything…that is currently doable.” We all naturally want to immerse our skills, talents, and mental faculties in something. Certain traits and behaviors, however, can change how susceptible to boredom we are. Case in point: The ability to steadily focus our mind on whatever is happening around us means we’re engaged, therefore not bored. Neglecting to hone attention skills seems to be “a logical cause of boredom.” Boredom may result in positive expressions, such as creativity and the elusive “flow state,” but it can also contribute to risky choices, poor self-control, and even mental health struggles.
What readers will find here is not a straightforward path to using mindfulness to combat the dreaded boredom in our lives, but rather a highly researched yet accessible account of boredom’s psychological and social implications, as well as some solid recommendations for how we might choose to work with it. —AT
A Collection of Voices for Peace, Self-care and Connection
Shamash Alidina • Teach Mindfulness
In the publishing industry, “crashing” refers to putting together a book in an insanely rapid period of time in order to speak immediately to an issue of the day. Shamash Alidina has done just that with this little volume of 27 pieces, written by 28 different mindfulness teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic and released in time for the United Nations International Day of
Living Together in Peace on May 16, 2020. Quite a feat! Mindfulness for Challenging Times covers a dazzling array of topics, from dealing with isolation, stress, and trauma to parenting, eating, media consumption, and cleaning (!). Free online guided meditations and exercises are included, and all profits go to support the work of the World Health Organization. —BB
YOU BELONG
A Call for Connection
Sebene Selassie • Harper Collins
This debut from meditation teacher Sebene Selassie is a pure delight. Selassie’s style tells the reader: You belong in these pages, and her message tells us: You belong, period. Selassie pulls from science, ancient Indigenous wisdom, Buddhism, art, pop culture, friends’ anecdotes, and her own experience (as an Ethiopian-Eritrean child of immigrants, regularly the only Black kid in any group, three-time
survivor of cancer, longtime meditator, and life-long seeker of ways to belong) to build a convincing argument: “The only thing human beings who breathe a breath have in common are birth, death, and belonging.” That belonging, Selassie notes, is tied to knowing and loving ourselves, but also to the idea that we are intrinsically linked. In the end, belonging is love. It belongs to us all—and we to it. —SD
Rutger Bregman • Little, Brown, and Company
In 1971, professor Philip Zimbardo carried out the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, wherein “a group of ordinary students morphed into monsters,” in the words of Rutger Bregman. In a pivotal chapter in Humankind, Bregman lumps this experiment together with Stanley Milgram’s 1961 study where subjects applied what they were told were electric shocks to people who answered questions incorrectly, and a full 65% of the subjects continued applying shocks up to the limit they were told to apply. To this pair, he adds studies of the “bystander effect” that came out of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, which occurred while many appeared to look on and do nothing.
Bregman brings this research up—after an earlier chapter on William Golding’s Lord of the Flies—to show us what has been marshaled to lead to the conclusion that we are, as one columnist put it after the Genovese incident, “a callous, chickenhearted and immoral people,” or as Golding wrote, “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”
Bregman gradually widens each frame to reveal bigger pictures. The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments suffered from the same disease as reality TV: The producers and directors are outside the picture hectoring and egging the participants on. Psychological research can’t be done this way anymore, and Zimbardo himself atoned by launching the Heroic Imagination Project. In the Genovese case, there were people who did something, but they were overlooked in the zeal to tell a sensational story.
This gets to the heart of what Bregman is about: Because people have done bad things, including some very shockingly bad things (see the Holocaust), we revert to a simplistic story of basic badness. Then, we design things based on that belief, leading to outcomes like mass incarceration. He’s asking us to consider what would happen if we started from a belief in people’s fundamental decency, for which we also have a great deal of evidence. Would we build a better world? —BB
TED TALKS DAILY
Episode: “10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation” with Celeste Headlee
“This world in which every conversation has the potential to devolve into an argument… It’s not normal,” Celeste Headlee, seasoned radio host and author of We Need to Talk, asserts. Part of why we’re so polarized, she argues, is that our “conversational competence” is in critical decline. Headlee’s
Dos and Don’ts for rich conversations include: “Enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn.” “Don’t equate your experience with theirs.” And the encouraging, “Forget the details: What people care about is you, what you have in common”—whether or not you see eye-to-eye.
BALANCED BLACK GIRL
Episode: “How to Heal Through Breathwork” with Kathleen Booker
Host Lestraundra Alfred offers a grounded and uplifting take on self-care topics especially for women of color. In this episode, she talks with breathwork coach Kathleen Booker about the importance of connecting with your breath and its benefits for relaxation, meeting goals, and mindbody healing. Booker breaks
down how the breath restores calm to the body during moments of panic: “The breath allows us to remember the truth of who we are: safe, whole; and in remembering that, to give us the courage and the clarity” needed in that moment. Then, she lovingly guides listeners in a dynamic breathwork practice.
