Mindful Magazine Spring 2021 - Freedom

Freedom

SPRING 2021 mindful.org

FI N D YO U R FOCUS • TA M E YO U R FE A RS • SAVO R E V E RY M O M E N T AWA K E N YO U R FE A R LE SS H E A R T • B E FR E E

GOOD MOOD FOODS What to eat for optimal mental health

CONTENTS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CALUM O’REILLY TIMMS / EYEEM / GETTY IMAGES (COVER), AND BY AFRICA STUDIO/ADOBESTOCK

THE FREEDOM ISSUE

Awaken Your Fearless Heart

By honoring our deepest desire to be in communion with others—valuing connection over control—joy emerges of its own accord. Barry Boyce writes that by caring without striving, we can find our way to true freedom.

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Good Mood Foods The food you eat can have a profound effect on your brain. Dr. Uma Naidoo explains what to eat to lift your mood.

On the Cover FREEDOM 20 Savor Every Moment 24 Find Your Focus 28 Be Free 46 Tame Your Fears 54 Awaken Your Fearless Heart GOOD MOOD FOODS 34 Eat the Best Foods for Your Mental Health 44 You Are Not Your Moods

STORIES 20 Mindful Living

Eyes Wide Open

Nothing to Fear Stephanie Domet dives into her deepest terrors and shares how selfcompassion helped her find healing.

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Care Deeply To find more ease and joy in our lives, we can let go of our cares—while still caring deeply, writes Barry Boyce.

3 Ways to Get Your Workout Off Autopilot

28 Inner Wisdom

Love Your Enemy

30 Brain Science

Make Time Stand Still

EVERY ISSUE 4 From the Editor 6 In Your Words 10 Top of Mind 18 Mindful–Mindless 66 Bookmark This 72 Point of View with Barry Boyce

VOLUME 9, NUMBER 1, Mindful (ISSN 2169-5733, USPS 010-500) is published quarterly for $29.95 per year USA, $39.95 Canada & $49.95 (US) international, by Mindful Communications & Such, PBC, 515 N State Street, Suite 300, Chicago IL. 60654 USA. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Mindful, PO Box 469018, Escondido, CA 92046. Canada Post Publication Mail Agreement #42704514. CANADIAN POSTMASTER: Send undeliverable copies to Mindful, 5765 May St, Halifax, NS B3K 1R6 CANADA. Printed in U.S.A. © 2021 Mindful Communications & Such, PBC. All rights reserved.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY EDWARD FURY / STOCKSY, ILLUSTRATION BY WACOMKA / ADOBESTOCK, SARANYA / ADOBESTOCK

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24 Health

from the editor

JOIN US

live We’re bringing our content to life with Mindful Live —a series of in-depth, online conversations, and events featuring mindfulness experts on how we can enjoy better health, cultivate more caring relationships, and create a more compassionate society.

Sign up to learn more at mindful.org/mindful-live

Heather Hurlock is the editor-in-chief of Mindful magazine and mindful.org. She’s a longtime editor, musician, and meditator with deep roots in service journalism. Connect with Heather at heather.hurlock@mindful.org.

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Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg introduced me to a compassion practice where you picture yourself surrounded by kind, warm-hearted beings who are sending you generous offerings of love and goodwill—I like to think of this magazine as a version of that practice. This Spring issue you’re holding is more than just a collection of articles—it’s a collection of hearts and minds sharing stories about how they’re showing up in the world with kindness, patience, humor, and grace.

In these pages you’ll find Ashanti Branch (page 11), whose Million Mask Movement encourages us to embrace our authenticity by sharing what we let others see and what we keep hidden. Michelle Maldonado offers a calming breath practice (page 15) to soothe our overactive minds if we wake in the middle of the night. Veteran science writer Sharon Begley, in her last column for Mindful (page 30), explores the science behind why mindfulness practice may change the way we experience the passage of time. And Mindful’s managing editor, Stephanie Domet, dives into one of her most potent life lessons about the paralyzing effects of fear and shares how she courageously opened herself up to healing (page 46).

All of these kind souls are your friends, even if you don’t know them. Even if you never meet them. They’re rooting for you. Each one of them. They know that we’re all connected. And that their work is also yours. And your work is theirs. And if they can share even a tiny slice of their experience of being a vulnerable human in this world, maybe someone out there might not feel so alone.

And, to me, that’s an essential piece of what freedom is about—the deepest knowing that we’re connected to each other and to the world. The fearless release of the barriers and judgments that separate you from me, your pain from my pain, your joy from my joy, your struggle from my struggle, your thriving from my thriving. All of the people in these pages are shining the light of their human hearts for you, with the hope that our collective efforts allow all of us to inch that much closer to being free.

As founding editor Barry Boyce reminds us (page 54), “The point is to value connection over control, to find freedom in merging ourselves with what we’re doing and who we’re with.”

May we all continue to help each other be free.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAIRE ROSEN

Freedom for Us All

WINTER IS COMING TO AN END …but it’s never too late to make a resolution.

Join our virtual community for livestream mini-meditations every Tuesday and Thursday morning harvardpilgrim.org/livingwellathome

Our public offerings are available to everyone, anywhere, so it’s never been easier to meditate with friends.

Looking for a more personalized experience?

Ask us how we can design programming tailored to your organization’s unique needs.

mindthemoment@harvardpilgrim.org • www.harvardpilgrim.org/mindfulness

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The Mind the Moment program was developed and is offered by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc.

in your words

Let’s talk LOVING-KINDNESS Genuine compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.

Here’s what Mindful readers suggest.

How do you speak to yourself with self-compassion?

“Me: I’m sorry...

Also me: I forgive you.”

Rank how self-compassionate you are!

Pamela C.

100

“I remind myself every day that This Too Shall Pass.”

Deanna B. “This moment does not have to ruin the rest of the day. A new day can start right now.”

Your average response

Tracey N. ← @louiselieffering reminds us there’s beauty all around if we take the time to appreciate it.

“Whenever doubt creeps in, I remind myself, ‘You’ve got this. You were MADE to handle this. You’re strong enough.

Stronger than you think. Keep going.’”

Kelly S. “I remind myself to be grateful.”

Beverly J.

→ @livinginmommywood shows us how mindfulness can create safe spaces for people to share and learn.

0

How easy do you find it to be kind to yourself?

“With positive self-talk. Si se puede! Yes, you can!”

Leslie B. “In my Vinyasa yoga class, I look in the mirror at myself and speak out loud that I am enough, I am strong, and I am worth it!”

Melanie C.

70% TOUGH

← @iamlenafranklin shows how the stillness of breathing allows us to take time out for ourselves.

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30% EASY

Next Question…

What does it mean to be authentic?

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

Cultivate Kindness and Strength With Sharon Salzberg In her newest Mindful online course, Sharon Salzberg—one of the world’s leading meditation teachers—offers the tools to gain a profound sense of connection and live a life of greater intention and compassion.

SIGN UP AT

mindful.org/lovingkindness

Healthy Mind, Healthy Life

Welcome to

mindful magazine • mindful.org Editor-in-Chief Heather Hurlock heather.hurlock@mindful.org Managing Editor Stephanie Domet Senior Editor Amber Tucker

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.

Thank you!

Print magazine & special topic publications

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FREE! Guided meditations & podcasts

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WIN A FREE COPY

Just as we train our bodies for fitness, we can train our minds for wellbeing. We call this Life Cross Training (LifeXT).

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virtual retreat led by Sharon Salzberg, Trudy Goodman, and Thomas Davis.

All resources are free: Jason Garner, former CEO of Live Nation, curates and funds the page because a decade of meditation practice helped him transform his own life.

TOP OF

mind Keep up with the latest in the world of mindfulness.

PLAYING AROUND When his daughter Harper was four, G Cody QJ Goldberg realized most playgrounds just aren’t accessible. Harper uses a walker, and

the wood chips at the playground got stuck in the wheels before she could even reach the play equipment. Her family founded Harper’s Playground, a nonprofit “driven

by the vision of a world in which no one is left out,” according to their website.

To make playgrounds radically inclusive, Goldberg recommends “three levels of inviting,” meaning the space should be physically, socially, and emotionally welcoming to all ages and abilities.

Spiral walkways allow wheelchair and walker access.

Slides are extra wide so a caregiver and a child can go together.

Before the pandemic, workshops were offered to help others create accessible playgrounds, and in the decade since Portland, Oregon-based HP began, eight more

playgrounds have been built (one as far away as Tokyo).

TUNING UP Launched in September 2020, Love4Live shares mindfulness resources as moral support for concert-industry workers struggling during the pandemic. In conjunction with InsightLA Meditation Center, the website offers video interviews with mindfulness experts, streaming meditation classes, and a

COVID-19 shone a particularly harsh spotlight on the epidemic of loneliness in long-term care facilities (LTCF). But Hita Gupta, a 15-yearold Pennsylvania resident, was already aware of the problem. In 2018, Hita started Brighten a Day, a nonprofit that reaches out to seniors in homes with cards, letters, and visits to lift their spirits.

Brighten a Day also reaches out to hospitalized children, and their website states that they’ve reached people in all 50 US states and beyond.

Since the pandemic ruled out in-person visits, Brighten a Day has donated over 70 devices to LTCFs to enable volunteers to video call with seniors.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JORDAN WOZNIAK / UNSPLASH, TK / ADOBESTOCK

BRIGHT IDEA

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OPEN DIALOGUE

PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN DUMLAO / UNSPLASH

An International Society for Contemplative Research is in the works, thanks to a Mind & Life Institute Think Tank grant. Amishi Jha, Zindel Segal, Linda Carlson, David Vago, Harold Roth, Fadel Zeidan, and Erin McCarthy will use the grant to establish a professional society for researchers with both clinical and cognitive neuroscience and humanities backgrounds. The goal is to support collaboration among otherwise distinct groups in the field. Dr. Jha says Mind & Life has brought scientists, clinicians, educators, mindfulness practitioners, and mindfulness teachers together for the past eight

years. Now, the plan for the International Society of Contemplative Research is to build a self-sustaining initiative run entirely by researchers and scholars in order to create the spaces needed for open interdisciplinary dialogue in the field.

A MILLION REASONS FOR EMPATHY Ashanti Branch raised his nonprofit’s goal to help people examine the masks they wear—by 900,000 masks. The 100K Masks Challenge invited you to fill out a postcard with three words that describe what you let others see, and three that describe what you keep hidden. With more than 50,000

masks already submitted, Branch (see also page 67) says Ever Forward Club has begun a Million Mask Movement, with the ultimate goal of a world with more empathy for each other and for ourselves.

ACTS OF kindness

WHAT DAY IS IT? If you find yourself referring to most days as “Blursday,” the Washington Post has the newsletter for you. Titled “What Day Is It?” the seven-day email series follows audience editor Steven Johnson on his quest to fight time distortion. Johnson offers insights and practices from psychologists and researchers aimed at reconnecting us with our sense of time.

DOG GONE

When a rescue dog from Spain bolted out of a jet’s cargo hold in Toronto, staff at one of North America’s busiest airports worked through the night to find the panicked Podenco, suspending traffic for an hour, and using security and thermal cameras to track her down.

“Boy, could she run,” worker Keith Everett told CBC News. The dog eventually laid down under his truck, and Everett joined her, gaining her trust before reuniting her with her humans.

FAIR BALL

When Kevin Ashford heard that a little leaguer in Fresno County, CA,

lost her baseball cards in a wildfire that destroyed hundreds of homes, he stepped up to donate his own 25,000-card collection to nineyear-old Reese Osterberg. Ashford told NBC News that in this context, his collection is priceless.

A PIECE OF PIE

Carlos Valdez of Weber County, Utah, always requests the same delivery man when he orders pizza— 89-year-old Derlin Newey, whose deliveries Valdez documented on TikTok. When some of Valdez’s more than 50,000 followers asked why an elderly man was still working, Valdez mobilized his community to present Newey with a check for more than $12,000.

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Research News

by B. GRACE BULLOCK

Research gathered from Birmingham City University, University of South Florida, University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale University.

GIVE MORE Can mindfulness meditation help people to be more giving? A team of researchers at Yale University and UCLA assigned 326 workers who were registered with a laborcrowdsourcing platform to either a mindfulness group or a control group.

Those in the mindfulness group watched a short breathing meditation video.

The control group saw a video teaching

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kids how to draw Mickey Mouse.

Both groups provided demographic information, and were told that they would receive either $1, $2, or $3. They were then given the opportunity to donate part or all of the funds to United Way, a well-known nonprofit organization that helps people with few financial resources. Those in the mindfulness group donated at a rate 2.61 times higher than those in the control group. Mindfulness group participants who were less than twenty-five years of age, or did not have a college education, were even

more impacted by mindfulness training, and gave considerably more than members of the control group.

SLEEP WELL Many healthcare workers are under more stress now than ever. While previous studies have examined the role mindfulness may play in helping us get a better sleep, in this case, researchers at the University of South Florida asked the opposite question: They wanted to

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see if medical staffers’ quality of sleep might be linked to how well they paid attention.

To do so, they monitored the

Exercise—might help people eat less chocolate.

In the study, 121 undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of three

Researchers concluded that some mindfulness practices may help people to eat less in the long run. sleep habits of 61 full-time nurses for two consecutive weeks. Those who slept well reported better mindful attention overall, suggesting that a good night’s sleep might benefit patient care.

BINGE LESS Psychologists at Birmingham City University in the UK tested whether two mindfulness tools—the Mindful Construal Diary and the Mindful Raisin

groups. Participants in the diary group read six questions about mindfulness and self-compassion in regard to their relationship to eating. A mindful raisin group listened to a four-minute audio meditation asking them to focus on the color, texture, and flavor of chocolate. A “mindless” control group read an article about cars. All were given four pieces of chocolate, and asked to eat only one while performing the task. At the end, they had permission to eat the rest

and were asked to rate their satisfaction and desire to eat more.

Students in the two mindfulness groups ate significantly less chocolate than controls. No differences were found between groups on satisfaction or desire to eat more. Researchers concluded these two mindfulness practices may help people eat less in the long run.

HOW MINDFUL IS YOUR JOB? An analysis of 61 workplace wellness interventions found trainings in mindfulness, resilience, or cognitive-behavioral techniques are the most effective types for boosting employees’ reported sense of happiness, both on and off the clock.

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becoming an ally It was scoliosis that brought Iman Gibson and Tori Lund together. Lund was diagnosed with it in middle school, and began using yoga and meditation to ease the pain. Gibson was also into yoga and meditation, and they began practicing together.

Both grew up to become instructors—Gibson of meditation, Lund of yoga.

And they’ve brought their mutual interests together in an album called AntiRacism Meditations, which invites listeners to engage with privilege and racism, gain tools to become an ally to those facing oppression, and strengthen love and compassion for all living beings through lovingkindness practices.

Gibson, who’s Black, says mindfulness meditation can lead directly to engaging in anti-racism work. “If I truly believe that you and I are the same, then I’m far less likely to mistreat you,” Gibson says. “By mistreating you, I would essentially

mistreat myself. Meditation helps us feel more connected and that’s why I’m so excited to deploy meditation to help bridge the gaps between us.”

Lund, who’s white, adds: “We need to be aware of our thoughts in order to address our behaviors.

Many well-intentioned folks unknowingly harbor racism, which can lead to harmful speech and actions. The majority of us unknowingly inherited racist perceptions. Mindfulness makes us aware. We then have the opportunity to choose right action moving forward.”

And Gibson says action is a vital part of her practice.

“If all we do is sit when we are called upon to stand— how can we truly contribute to a more enlightened and awake world? The practices we curated are training for people to know when and how to stand.”

Meditation teachers Iman Gibson and Tori Lund spoke with Mindful about AntiRacism Meditations (their album of guided meditations with accompanying journal prompts) how mindfulness can lead to allyship, and the lifelong friendship that led to this project.

Lund has had an opportunity to work with that, as a country singer who moved from LA to rural Georgia.

“My genre of music has been falsely synonymous with ‘white culture,’ even though it’s rooted in Black music traditions. I often play for all-white venues, have seen racist themes such as confederate flags, noticed racially insensitive band names, and heard racist lyrics. I may not be able to enforce change, but I can call out racism when I see it and boycott venues, bands, and music that exhibit or promote racism.”

She adds that she has no direct experience of racial oppression, but she has seen Gibson experience it. “We are connected, your suffering is my suffering. People who have not experienced

Iman Gibson’s artwork (as seen below) illustrates the AntiRacism Meditations project, which can be found at

antiracismmeditation.com

racism have an obligation to use that privilege to put an end to it.”

And ultimately, that’s the goal for their meditation project. “My deepest wish is that, using the tools learned from meditation, folks look inside themselves without judgment, observe what they notice, then turn it into action,” says Gibson.

Read more about Iman and Tori at mindful.org/email-exchange

PHOTOGRAPH BY IMAN GIBSON

LOVE IN ACTION

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With Michelle Maldonado

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If you can, set aside a few minutes to meditate before you go to bed, or to journal if that’s your preference—but give your mind some time to unwind.

Our minds hum, even when we’re tired, so give yours an outlet so that you’re not stuck in rumination.

And then, when you do get in bed, try a body-scan meditation. That can help you ease into quality deep sleep.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEUTIE/ADOBE STOCK, VECTEEZY

IF YOU WAKE UP IN THE NIGHT Activate your parasympathetic nervous system with a simple breathing practice.

• Inhale slowly, to a count of four.

• Then, exhale even more slowly, to a count of eight.

• Repeat this pattern for as long as you need to.

This kind of breathing activates the vagus nerve, which reaches from the base of your skull to your colon and is the major nerve of your parasympathetic nervous system: the part of your nervous system that helps calm the body.

If that doesn’t work, and you just can’t stay in bed, then you can always get up—don’t hold yourself static, spending time and energy fighting your alertness and being insistent on going back to sleep. Allow your body and mind to be where they are and find a calming activity—such as journaling or reading—that will allow your energy to dissipate so you can get the rest you need.

Michelle Maldonado is coauthor of A Bridge To Better: A Family’s Open Letter To Humanity & Resource Guide, and founder of Lucenscia, a firm dedicated to human flourishing and mindful business transformation. She is a former corporate attorney and a certified mindfulness and emotional intelligence teacher and practitioner.

NAME IT to TAME IT Once considered an occupational hazard of hermetic life, acedia took a turn as a Deadly Sin before largely falling out of the lexicon. It has resurged, thanks to a certain pandemic, as it describes a thoroughly modern condition: listlessness, ambient anxiety, and an inability to concentrate.

Practice: While we all get caught up in moments of distraction and avoidance, we can practice the ART of presence.

Bring mindfulness to a daily Activity, a daily Routine, and a daily Trigger. Replace your trigger-reaction with a flash of being present.

a di ia e d AAcce

Acedia

Q

I can’t stop ruminating before bed— which doesn’t lead to a good night’s sleep! How can I use my practice to get some rest?

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Whether it’s because we’re spending more time at home, or thinking more about supply chains and shortages, more people took up gardening tools in 2020.

Seed companies report increased demand globally, and a study out of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reveals that almost 20% of Canadians grew food for the first time in 2020.

There’s some evidence that gardening can help reduce stress, increase feelings of well-being, and build community. Here are three recent stories that reinforce those ideas.

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Communities like Sudbury, Ontario, just went ahead and got their hands dirty. The Home Garden Project helped distribute free soil and seeds to hundreds of local households. The goal was to support mental and physical health during a challenging time, increase food security, and let citizens contribute to community wellness.

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In an economically disadvantaged part of North England, researchers from three UK universities planted ornamental gardens in residential front gardens. Participants in the study reported lower stress, increased feelings of well-being, and greater happiness due to their newly blooming yards, and saliva tests indicated lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in those who received plants, compared to a control group who did not. The study’s authors write: “Comparing the data on perceived stress in this study to others, the positive effects due to the horticultural intervention were approximately equivalent to eight weekly mindfulness sessions (as measured after six months),” citing a 2018 study

by Van Wietmarschen et al.

In slightly more dubious news, psychologist and keeper of more than 200 house plants Dr. Katie Cooper was in the news, extolling the virtues of meditating with house plants, to promote her new book on just that subject.

Her prescription involves pretty standard meditation instruction—with the addition of, wait for it, house plants.

PHOTOGRAPH BY HELLO I M NIK / UNSPLASH

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MINDFUL OR MINDLESS? Our take on who’s paying attention and who’s not

by AMBER TUCKER Find truly COVID-safe dining in Ransäter, Sweden, at the restaurant Bord För En (table for one)—consisting of one table and one chair, in a field.

Diners pay-what-you-can to have a homemade meal delivered by pulley in a picnic basket, from the owners’ house to the table.

Finally, a Twitter to warm your heart: The account “Respectful Memes” has 1M followers and posts adorable animals, animated characters, and general goodness. Its bio boasts “#1 Source of Memes to show your Grandma!”

MINDFUL

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A supermarket in North Wales, UK, used absurd amounts of technology to send a lone chicken nugget where no nugget has gone before: into space.

The meaty morsel soared to 110,000 feet above Earth, but sadly, there were no fries with that.