TEN PERCENT HAPPIER
Episode: “You Can’t Meditate
This Away” with Sebene Selassie
For anyone who feels doubt or discomfort in engaging with racial inequality through the lens of their meditation practice, this interview is the place to begin. So much insight is shared in this open, reflective conversation between host Dan Harris and meditation teacher Sebene Selassie (read more about her on page 38). “We’re so often tending to our
inner world,” says Selassie, “but when we start talking about this stuff, the outer world, we really need to also include history, context, understanding how we got here.” And looking honestly at bias is an ideal time to use our practice. It’s painful to see bias in ourselves, says Harris, “but if you can see shame clearly, then you can navigate it and deal with it.” ●
Rheeda Walker, PhD • New Harbinger
“The belief that we can endure anything is both a strength and a weakness of our current culture,” writes Rheeda Walker, a behavioral scientist and psychology professor at the University of Houston. Early in the Guide, she highlights the struggles with mental illness and suicide that Black people experience, which go widely unacknowledged. She makes the empowering case that, in the midst of white supremacy and all its
implications, Black people need to cultivate “psychological fortitude,” sharing frameworks and resources that speak directly from and to Black Americans’ realities. Equally vital, for Walker, is the life-giving opportunity to celebrate one’s Black cultural and spiritual belonging. The book’s focus is twofold: Part One, Recognize Serious Threats to Emotional Health and Life; and Part 2, Reclaim Your Mind to Reclaim a Life Worth Living. —AT
Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing
Christiane Northrup, MD • Penguin Random House
This fifth edition of Christiane Northrup’s landmark handbook for women’s health, first published in 1996, has been updated for the #metoo generation. As with Northrup’s four earlier revised editions, this one offers updated treatment and research data, and updated thinking, too, from Northrup’s new stage in life: grandmother.
Northrup is still all about a holistic approach to women’s health, and that includes considering the culture in which women live. Northrup doubles down on her avowal that
having internalized our bodies as a problem is at the heart of women’s health, and that sexual trauma and abuse play out in our physical body. She notes that as the tide seems to be turning for sexual assault and harassment, so too must the tide turn for healthcare. This book will be for any woman who missed it the first time around—it’s comprehensively dedicated to women’s health, from the role of the patriarchy in women’s health care to understanding menopause, and includes a 12-step program for flourishing. —SD
Not just for fear, this practice can be engaged with any emotion, pleasant or unpleasant. As you hone your awareness of what’s going on in your mind and body, you’ll recognize what emotions are present for you. By practicing this, you will learn that you can feel sad without being sad, feel anger without being angry, and include any fearful part of yourself, from a place of natural open-hearted awareness.
In this practice for children, we learn to shift our thoughts and emotions away from dwelling on something we don’t like. You may feel stressed by a test, or a friend, or your parents. It can be hard to let go of that kind of thought. Sometimes, it takes practice to focus on the good stuff, too. Mindfulness can help if we choose to recall what is positive for us, such as the people we love and what’s gone well during the day.
We can use mindfulness to be aware when we have a self-critical voice, and we can label that voice as “judging.” When these thoughts come, we can be on top of them and not get so caught up. We can know that we’re still fundamentally a good human being. This practice allows us to connect with that understanding and have compassion for ourselves, even with the flaws that we all have. —AT
The pandemic marks “a turning point in history,” the celebrated historian Margaret MacMillan wrote in The Economist. Fault lines have been exposed in the world we’ve constructed that could, she wrote, lead us either to “reform or calamity.” She said this before the uprising that emerged in cities worldwide after the killing of George Floyd. The pandemic had reduced distractions, so that hypertragic event exposed another fault line that could no longer be put out of mind. We can choose to care and do more about the world we’re making—or not.
Optimistically, the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in an essay on newyorker.com that “The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable... We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.” The depth of feeling he speaks of seems a lot like mindfulness—the kind that we are all born with access to, not merely the current fad.
Writing from within the COVID-19 lockdown, I’m finding strangeness and vertigo. The word “week” seems meaningless. Days and months and years are all based on natural phenomena, but somebody had to invent the week,
and it’s not holding up when many of the routines we shape our lives by have been removed.
Time—Gumby-like, bendy, contorted, and contortable—is not its old supposedly reliable self. The tyranny of clock and calendar have been removed, which could be a relief, but the resulting anarchy is unsettling, and the future is a fog of question marks.
moment of isolation, a retreat. We’re not advancing into the world to do; we’re taking a moment to be. The pandemic thrust many of us into a sudden retreat, inadvertently prompting us to reflect, indeed, on what matters, to us as individuals and in community. It’s a tremendous gift to have both the spirit of mindfulness and the formal practice at a time like this, and to
Lots of people say things like, “It’s Thursday, really? How do you know? One day just runs into another into another into another.” My mind keeps conjuring up lines I had to memorize in high school, like “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day...” or verses from songs I listened to back then: “Time, time, time, see what’s become of me... I was so hard to please,” or “Yesterday...”
As time has become so amorphous, I’m reminded of Mindful ’s original slogan: “taking time for what matters.” People used ask us what we meant by “what matters.” My answer was often vague. Now, I could make a list: The health of your own mind; the unbiased care in your heart for the suffering of all people; family and friends; the people who do all the things that support your life—grocers, cleaners, nurses, doctors, drivers and deliverers, and so many more we easily take for granted; the colors, sounds, smells, and tastes of nature, magisterial and magical.
Mindfulness practice itself is a
spread that wealth to others if they need to find strength in their own heart and mind, because that is ultimately what mindfulness offers.
When we sit there, with no project, letting go of yesterday and tomorrow for a while, who we are without all our plans and routines is laid bare. What we may discover, as we cross the threshold beyond anxiety, is how much resilience, clarity, strength, and peace we have in our mind. We see that we’re not defined by what we consume or what we’ve made of ourselves. We find out what really matters.
And if you’re having trouble finding that strength, look to strength in numbers, reach out to others ready to help you find your way. May this turning point in history turn us toward the great strength each of us has within, and may we celebrate that strength together as we rewrite what we imagine is possible. ●
May this turning point in history turn us toward the great strength each of us has within and celebrate it together as we rewrite what we imagine is possible.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.