Cars aren’t going anywhere, but they can provide renewable energy. British company Alpha 311 designed a small wind turbine that converts the winds generated by highway traffic into energy that can power lampposts, as well as the main power grid.

An ocean sunfish of unusual size had residents of Wareham, MA, worried. They called 911 about it—repeatedly. Finally the local PD had enough: “The sunfish is doing normal sunfish activities. It’s swimming...

The sunfish is FINE,” read their Facebook post.

A costly way to save face: French couture brand Louis Vuitton released a mask and bandana set for the 1%, predicted to retail for nearly $500 USD. Still no more COVID-protective than a plain ol’ $5 mask. ●

MINDLESS

EYES WIDE OPEN The art of unhooking from your stories allows you to see what’s in front of you rather than seeing what you’re looking to see.

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By Heather Shane Blakeslee

PHOTOGRAPHS BY YAROSLAV DANYLCHENKO / STOCKSY AND BY HARRY QUON / UNSPLASH

mindful living

The practice of mindful looking starts with unburdening ourselves of the stories we’re constantly telling ourselves, says Diana Winston, director of mindfulness education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center.

It’s the difference between “looking,” she says, and “looking to see something.” It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Each day, most of us think nothing about the fact that we wake up and don’t make a move until the sunlight or a light turned on in our room is there to guide us. In the grand scheme of the planet, however, that’s an unusual orientation.

Most species, including all manner of insects, plants, and animals, primarily navigate the world through pheromones. While we all know that dogs have a better sense of smell than we do, the same is true for most species on the planet, according to biologists such as E. O. Wilson. A moth may be drawn to a flame, but it will also be drawn to a willing mate by minuscule quantities of a particular molecule emitted by a potential partner scores of miles away. At that distance, a human would need a dating app—or at the very least a friend willing to play matchmaker.

We humans have uniquely evolved to navigate the world primarily through sight. When mindfulness practitioners talk about the “visual field,” they are simply referring to whatever we’re taking in through our eyes, and, according to Winston, it doesn’t need to be a required part of our practice, “because so much of meditation is done with our eyes closed.”

She notes that some types of meditation may encourage you to focus on or visualize an image, or the flame of a candle, and it’s possible to “include the visual field either externally or internally.” Winston says, “It’s a whole other way to be mindful that can be quite enjoyable and helpful, and very translatable into everyday life.” →

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Heather Shayne Blakeslee is the founder of Red Pen Arts and publisher of Root Quarterly in Philadelphia.

Savor What You See The next time you leave your home for a walk, when you experience another person on the street, simply take them in. Don’t stare creepily.

But just notice their body, their gait, the shape of their face. The mask that may cover their face. Does this experience of simply noticing a human being who is present in your visual field help you remove some of the divisions that your inner narratives might highlight? Can you identify some of the narratives you might place on this person? Can you create more space for compassion? It’s possible that

this way of tapping into your experiential self can help you appreciate the complexity of people’s forms and their movements as beautiful in and of themselves.

Appreciating ordinary, everyday beauty, says Winston, “can really transport people into a mindful state” because “you’re just in a place of connection and presence.” The approach, Winston reminds us, is to be “curious and open” and, per the last part of UCLA’s working definition of mindfulness, exhibit “a willingness to be with the experience.”

To be with one another, without judgment.

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At Winston’s center at UCLA, they start by defining mindfulness as “paying attention to present-moment experiences with openness, curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is.” When it comes to looking, Winston acknowledges that simply being with what is can be a challenge.

While most of us may not have a candle on the bedside table drawing in unsuspecting moths, we probably do have a lamp. Mindful looking means we observe the lamp without getting caught up in the “concept” level, Winston says, where we immediately think to ourselves, “‘This lamp shade is always crooked. It’s time to buy a new lamp.’

That’s when we’re getting lost in the story, which we’re trying not to do with mindfulness.” She explains that in that moment, we’ve switched from our “experiential self” to our “narrative self.” So, with the lamp, our experiential self might notice how the color shifts slightly from one side to the other depending on how the light falls.

22 mindful Spring 2021

PHOTOGRAPH BY YAROSLAV DANYLCHENKO / STOCKSY

Experiencing What You See

mindful living

Love.

Serve.

Remember.

m PODCAST The Whole Picture Founding editor Barry Boyce on what a jigsaw puzzle taught him about perception. mindful.org/ whole-picture

“When you switch into the narrative self,” she says, “that’s a very important way we have to be in life. Often, we have to have the narrative self engaged. But when we’re bringing in mindfulness, we want to be more connected to the experiential self.”

Looking Without Judging Our unconscious judgment of situations and of other people is nearly constant; as humans, we are drawn to narratives just as those moths are drawn to a flame. What if we allow ourselves to snuff out that flame and take in our visual field without narrative—and without judgment?

In this time of deep division and unrest, it is possible that “slow looking,” especially when we move about in the world, may help us settle into a space in which we simply allow others to be as they are, and to allow ourselves to be as we are, without judgment. ●

Spring 2021 mindful 23

50 years after the publication of , an extraordinary memoir from Ram Dass.

BeingRamDass.com

mental health

3 WAYS TO GET YOUR

Workout off Autopilot ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steve Calechman is a contributing editor for Men’s Health and a writer for MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program. A journalist for over 25 years, he is also a regular contributor to Mindful.

24 mindful Spring 2021

People might have had to get creative, but throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve found ways to bike, walk, or work out, and it’s offered something that felt comfortingly close to normal. One survey conducted during the pandemic found that 70% of the participants reported doing the same amount of exercise, if not more.

But exercise can be hard, not just for people who are new to it, but also for those who do it regularly. It takes effort and self-regulation. And that can be tiring, especially over the last year, when there was so much to be disciplined about.

Sometimes, we just want to get on our walking

route or do our program. Exercise becomes the escape from all the “musts” in life. In other words, “Exercise planning is one less thing that you have to think and worry about,” says Kathleen Martin Ginis, professor of health and exercise sciences at the University of British Columbia.

There’s a relief in that worry-free space, but when you permanently go on autopilot, the body and mind eventually become bored. Exercise that once challenged you or relieved stress turns into “checking a box,” says Stuart Phillips, professor of kinesiology and director of the Physical Activity Centre of Excellence at McMaster

By Steve Calechman

ILLUSTRATION BY RAWPIXEL

Whether you’re ready to get off the couch or upgrade your exercise routine, these expert-recommended tips will engage your mind while keeping you in tune with your body’s capabilities.

University. If you’re just going through the motions, you could stop seeing results, or you could get injured; regardless, when you lose focus on the present, you might quit exercising altogether, and then feel none of the benefits.

Re-engaging your body—and your mind— requires shaking up your routine, but it doesn’t necessarily require an overhaul. It could be injecting some variety, a change in mindset, or just a new setting. Between the novelty and a set of options, you’ll discover a renewed need to concentrate and strengthen not just your muscles, but also your body-mind connection.

1 RECRUIT SOME HELP The most direct, obvious way of reinvigorating your program is to start doing new exercises.

If you lift weights, even light ones, try working with resistance bands or change the order of your program, Ginis says.

If you want to take it a step further, you can hire a personal trainer for a few sessions, either virtually or in person, making your intent clear from the start: You want more options to choose from for each workout. When you go back to working out on your own, you have a menu to pick and choose from. You’re essentially creating a program each time, if you desire—and, by having to regularly decide what you want to do, you’re focused and present, says Robert Linkul, owner of Be STRONGER Fitness in Sacramento, California.

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2 CONNECT MIND AND BODY It’s sometimes easier to make a change when you’re working with a trainer. That person has expertise, and you have confidence that their suggestions will pay off. On your own, you may find there’s enough stress involved with making the change that you don’t want to do it.

One way to remove this psychological hurdle is to think about your goal with exercise. If you’re preparing for a 10K, being strict is probably wise. But for many people the intent is to be outside, stay active, and/or chase your kids around. Since you’re not training for an event, there’s little downside to occasionally trying something new. You can experiment and do what you want to do rather than what you have to do, since there really aren’t any have-to-dos.

It can be as simple as varying your mindset.

Phillips says that one recommendation when lifting weights is to say “Focus” to yourself as →

m AUDIO Move Into Ease Special for subscribers: A mindful body practice from Cara Bradley helps you shift into a state of calm and ease. mindful.org/ mindfulworkout

mental health

you lift. The word keeps you on track and locked in for those 8 or 10 repetitions. “It becomes second nature,” he says. It also helps to concentrate your attention on the muscle that you’re working for each exercise. Research has shown that it builds the mind-body connection and can lead to an increase in strength.

You can also play with your perceived level of exertion. Think of it as a scale of 1 to 10. Some days, you’re doing a 3, just to work your range of motion or enjoy the scenery as you walk outside.

Some days, try for a 6 or 7. It’s not necessary or recommended to go to 9 or 10 out of 10. “You don’t have to drain the tank,” Phillips says. But by occasionally pushing yourself, you’ll have a new motivation, and what was once your baseline will increase a little more. “You’ll know where your ceiling is and how far you can go,” he says.

3 BRING IN SOME NOVELTY

Change your setting. If you’re doing yoga or lifting weights in one room of your house, go to another. If you’re inside, go outside. There are new sounds and smells. There’s sunshine.

There’s an overall openness, a feeling of possibilities. “It prompts blue-sky thinking,” Ginis says.

Phillips adds that being by water, if possible, particularly helps. Studies have suggested a positive link between greater exposure to blue spaces and mental well-being and levels of physical activity.

Change the route that you normally run, bike, or walk, or do it in the opposite direction. If there are hills on your route, add them in occasionally, where you walk or run up the incline and then easily come back down. As with weights, play with your exertion level by increasing your overall pace. Or you can add in intervals, where you do a time of intense effort followed by a resting pace, and alternate that for a series. When walking, for example, use a watch and speed up for 15-60 seconds, depending on your experience and fitness level, followed by the same time at an easier pace. You could also use landmarks, such as light poles or trees, and do the same rotation, says Ginis, adding that using a visual marker rather than time can feel less tedious and more motivating.

If you usually exercise alone, sometimes do it with others, for support and friendly peer pressure. And if you don’t usually listen to music, give it a try. Research from Ginis’s lab shows that listening to music (not podcasts) can increase performance and enjoyment. It also serves as a distraction by reducing an aversion

26 mindful Spring 2021

mental health

to doing higher-intensity exercise. In other words, listening to music can take you out of the moment—which can be helpful, she suggests, on a day when you push a little harder than usual.

It can make your workout feel like less effort.

On more moderate days, when you want to enjoy your surroundings or focus on form, don’t listen to music, so you can fully concentrate and be present. As for the type or tempo of music, Ginis says it’s all personal preference. “It’s totally what works for you and what motivates you,” she says.

Ginis says that a simple way to focus is to consciously take in new stimuli. Try the 3-3-3 activity: Notice three things you hear, three you see, three you feel. You can do this while you walk or even before each set at the gym. “It takes you out of your head and brings you into the present. It quiets your mind,” she says.

There’s really no one ultimate solution—it’s just about making a change, and the upside is that you’ll find something to add to your program. Your mind and your body will be focused, working as one. “You can’t go wrong because you can always go back to what you used to do,” Ginis says. “It opens you up to feeling the exhilaration that can happen when you try something new. You can become excited again about your exercise.” ●

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inner wisdom

Love Your

ENEMY ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elaine Smookler is a registered psychotherapist with a 20-year mindfulness practice. She is also a creativity coach and is on the faculty of the Centre for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto.

28 mindful Spring 2021

It has been a time of rage, despair, and divisiveness. The enemy is everywhere. As we batten down the hatches against the threat of one another, it might be worth pausing, just for a moment, to be curious about the price we pay for holding on to hatred.

The brain is amazing at spotting potential threats. When you are under attack, hormone blasts turn you into a temporary superhero so you can run like hell or fend off acute pain. In small doses, this cocktail of adrenaline, cortisol,

and a thousand other herbs and spices can keep you alive and kicking just a little bit longer.

When overused, however, these very same hormones are the source of chronic sleep problems, digestive difficulty, anxiety, and poor brain function. It’s worth noting that these are the hormones we switch on when we see the world as our enemy.

How does thinking about your enemy make you feel? Does fixating on your foe make you feel strong, healthy, and present? What do you notice

By Elaine Smookler

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AUDREY SHTECINJO / STOCKSY

Divided, we fall prey to seeing threats everywhere—especially in those we disagree with. But holding on to hate only hurts us.

in your body when your enemy is near? Are you holding your breath, tightening your jaw, and bringing digestion to a grinding halt?

THE SWORD AND THE FLOWER To live mindfully is an invitation to stand up for social justice and environmental stewardship.

It means recognizing where corruption takes us and courageously looking at our own beliefs, stories, and anything else that blocks the clearest and widest view. It’s also important to notice if you are grinding the ax of hatred while imagining that you are standing up for decency and fairness.

As we cultivate awareness, we become experts at noticing when the sword is needed and when the flower. We use our swords in our firmness to cut through ignorance. Our swords free us from the torpor of inaction and disengagement. We use our swords to act boldly and maintain agency over our own inner being. With presence and ONLINE confidence we know when COURSE to rage, when to run, when Get Started to be ready, when to rest.

With We take action as needed, Mindfulness with no enemy required.

We are spurred by wisdom.

Elaine Smookler When you feel yourself helps you tap being swept away by your into your own certainty that the other is a natural state monster, check in with your of mindfulness intentions. If they are for anytime you kindness and clarity, step feel stressed, back before you consign anxious, or in your opponents to eternal need of greater hell. What you consign them clarity and to affects you also. Instead, focus. choose a view that brings mindful.org/ understanding and the get-startedopportunity to keep your course balance, your energy, and your sizzle. Be judicious with your energy so that you can serve your cause with vitality and presence. ●

m

Serenity Now 1

Find somewhere to sit, stand, or lie down that gives you a sense of safety and stability. Take three deep breaths, in through your nose and out through your mouth.

Then settle into a natural breathing rhythm.

2

Feel your forehead relax, along with your eyes, your jaw, your whole face. Feel the relaxation and release of your neck, your shoulders, and your belly. Imagine a radiant sun beaming from within your heart. Picture yourself at the center of this warm and welcoming light.

3

Send these intentions to yourself, pausing before each repetition to just rest

in the space: May I be free from suffering. May I find peace and joy. See if you can rest in these wishes for your own well-being.

4

Picture someone you have not been able to find common ground with. You may never agree, but you can notice that even this person likely wants to feel safe and suffer less. Allow yourself to gently offer these words, noticing how it makes you feel: May you be free from suffering. May you know peace and joy.

5

Notice your breathing, your body, and your mind.

Are you feeling more ease or less? Are you feeling more agitation or less?

Spring 2021 mindful 29

brain science

MAKE TIME

Stand Still

The passage of time seems to speed up as we get older—but research finds this unnerving phenomenon may be allayed by learning to more attentively savor all the familiar details of our lives.

Imagine a woman, well into her seventh decade of life but still mentally sharp, taking her grandson on his first walk along the beloved beach where she has lived for years. The

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sharon Begley is senior science writer with STAT, a national health and medicine publication. She is also author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain and Can’t Just Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions.

30 mindful Spring 2021

little boy hears the roar of the surf, the screech of seagulls; he sees sand and sand castles, families under beach umbrellas, toddlers scampering away from the incoming tide, a carpet of tiny shells and garlands of shiny brown seaweed; he smells the briny, metallic air. To him, many things happened. The grandmother, in contrast, experiences these details much less distinctly. This means that for her, just one thing happened: another beach walk.

The difference between the grandmother’s and the boy’s subjective experiences of the identical physical experience offers a tantalizing clue to something that explorers of the human condition, from novelists to psychologists, have puzzled over: why our sense of the passage of time speeds up as we age.

You’ve almost certainly experienced it. How can I have been working here for 10 years, when it feels like employee orientation was only yesterday? you

By Sharon Begley • Illustrations by Edmon de Haro

Dozens of studies have found that positive mood and high arousal make time seem to pass more quickly. In contrast, if you are in pain, the two hours until your next Tylenol feels like it is passing with the speed of cold molasses.

ask. Where did the summer go? you wonder. And in your darker moments, Where did my life go? You don’t need to be as old as our beach-walking grandmother to feel this; the perception that time is accelerating creeps in well before middle age.

Scientists have identified many reasons for this, but one that has come to the fore recently has both the feel of truth and, even better, offers a hint that mindfulness might help counter the sense that life is slipping away, like the sand in an hourglass whose neck has inexplicably widened.

HEALTHY MIND, HEALTHY LIFE Cultivating Mindful Habits for Happiness and Well-Being An online course with Mark Bertin

The Melting-Pot of Memory The new idea is this. As we get older, we “chunk” the experiences we’ve had into broad categories, bundling individual moments into larger, more generic groups in our minds. The grandson’s beach walk, in his memory, consisted of dozens of vivid, individual experiences. To the grandmother, these experiences are so familiar that they get filed as a single one: “beach walk.”

Similarly, with age we group experiences into broad chunks such as “work” or “family” or “fun outings,” psychologist Mark Landau of the University of Kansas and his colleagues argued in a 2018 study. As a result, to an older person, “fewer things seem to have occurred in a given period, so it seems to have passed faster, in retrospect,” they wrote. →

Spring 2021 mindful 31

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brain science

The mindfulness connection? It may be possible to use mindfulness meditation, or even casual applications of that way of observing thoughts and experiences, to heighten awareness of them in a way that keeps the passage of time from accelerating.

A little background: Our perception of how quickly time passes varies according to numerous factors, some as changeable as emotion—as per the adage “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Dozens of studies have found that positive mood and high arousal make time seem to pass more quickly in the moment. In contrast, if you are in pain then the two hours until your next Tylenol feels like it is passing with the speed of cold molasses. If a dreaded event is approaching—your speech is in half an hour!—the time seems to speed by. Depression makes time seem to pass more slowly, as do boredom and doing physically or cognitively undemanding tasks. In those situations, the brain has spare capacity “to focus attention on the passing of time,” psychologist Ruth Ogden of Liverpool John Moores University told me, “and a greater- than-average level of attention to time may result in the sensation of it passing more slowly.”

During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, Ogden asked 604 participants in the UK about their sense of time’s passage. Older people, and those on whom the social isolation was especially hard, said time seemed to drag over the course of a day or week.

That reflects boredom: When we have nothing to do and feel generally miserable, the hours stretch out interminably— Will this day never end?

That older people in this study experienced time as passing slowly was somewhat surprising, however, since “older people will often make statements which suggest that time passes more quickly as you age—for example, ‘Christmas comes around more quickly each year,’” Ogden said.

But because lockdown curtailed socializing and normal day-to-day

32 mindful Spring 2021

activities, she said, “it’s possible that the loss of their freedom, coupled with less ability to engage with technology to maintain social relations, left the elderly more vulnerable to experiencing time passing slowly.”

Others in Ogden’s study felt time fly. “People who were younger, more satisfied with their social interactions, busier, and less stressed were more likely to experience time passing more quickly,” she said. “These factors [increase] our level of physiological arousal, [which] makes time pass more quickly.”

If, however, we ask people in the winter of 2021 to reflect on time’s passage over the previous 12 months, their retrospective judgment might differ from their in-the-moment perception. “Retrospective judgments are heavily influenced by the amount of memory content from the time in question,” Ogden said. With

brain science

few distinct memories, “we feel like less time happened. Lockdown has been boring, we haven’t been able to do things, and we may have formed fewer memories than normal. We may therefore look back on this period as feeling ‘short.’”

Swiftly Flow the Years Which brings us full circle to why many of us, particularly as we get older, find ourselves asking where did the last 10 (or 20, or…) years go?

This retrospective judgment of time’s passage over decades is much more consequential than whether we feel a particular afternoon flew by—it can profoundly influence how we evaluate our lives. By understanding the reasons why “time often seems to pick up momentum, going faster and faster as we get older,” Landau and his colleagues wrote, we might be able to prevent a feeling they call “unpleasant, demotivating, and possibly even hostile to the sense that life is meaningful.”

The scientists suspected that the different subjective experiences of the grandmother’s and grandson’s beach walk might be driving our retrospective judgment of time passing more quickly with age. That is, by “chunking” our experiences, we feel we have had fewer of them.

The researchers therefore had 107 volunteers either write about how their experiences over the last year were similar to those of other years (which encouraged chunking) or how things could have transpired differently (no chunking). The chunkers felt the previous year lasted less than 12 months, but the non-chunkers did not. “Perceiving a given period as passing faster depends on whether one chunks that period,” the scientists concluded.

Although they encouraged volunteers to chunk, we do it spontaneously, and we do it progressively more with age, because fewer

experiences feel new. Looking back at the past year or even decade, we remember just a few categories of experiences (that is, chunks), not a rich smorgasbord of distinct experiences. Time flew by.

A remedy for that might be mindfulness, the scientists suggested. If we focus on processing a moment, rather than letting it slip by mindlessly, we can better apprehend its uniqueness and keep it from being obliterated by chunking—more like the grandson’s beach walk, rather than the grandmother’s.

In shorthand, says neuroscientist and mindfulness researcher Amishi Jha, we can understand the relationship between mindful attention and long-term memory storage as: “Better perception—>better encoding—>better working memory—>better long-term memory (for facts and episodes)—>fuller embodied retrieval.” When we get into the habit of paying attention nonjudgmentally—remaining curious about the experiences and people in our lives, no matter how familiar they get—we improve our working memory, which may in turn aid our ability to store and recall long-term memories of events and information.

“The logic is this: Improved attention leads to improved encoding into working memory,” Jha explains.

“With higher-integrity working-memory representations for content, the better the chances for successful consolidation into long-term memory and the better the chances of successful learning and retrieval of information,” although, she notes, research that formally connects these dots as relates to mindfulness has yet to be published.

Mindfulness has “the potential to resensitize us to the satisfaction of simple things and, perhaps, counteract life’s quickening pace,” Landau and his colleagues suggested. “When the individual resides more fully in the moment, she or he may also better appreciate the uniqueness of those moments once they have passed.” ●

This is my final column for Mindful. I will always be grateful to founding editor Barry Boyce for inviting me to explore with you the mysteries of how and why we think, feel, and act as we do, and am grateful for your thoughtful feedback. Never stop wondering.

Sharon Begley

Sharon Begley holds a special place in our hearts. In our formative days, she was the first person to agree to a regular column, and she has appeared in every issue since. No one else holds that distinction. Sharon is a top-flight science journalist who probed deep questions without fear or favor—setting a high bar for our research reporting. In her unstinting commitment to evidence, Sharon gave our magazine starch and protein: content that could stick to the ribs. We will miss her. I know you, the readers, will miss her, and yet her legacy of enthusiastic curiosity and endless investigation and inquiry will live on. She has baked it into Mindful’s DNA.

Ba rry Boy ce

Spring 2021 mindful 33

wellness

GOOD MOOD FOODS PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALAN SHAPIRO / STOCKSY

By Uma Naidoo, MD, Nutritional Psychiatrist and author, This Is Your Brain on Food

The food you eat can have just as profound an effect on your brain and your mental health as the drugs prescribed by your doctor.

The reason: Your gut and your brain are in constant communication with each other. Here’s what to eat to lift your mood.

Spring 2021 mindful 35

wellness

I

once had a patient who was confused as to why I talked about her gut while treating her mind. To her, it seemed irrelevant.

“After all,” she said, “it’s not like they are actually next to each other.”

While your gut and brain are housed in different parts of your body, they are physically connected.

The vagus nerve, also known as the “wanderer nerve,” originates in the brain stem and travels all the way to the gut, connecting the gut to the central nervous system. When it reaches the gut, it untangles itself to form little threads that wrap the entire gut in an unruly covering that looks like an intricately knitted sweater.

Because the vagus nerve penetrates the gut wall, it plays an essential role in the digestion of food, but its key function is to ensure that nerve signals and body chemicals can travel back and forth between the gut and the brain, carrying vital information between them, and making the brain and gut lifelong partners.

The basis of all body communications is chemical. In the brain, these chemicals originate from the primary parts of your nervous system (with an assist from your endocrine system): the central nervous system, which comprises the brain and spinal cord; the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which comprises the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems; and →

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Uma Naidoo, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist, professional chef, and nutrition specialist. She is the director of Nutritional and Lifestyle Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she consults on nutritional interventions, and director of Nutritional Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital Academy. She also teaches at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.

36 mindful Spring 2021

THE GOOD MOOD FOODS Your gut and your brain are deeply connected and talking to each other all the time. Here’s a rundown of 5 kinds of good mood foods to add to your menu.

1 PROBIOTICS & PREBIOTICS To reset your gut microbiome, increase the probiotics and prebiotics you eat.

Probiotic-rich foods contain bacteria that help your body and brain.

An animal study in 2017 from the University of Virginia School of Medicine indicated that Lactobacillus can reverse depression in rats. Similar findings have been established in humans.

Prebiotics are essentially food for probiotics. Probiotics break down prebiotics to form short-chain fatty acids that help reduce gut inflammation, block the growth of cancerous cells, and help the growth of healthy cells.

Certain species of gut bacteria have the ability to boost levels of brain chemicals such as gammaaminobutyric acid (GABA), which may speed relief from depression and other mental health conditions.

EAT THIS Probiotics Yogurt with active cultures (avoid yogurts high in added sugars), tempeh, miso, and natto (fermented soybean products), sauerkraut, kefir, kimchi, kombucha, buttermilk, and some cheeses such as cheddar, mozzarella, and Gouda.

Prebiotics Beans and other legumes, oats, bananas, berries, garlic, onions, dandelion greens, asparagus, and leeks.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DARINA KOPCOK / STOCKSY

wellness

“

What sometimes gets lost in discussions about mental health is a simple truth: The food you eat can have just as profound an effect on your brain as the drugs you take.

—UMA NAIDOO, MD

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NATAŠA MANDIĆ / STOCKSY AND BY ALAN SHAPIRO / STOCKSY

the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis), which comprises the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal gland.

The central nervous system produces chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine that are critical for regulating mood and processing thought and emotion.

Serotonin, a key chemical deficient in the brains of depressed and anxious people, plays a major role in regulating the gut-brain axis. Serotonin is one of the most buzzed-about brain chemicals because of its role in mood and emotion, and more than 90% of serotonin receptors are found in the gut.

In a healthy body, all these brain chemicals ensure that the gut and brain work smoothly together. Of course, as in all delicate systems, things can go wrong. When chemical over- or underproduction disrupts this connection, the gut-brain balance is thrown into disarray. Levels of important chemicals go out of whack.

Moods are upset. Concentration is disrupted. Immunity drops. The gut’s protective barrier is compromised, and metabolites and chemicals that should be kept out of the brain reach the brain and wreak havoc.

This chemical chaos gives rise to psychiatric symptoms, from depression and anxiety to loss of libido to devastating conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

In order to correct those chemical imbalances and restore order to brain and body, you might assume that we would need a barrage of sophisticated, carefully engineered pharmaceuticals. And to a degree, you’d be right!

Most drugs used to treat mental conditions do seek to alter these chemicals to return the brain to a healthy state—for example, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (most commonly referred to as SSRIs), which boost serotonin to fight depression. Modern mental health medications can be a godsend, and I don’t want to downplay their importance as a therapy in many circumstances.

But what sometimes gets lost in discussions about mental health is →

2 FOODS RICH IN GOOD MOOD VITAMINS Many vitamins play key roles in preventing and easing depression.

A deficiency in vitamin B12 and folate (B9) can contribute to a loss of brain cells which is associated with depression.

Vitamins B1 (thiamine) and B6

(pyridoxine), vitamin A, and vitamin C all play crucial roles in brain function and mood regulation.

EAT THIS Find B12 and folate in legumes, citrus fruits, bananas, avocados, leafy greens and crucifers, asparagus, beets, nuts, seeds, fish and shellfish.

Vitamins B1 and B6 in the foods in the B12 and folate section, as well as in soybeans and whole grains.

Vitamin A in sweet potatoes, carrots, spinach, and black-eyed peas.

Vitamin C in citrus, cantaloupe, strawberries, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts.

Spring 2021 mindful 39

3 FOODS RICH IN IRON AND GOOD MOOD MINERALS Iron, magnesium, and zinc all play vital roles in proper brain function, and deficiencies in these minerals have been linked to depression in clinical studies. Several case studies in which patients were treated with 125-300mg of

magnesium have demonstrated rapid recovery from major depression, often in less than a week.

EAT THIS Iron-rich foods.

Shellfish, lean red meats and organ meats (in moderation), eggs, legumes, pumpkin seeds, broccoli, spinach, and dark chocolate (also in moderation).

Magnesium-rich foods. Avocados, bananas, dried apricots, nuts and seeds, legumes, whole grains, and some omega3-rich fish (such as salmon and mackerel).

Zinc-rich foods.

Seafood (especially cooked oysters), lean beef, and poultry, with lower amounts found in beans (chickpeas and lentils), nuts, and whole grains.

“

wellness

The idea of using food as medicine for mental health is central to nutritional psychiatry, and in my opinion, it’s crucial to finding meaningful, lasting solutions to mental health problems.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAPERCLIP / STOCKSY

—UMA NAIDOO, MD

a simple truth: The food you eat can have just as profound an effect on your brain as the drugs you take.

Behind the scenes of the gutbrain romance is a huge collection of microorganisms that reside in the gut. We call this panoply of different bacterial species the microbiome.

The gut microbiome—in both humans and other animals—is another type of romance, with both parties relying on each other for survival. Our guts provide the bacteria with a place to live and thrive, and in return they perform crucial tasks for us that our bodies can’t perform on their own.

The microbiome is made up of many different types of bacteria, with a much greater diversity of species in the gut than anywhere else in the body. Each person’s gut can contain up to a thousand different species of bacteria, though most of them belong to two groups—Firmicutes and Bacteroides—which make up about 75% of the entire microbiome.

The idea that the microbiome plays such an essential role in bodily func-

tion is relatively new in medicine, particularly when it comes to bacteria’s influence on the brain. But over the years, the science has been building that gut bacteria can affect mental function. Functional bowel disorders, for instance, like irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease, also come with mood changes due to bacterial populations being altered. Some clinicians observe that adding a probiotic as part of a psychiatric medication treatment plan can also help to lower anxiety and depression. And if you transfer the gut bacteria of schizophrenic humans into the guts of lab mice, those mice also start to show symptoms of schizophrenia.

If normal gut bacteria are not present, production of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)—all critically important for the regulation of mood, memory, and attention—is impacted. Your brain needs the proper balance of gut bacteria to make the chemicals it needs to stay stable and healthy. →

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FOODS RICH IN OMEGA-3 FATTY ACIDS Omega-3s are crucial to mental health. But since we cannot produce them on our own, we must get our omega-3s from our diet. The three main omega-3 fatty acids are alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid

42 mindful Spring 2021

(DHA). EPA and DHA are the omega-3s most critical in mood disorders, so it’s particularly important to ensure that you get enough of them. Omega-3s lower inflammatory markers and protect neurons from excessive inflammation.

EAT THIS Cold-water fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, tuna, herring, and

sardines, contain high amounts of omega-3s. Trimmer fish like bass and trout are good sources, too.

Grass-fed beef contains more omega-3s than conventional beef.

ALA sources include edamame, walnuts, and chia seeds.

Omega-3fortified foods on the market, especially eggs, milk, and yogurt.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOLPHIA NANDI / STOCKSY AND BY EDWARD FURY / STOCKSY

4

The gut needs your brain to be stable and healthy so that it can maintain the proper balance of gut bacteria. If that cyclical relationship is disrupted, it means trouble for both the gut and the brain. An unhealthy gut microbiome leads to an unhealthy brain, and vice versa.

Food influences your brain directly and indirectly. When food is broken down by the microbiota into fermented and digested materials, its components directly influence serotonin, dopamine, and GABA, which travel through the brain and change the way you think and feel.

Some foods promote the growth of helpful bacteria, while others inhibit this growth. Because of that effect, food is some of the most potent mental health medicine available, with dietary interventions sometimes achieving similar results to specifically engineered pharmaceuticals, at a fraction of the price and with few if any side effects.

The idea of using food as medicine for mental health is central to nutritional psychiatry, and in my opinion, it’s crucial to finding meaningful, lasting solutions to mental health problems.

Thankfully, we are inching toward a moment in health care when medicine is no longer strictly about prescriptions and a single line of therapy. In psychiatry, we are finally beginning to talk about the power of food as medicine for mental health.

That doesn’t overshadow the importance of working with your doctor, since medication and the appropriate therapy remain a part of the journey to improved mental health. A better diet can help, but it’s only one aspect of treatment. Still, the relationship linking food, mood, and anxiety is garnering more and more attention.

There’s a proverb that states that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. We might have stumbled upon a great truth with slight modification: For both men and women, the food that enters our stomachs can warm our hearts and change our brains. ●

wellness

5 HERBS AND SPICES Many seasonings help the brain fight off free radicals and prevent oxidative stress, which can damage tissues. Pair them with the antidepressant foods to double their mood-boosting effects.

EAT THIS Saffron. A 2017 study revealed that 15 mg of saffron

is as effective as 20 mg of Prozac in decreasing depressive symptoms. In animals, saffron increases levels of the goodmood neurotransmitters glutamate and dopamine.

Oregano.

Researchers have connected carvacrol, an active ingredient in oregano, with neuroprotective and antidepressant effects in animal studies, although to date, there are no such studies in humans.

Turmeric. A meta-analysis in 2017 found that curcumin, an active ingredient in turmeric, reduces depressive symptoms by adjusting brain chemistry and protecting brain cells against toxic damage that leads to depression.

Other moodboosting herbs.

Lavender, passionflower, and chamomile are all herbs that can be helpful for depression too.

They’re easiest enjoyed as teas.

Adapted from This Is Your Brain on Food: An Indispensable Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More by Uma Naidoo, MD, Director of Nutritional and Lifestyle Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

wellness

YO U A RE N OT How to create kind space to process emotions and moods.

By Steve Calechman

the University of Toronto. “Moods, on the other hand, are the states of mind that are fed by continually thinking, problem solving, and ruminating, and they work to keep emotions in place.” You can think of emotions and moods on a continuum: An emotion is a brief spike of energy and information; a mood can last a day or two. If a mood sticks around longer than that, there may be a clinically relevant problem, like anxiety or depression.

How are moods different than emotions? “Emotions have been called ‘action potentials’ because they alert you and they energize you towards taking some kind of action based on your appraisal,” says Zindel Segal, Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at

What makes an emotion or a mood? Usually they happen in response to a trigger. “An emotion is an episode of noticeable affect triggered by an appraisal or stimulation from something in your environment,” says Segal. The trigger could come from food, caffeine, a stressful

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job, a kind word, sunshine, or listening to music. Triggers can also be extremely subtle because they’ve become automatic. “Our triggers can become routinized,” says Segal.

“And so, we may not notice them as a trigger. We may just notice that we’re having an emotional reaction.”

How do triggers become routinized? When we identify our emotions as being closely related to our “selves,” entwined with our identities, there’s not enough space around them to notice them for what they are: information that arrives, rests, and passes. “All emotions run through self because it’s the sense of self-relevance and self-reference that determines how strong an emotion is and how much of an alarm it’s going to send to you,” says Segal. If you’ve closely iden-

PHOTOGRAPH BY SERGNESTER / ADOBESTOCK

T

here are various factors that determine why you get into a mood and how you get out of one. Before we explore that, it helps to understand the difference between an emotion and a mood. An emotion is shorter in duration, higher in intensity—like a spike of energy. A mood happens over more time. “You can be grumpy all day, but you can’t really be in a rage for the same period,” says Philip Gable, assistant professor of psychology at University of Delaware.

YO U R M OO DS

tified with the emotion, you might not notice that it’s happening—it’s become automatic, routine.

How can you unhook from a mood? It starts with creating space for reappraising the situation. “The way that mindfulness works is that it doesn’t diminish the emotion,” says Segal.

“Mindfulness helps to de-identify with the experience. We see emotions and moods as moving and shifting over time. They become something that’s happening in the mind rather than happening to me. In this way, there’s less of a tendency to fully identify with them and maybe a bit more of a nudge towards investigating them, seeing what comes next,” says Segal. Mindfulness gives you space around your emotions, which can be very valuable for choosing to respond wisely.

Can you think your way out of a bad mood? The short answer: no. “The thing to do is not to try to respond to the mood with further thought. It’s super seductive to use thoughts to respond to thoughts, to try to problem solve, to ruminate, to brood. But you miss the possibility of stepping entirely outside of thought and experiencing what a mood feels like in the body—through a relationship that just allows it to be there, but creates space around it so that it can be observed,” says Segal.

Besides mindfulness, what are some ways to support healthy moods? Sleep is probably the best.

“It’s the ultimate reset,” says Gable.

“You lose conscious thought while the brain removes toxins and waste.

It’s rare that you don’t wake up with a

different perspective [or] at least more energy to deal with the problem.”

Do something with your body: yoga, go for a walk, or do something that connects you to other people. “Getting in touch with your body allows you to subvert the idea that you can think yourself out of a mood,” says Segal.

Eating healthier is another way to control how you feel, because it changes the brain’s neurochemistry, and, at its most basic, the brain is a machine, one that you can tend and maintain. “You can take care of it or run it into the ground,” Gable says. “The way you feel and the mood you’re in is not entirely out of your control.” ● ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steve Calechman is a contributing editor for Men’s Health and a writer for MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program. He is also a regular contributor to Mindful.

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self discovery

N OT H I N G TO FE A R What self-compassion and mindfulness reveal about things that go bump in the night.

By Stephanie Domet

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PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIL NEVSKY / STOCKSY, ILLUSTRATION BY SARANYA / ADOBESTOCK

self-discovery

For decades—my whole life, practically—I’ve lived with a persistent, debilitating fear of being murdered in my bed, I tell the audience. They laugh uproariously.

They’re not being insensitive—I’m telling it funny. That’s how I always tell it. I run through the list of ghosts that haunt my overactive imagination: Sasquatch, vampires, Adolf Hitler, the Loch Ness Monster, Jesus—that crown of thorns, all that blood—those phantoms of my childhood. Then the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer—the true-crime menaces of my late-night adolescent reading. Fear has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember.

It’s not totally surprising. I was a girl in the 1970s and ’80s in southern Ontario. I read the newspaper every day from the age of nine or ten, and my mother’s magazines—Family Circle, Women’s Day—and they were all always cover-to-cover, it seemed, with violence against girls and women.

Kids my age disappearing from the hallways of their apartment buildings, or last seen on the subway heading downtown to a movie with friends.

Women like my mother followed through parking lots, pulled into vans

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when out for a walk, flagged down to help someone in need, and then never heard from again. I learned to walk with my keys threaded through my fingers. I read conflicting advice on whether to fight or submit. When my hair was long, I learned to keep it tucked into my coat so it couldn’t be used to apprehend me from behind.

Some of that fear was caution, and self-preservation, I guess. It was the water I was swimming in—misogyny and men’s violence against women was baked into the society in which I grew up, from the news headlines, to the murder mysteries my mother read, to the movies and television shows we all watched. But that fear also flicked a switch in me that was hard to switch off. I became hyper-alert.

’Fraidy Cat Looking back now, I can see I was living with anxiety from the time I was small. We didn’t call it that, then. We called it oh don’t be such a baby, and she’s afraid of her own shadow, and don’t be ridiculous. And to be fair, a lot of what I was afraid of was utterly ridiculous. Parked cars (they could become moving cars at any moment!),

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephanie Domet is the author of two novels, including Fallsy Downsies. She is a recovering public radio host, and is currently the managing editor of Mindful and mindful.org. She is probably wearing something she sewed herself.

PHOTOGRAPH BY TOD KAPKE / STOCKSY, ILLUSTRATION BY NATALIA9 / ADOBESTOCK

I’m standing on stage in front of 150 people, the spotlight bright in my eyes, the microphone solid in my hand. Their faces stare up at me, expectantly. I’m there to tell them a story. For a lot of people, being on stage in this way is a nightmare. Stage fright can make your heart pound, your mouth go dry, your limbs quake. But not me. I’m comfortable here. My worst nightmare awaits me later, at home. It’s also what I’m on stage to talk about.

our furnace room (likely last known location of Sasquatch), a picture of a marble bust in a book (I can feel that statue watching me). As a lifelong writer, my imagination was my best friend. It was also, it seemed, bent on terrorizing me. And I was helpless before its infinite power.

I knew how to make it funny, though.

And I did that, in the daylight hours.

The story of my fear became one of my funniest set pieces, one I returned to again and again, especially once I learned, later in life than is comfortable to admit, that not everyone is paralyzed by fear at night. When I realized that this fear was unusual, I went to town, pulling out every formative experience that solidified my terror. I’d gotten up to pee one night when I was seven or eight, and, half-asleep, collided with my father who was making the rounds of us kids, ensuring we were safe and sound before he and my mother turned in. Scared the daylights out of me. The night I’d stayed up, home alone at the age of 17, reading about the Zodiac Killer, too scared to go to sleep till I got through the story, and utterly uncomforted by the inconclusive ending—the Zodiac Killer was still out there! What if he was in Mississauga, Ontario, in my boring, quiet neighborhood? What if he was outside my very house right now! Is that the sound of the front door easing open?

Footsteps on the staircase? (Never mind the contortions of logic, the self-centering acrobatics involved in the dark fantasy that this infamous →

FE A R H A S B E E N M Y CO NS TA NT CO M PA N I O N FO R A S LO N G A S I C A N RE M E M B E R .

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self-discovery

Fear Itself It started early, before darkness had even truly fallen. I worked from home, alone, with no fear during the day. I taught creative writing to my students as the sun set. The parents of one of my students had been in the audience the night before, and the dad made a weird comment at pickup time. The switch in my mind flicked to High Alert. When the students and

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You Don’t Have To Go It Alone But figuring out how and when to work with a therapist can be scary too. Here’s what you need to know.

Know when to seek help While Kaylee Friedman, a licensed associate counselor in New Jersey who uses mindfulness-based techniques with her clients, believes everyone can benefit from therapy, she notes that a therapeutic relationship may be particularly helpful when your ability to function is curtailed by “feelings of anxiety, lack of motivation, feeling lost or hopeless, social issues, dealing with oppression, relationship struggles, grief, family crisis, unprocessed trauma, etc. If you’re spending at least an hour each day worrying or thinking about these issues and they cause you to feel distracted or to underfunction in important roles in your life, you’d probably benefit from therapy.”

Know that the first hurdle will be the hardest “Meeting a therapist is stressful, especially for somebody who’s already struggling,” says Friedman. But, she adds, therapists want to help. “Even if we aren’t the right fit for you, or we don’t have any slidingscale spots left, or we don’t take your insurance. If you reach out to us, we’re going to do our best to either be the one that helps you or refer you to someone who can. We are trained not to just leave people in the lurch.”

Talk first “Ask for a 15-minute phone call before you book,” Friedman says. Write down your questions in advance (or search “questions to ask therapists” online). “And just know that we are working for you.

We’re a team. But at the end of the day, we love when you advocate for yourself and when you ask lots of questions.”

ILLUSTRATION BY NATALIA9 / ADOBESTOCK

murderer would target little old me.)

I lay in my bed and shook. A figure at my bedroom door, barely visible in the first streaks of dawn. I opened an eye. My father, again. He and my mom and my younger siblings had been on a road trip and decided to drive all night for home.

Here, I feel I should say a word about my father: He was gentle and smart, stubborn and fair, capable and wise. I loved him and he loved me. I was never afraid of him. But he did have a way of being in the wrong place at the right time.

On stage, the crowd loved these stories, laughing and gasping at all the right moments. But lately, I’d had the sense that maybe this fear of mine wasn’t hilarious. I’d been telling two friends about it, in my jokey way, and they looked concerned. “It’s OK!” I said. “It’s hilarious!” But their reaction stayed with me. Maybe it wasn’t hilarious—or at least, maybe that’s not all it was.

After the show, women found me outside the venue to tell me how much my story resonated. They, too, were afraid of being murdered in their beds, and they were so glad to know they weren’t alone. It was worth it, I thought, and I floated home on the wave of praise and belonging. I had my best night of sleep in a long time, no fear, even though my spouse was out of town and I was alone in our three-bedroom house.

The next night, though. Wow.

Find your fit “There are so many unique experiences of marginalized and oppressed groups that even if you find a therapist who you click with, it’s not guaranteed that they’re going to be understanding about your unique struggle or educated about what you’re dealing with,” she says. But search engines like Inclusive Therapists and Therapy Den can make finding a match easier. Therapists can indicate their own identities, along with basic information about their training and specialties.

Listen to yourself “Just keep checking in with yourself. Is this person answering questions in a way that feels defensive, or do I feel held by this person? Are my questions being answered honestly and thoroughly? Do I feel comfortable right now?”

Friedman notes you’ll derive a lot of information from sitting with your own reaction to the person. And, after all, the best therapists help you uncover the wisdom inside you to help you heal.

—Stephanie Domet

W H AT WO U LD TH AT E V E N LOO K LI K E , A LI FE W ITH O U T TH IS PE RSIS TE NT, PE RVA SIV E FE A R ? parents cleared out of my living room I noticed the little twinkle lights I keep along the mantel in winter were switched on—and I hadn’t done it.

If this were a television drama, the violins would be layering in tension.

The Fear had me and it wasn’t going to let up.

In bed that night I reminded myself I’d checked the doors and they were locked. My mind imagined a patient murderer, lying in wait for me. I lay in bed, solid with fear. I held my breath.

Every sound magnified. The absence of sound untrustworthy—surely the calm before the violins returned.

I’d doze, then wake, heart pounding, was that a sound? What was that sound? The front door easing open?

The back? Someone coming in the kitchen window? Is there someone in this room? My eyes strained to tease out the strands of darkness that surrounded me.

This was a familiar routine. It was my nightly opera. I tried to talk myself out of my fear: Don’t be ridiculous.

This is the most egotistical fantasy ever.

You think you’re such a good catch for a murderer that he’d wait till you’re tired of watching Netflix, done puttering around the kitchen, finished reading your book? It’s absurd. Illogical. Most people do not get murdered in their beds. Go to sleep.

Surprisingly, my stern litany of self-talk did not result in restful sleep.

Most nights, I would eventually fall into uneasy slumber. But this night was different. This night, the terror wouldn’t let me go. And I did what I had never done before.

I clicked the light on. Heart pounding with fear and shame, I pushed a heavy piece of furniture across our bedroom door and I got back in bed.

I read my phone. I read a book. I felt terrible, like I had failed. And I was still sleepless, and terrified.

Later, I told a friend, who happens to be a therapist, about the experience— about telling the story on stage, and the frightening night that ensued. She nodded. “If you ever want to put that →

Spring 2021 mindful 51

down,” she told me, “I know someone who would be a great match for you.”

Put it down, I thought. Is that an option? I could just—put it down?

What would that even look like, a life without this persistent, pervasive fear? I had only ever thought of The Fear as something to suffer. The idea that I could talk to a therapist about it and be free of it felt as outlandish as the idea that an evil version of the Count from Sesame Street was behind the door of the bathroom of my childhood home.

Finding Comfort I tried not to treat Debbie’s office like the stage at the Seahorse Tavern, but my tales of night terror have been so often told I can’t help falling into funny-storytelling mode. “I’m pretty sure it’s sound coming from my own face, every time,” I told her. “Snoring, grinding my teeth. I wake myself up and wait for the sound to reoccur, but because the sound originated with me, it never does, and then I’m just anxious and alert.”

I also wear corrective lenses, I told her, and so I can’t see much at night.

So, you’re vulnerable, she said. I agreed.

I don’t know how to solve for that, I told her.

It’s not something you solve, she said.

Oh. Then she said: Tell me about the murder. And I said: Oh, the murder doesn’t matter.

52 mindful Spring 2021

My therapist is a cool customer. She nodded. “Then what are you afraid of?”

I thought about all the possible answers to that question. “Terror. I’m afraid of being terrorized.”

She nodded again, and she looked at me, her face soft and expectant.

“Oh,” I said. The edge of an idea began to reveal itself. “It’s me.”

I had been so afraid of terror for so long, that when the realization finally dawned it felt like a new day breaking.

“I am terrorizing myself,” I said. “I am doing it to myself.”

Debbie’s prescription was that I find a comfort object, something I could reach for in the night when The Fear started to prickle up my back. Again, I was struck by the novel idea that comfort was an option. “What have you been reaching for?” Debbie asked.

“Mostly logic,” I told her, “and stern self-talk.”

“And how’s that been going?”

“Here I am,” I said.

That afternoon, my spouse left for a two-week tour. I was once again home alone, with all my vulnerability, which I was trying to think of as a feature, rather than a bug. (Most people don’t get murdered in their beds, I’d told Debbie. But some do, she had replied, in a way that was oddly comforting and affirming, allowing me to acknowledge my fear and the role it had played in trying to keep me safe, instead of trying to shame me out of feeling it.) When I returned home from running errands, I instinctually said aloud, as I came in the front door, “Ah, my cozy home.” This allowed me to feel comfortable, rather than

to immediately begin worrying that there might be a murderer lurking in the basement. And later, when I went up to bed, I pulled back the blankets and murmured, “Ah, my cozy bed.”

But sometime after sleep came, I was awake again, startled by a close sound. Probably my teeth clicking against each other, I thought, though I already felt the creeping fingers of fear prickling up my back. I knew what would come next—the lid would fly off my imagination and I’d be in for it. I took a deep breath. I paused.

You have a choice, here, I told myself.

You can choose terror, or you can choose something else. I breathed again, curled over onto my side, and patted my own heart with my hand.

Out loud, I said, “You deserve to have a peaceful sleep, and pleasant dreams.” And then I closed my eyes and had both.

When I tell this story now, I still tell it funny—it’s my preferred mode.

But I tell it, too, with a sense of wonder at the power of self-compassion, and how it has replaced fear as my nighttime companion.

The addition of self-compassion to my nighttime routine has occasioned a spillover into the daytime part of my life, too. Though stern and logical selftalk is still my first go-to, being kind to myself in the grip of night terror has allowed me to take another look at how I address myself during the day.

And while the day-side shift is slower, when I remember to give myself the choice, I choose self-kindness every time—and that makes for better days, along with easier nights. ●

ILLUSTRATION BY VAL_IVA / ADOBESTOCK, PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDRE / ADOBESTOCK

I TOO K A DE E P B RE ATH .

I PAUSE D. YO U H AV E A CH O I CE , H E RE , I TO LD M YSE LF. YO U C A N CH OOSE TE RRO R , O R YO U C A N CH OOSE SO M E TH I N G E L SE .

self-discovery

m AUDIO Find Compassion Kristin Neff leads a twenty-minute compassion meditation. mindful.org/ kristin-neff

equanimity

Care Deeply with a light touch

When we awaken our fearless heart in communion with others—valuing connection over control—joy emerges of its own accord. Barry Boyce writes that by caring without striving, we can find our way to true freedom.

54 mindful Spring 2021

PHOTOGRAPH BY AFRICA STUDIO / ADOBESTOCK

equanimity

Vicissitudes.

I’ve always loved that word. It seems onomatopoeic. You can hear the ups and downs of change and variation in there, and the pain of all that jolting. Just when things are going so…this other thing comes along. It does make sense that we’re so heavily wired for safety and security, and are therefore resistant to change and the challenges it brings. Because survival, right? Be safe, be secure, keep things the same, survive.

Ah, but life doesn’t cooperate with that instinct. It’s right there in the definition of vicissitude in the American Heritage Dictionary: “the quality of being changeable; mutability.”

One choice when the deep drive to be safe and secure meets up with the mutability of all of life is just to say, “F— it, I don’t

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org. He is also author of The Mindfulness Revolution, an anthology of applied mindfulness instructions from leading teachers and experts.

56 mindful Spring 2021

care,” but the damn thing is, if you’re human, you cannot help caring. And that’s one of life’s massive conundrums.

When we started Mindful magazine and mindful. org, I didn’t want to do it.

I thought it was crazy to start a magazine in the internet age (and many others agreed). People protested. “You folks need to do this. Someone will do it, and it shouldn’t be Martha Stewart. She knows nothing about mindfulness.”

My arm was twisted right into doing it, along with several others as foolish as I

was. It was so very complicated and so very hard. I’d worked on magazines all my adult life. I loved them, but I was never in charge.

Each issue has hundreds of little and big elements, and the little ones are as hard as the big ones, and the people who work in this world tend toward perfectionism, and there are lots of opinions. To hold the stress at bay, I told myself I didn’t care if it worked out.

But my inner human raged: “Of course you care.

You care deeply. You want this to work.” But caring was killing me. And in →

“The work is simultaneously caring totally and yet not caring at all, operating in these dual planes of reality as a momentto-moment practice.”

NATE KLEMP

“With mindfulness, we Author, philosopher, founding partner of Mindful feel emotion more fully, but we have the skills to relate and engage so we are not held captive— We can get close to emotions and watch them transform.”

TARA HEALEY

ILLUSTRATION BY ROMANYA / ADOBESTOCK

Founder and program director of Mind the Moment at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care

equanimity “The essence of equanimity is the ability to care without either attachment or detachment.”

MARGARET CULLEN

Marriage and family therapist, MBSR teacher

“There is a balance of warming our hearts toward others and also toward ourselves. At some points in life we feel more at ease with the outward caring and at other points, we may need it to fill our own cup to fight the good fight.”

ELISHA GOLDSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION BY RAMONA KAULITZKI / ADOBESTOCK

Psychologist, author, cofounder of The Center for Mindful Living

an endeavor that’s about developing composure and equanimity, it didn’t make a lot of sense.

It was hard for me to accept that caring, such a good thing, could lead to crippling levels of anxiety and stress, and there is so much to care about beyond just doing a good job: people you love deeply, your health, and then the big things like equality, justice, the environment, and on and on.

Since we can’t not care, and yet caring can kill us, we have to find a way to strike a balance: learning how to love and care without caring yourself to death. That’s the art. And it requires a child-at-play, naïve, que será será attitude that is nevertheless anything but cold and uncaring. This paradox of caring deeply while being carefree at the same time takes skill, and while

mindfulness practice is not a magic wand to confer that skill, it can be a huge help.

I have to admit that it took me long years to cultivate some equanimity in the midst of Mindful’s evolution. Amid a storm of vicissitudes, I doubted and regretted deeply. I do not now. It has been a great teacher. Like they say about meditation, the point is not to do it right but rather to learn from the process. You start where you are and you go back to where you are.

One big thing my “teacher” taught me was how brutal the fruits of expectations can be. With a meditation student or my daughters or staff or volunteers, I was eager to get someplace and accomplish big things, and that translated into visualizing precise outcomes and pouring all my energy in

trying to bring those about, imposing that on others while burning myself out.

(And that wreaks havoc on the whole role model thing. Who wants to emulate someone who drives themselves into the ground with stress?) I was trying to make what was uncertain—the future—certain. I learned the hard way how that just does not work.

At my low ebb, mindfulness helped me learn that effective caring begins with paying attention to what’s happening now and letting the results emerge as byproducts of caring in the present tense. When caring veers into controlling, that’s when a dose of carefree ease can make all the difference.

A smile of appreciation at whatever happens goes much further than a grimace of withering judgment and disappointment. →

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equanimity

“

When caring veers into controlling, that’s when a dose of carefree ease can make all the difference.

Joy Emerges of Its Own Accord Somehow, ironically, being carefree doesn’t mean not caring. In other words, not maintaining a laser focus on outcomes and expectations doesn’t mean we don’t care about whether we or others do well. It’s how we get there that counts, and that’s a skill to develop, not something that just happens. Ed Hanczaryk knows a lot about this skill.

A golf pro who employs mindfulness techniques in his instruction, he believes how we approach recreational life affects how we approach life at large. He celebrates a balancing act that combines intensity and ease, summarized as “Focus, Let go.” With mindful awareness, he suggests, we can see that “We create the world moment by moment: so fast that reality

60 mindful Spring 2021

appears unbroken, linear.

As with a movie projector, the flickering static images appear to move, creating a story.” When we become self-involved, we cling to this story. If, instead, our focus can land on the activity itself, the story we’re telling ourselves can be let go. When athletes perform at a high level, he says, “They’re so engaged and so trusting of their abilities, they’re not separate from the activity.” Joy emerges of its own accord.

Echoing this point, Mark Campbell—a performance coach who is also director of mental conditioning for the Washington Nationals— emphasizes that caring is what gets us into the game, because we do well when we care about something.

Then, once we’re in the game, mindfulness can help us stay in, safely. “Passion drives people to be great

“We are entering a realm of mystery in a way, whenever we act, because we can’t predict the outcome. We act and we let go. We’re not in control of the universe, which doesn’t mean we do nothing. We care.

We do everything we can.”

SHARON SALZBERG

ILLUSTRATION BY WACOMKA / ADOBESTOCK

Mindfulness teacher, bestselling author

and to continue moving forward during tough times.

Caring is an amazing power, but it comes with responsibility—mostly to yourself.

Learning to manage your self-care is important, refilling your tank regularly to have more of what you need when you need it.”

Like other people in helping professions, Andrés Gonzalez of the Holistic Life Foundation, in Baltimore, says he finds it helpful to remember an adage that allows “me to be true to myself: You can’t keep setting yourself on fire to keep others warm.”

Ashanti Branch, who like Andrés works with young people in urban schools, in Oakland, says that he cares “by not getting too attached” to a particular outcome, remembering a saying from an early mindfulness retreat: “No aversions. No cravings.”

Caverly Morgan, another mindfulness teacher who works with young people, in Portland, Oregon, says there is a paradox, a fundamental riddle at the heart of our being about how to care deeply while also being carefree, and its answer lies in “remembering who we really are, that we’re not a separate little body/mind cut off from everything else that somehow also has the capacity to control everything. When we can truly remember we’re all made of the same stuff, we no longer see people as →

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‘others.’ We care deeply for everything, because we feel ourselves to be everything.

And that recognition frees us to remember that we are not in control, and that’s the carefree part.”

While “being everything” may sound unbelievably woo-woo, it’s not truly different from the zone athletes and artists treasure. Whether it’s caring about doing a good job or caring about others, the point is to value connection over control, to find freedom in merging ourselves with what we’re doing and who we’re with, rather than expecting a certain result. When we let go of the controlling kind of caring that longs for multiple Facebook likes, the connecting kind of caring will emerge. We follow the passion deep in our heart to be in communion with others and surf life with energy—in the midst of all the deep challenges and pains of living.

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Equanimity: What the hell is that?

Why do we ask ourselves, in the recesses of our mind, whether to care or not?

Because caring hurts.

But that hurt in our heart is there simply because we’re alive. Sadly, there are many social norms and bad habits that shame us for our vulnerability. We’re supposed to look impervious to pain.

Many a crying child has been mocked or shushed, so it’s easy to conclude that not caring, in the form of carelessness, might be the best solution: to shut down, ignore, feel separate, and imagine this is a form of control. Great rivers of dysfunction spring from this ingrained habit of avoiding heart-pain. By contrast, letting ourselves observe closely how we respond to pain and difficulty—and mindfulness practice is a most helpful means to do so—can become the source of equanimity. It’s one of

those seemingly complex five-syllable words, but it simply connotes not overreacting: Whichever occurs, what we perceive as good or bad, we let it be. In some sense, we couldn’t care less.

Outwardly, it can look like indifference, but it is simply being there. Indifference is actively resisting, while equanimity is infused with a carefree kind of curiosity and a distinct lack of striving and struggling.

Mindful Self-Compassion teacher and author Steve Hickman describes how he noticed at a certain point in his “mindfulness career” that “resisting what’s painful not only did not make it go away, it made it worse, because ‘what you resist persists.’

Whatever automatic thing I did to discharge the pain only compounded it and made me feel disheartened. Instead, now I try to ‘let it land,’ staying there long enough to really feel the hurt, knowing it won’t

ILLUSTRATION BY SATHAPORN / ADOBESTOCK

truly harm me. What often emerges is a resolve to take meaningful, wise action rather than avoidance or momentary gratification, like finding a way to spend time with those who have been left behind by the loss of a loved one. Reaching out rather than closing in. Pain, genuinely felt, reminds us of what we treasure.”

Perhaps another phrase for equanimity could be the paradoxical “carefree caring.” Michael Carroll, a meditation teacher and coach, came to realize that overly caring about his brother meant he was keeping score in their relationship, so he says, “I learned that caring too much for those I loved was more blinding than revealing.” By letting go of this control-oriented, judgmental, and outcomeoriented kind of caring, he “could feel the freedom to love him easily without feeling obligated to be a particular way toward him. Love without a scorecard.”

Jon Roberts, of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, found something very similar when his son was born. “As a freaked-out father-to-be,” he says, “I devoured ALL the baby literature I could find, so I could prove to my newborn I cared, by knowing everything in advance.

When he arrived, he was nothing like the babies in books. I had to reverse course. Instead of teaching him to be the baby I thought he should be, I’ve had to let him teach me, to learn who he is. In the process, I’ve become more comfortable with accepting the unexpected. In that way, my son has been a great mindfulness teacher for me.

When I care so hard about getting it right—in meditation and in life—I hit a wall.

When I hold mindfulness like a baby, and watch it shit down my arm, I can sink into not-knowing, and I’m actually able to learn something, and there’s a baby-like joy in that.” →

“

Indifference is actively resisting while equanimity is infused with a carefree kind of curiosity and a distinct lack of striving and struggling.

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“Once we understand that everything changes all the time, it seems unwise to be attached to a single outcome sometime in the future.

We do not want to become blinded to moving parts and new solutions and opportunities. I don’t see that as ‘not caring’; I see it as wise leadership.”

JANICE MARTURANO

Founder and executive director, Institute for Mindful Leadership

A Deep Well of Caring The kind of caring that hopes knowing everything will allow us to fix everything (in both the make-itstay-put and the repair-it senses of the word) is just another form of control that is out of sync with the changeability and uncertainty that rule life. We can never know fully, and as a teacher once counseled me, “Not-knowing is the most intimate,” because we don’t try to impose our partial knowledge on others. We pay attention to what’s really happening, not the movie narrative we’re constructing and thinking that means we know what’s going on.

Pat Rockman of the Centre for Mindfulness Studies, like her longtime friend Elaine Smookler, trained as a clown, in the tradition that sees clowning and jest as means of bringing authentic joy by breaking

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“We have very little control over any outcomes in our lives.

We do have control over our process, our preparation, and our persistence. When we focus on those, we can be more at peace with the knowledge that we have given everything we could.”

MARK CAMPBELL

Director of mental conditioning, Washington Nationals baseball team

the molds we set ourselves in. (See Mindful, Winter 2020). One of the first rules of clowning is “care enough not to care,” and for Rockman that means “not being so gripped or invested that my knickers are always in a twist. It means caring about the relationships and endeavors that are deeply meaningful to us, which means though we necessarily have agendas, we don’t hold to them, care so, so much about them, that we’re ruled by our reactivity, our disappointments, our wanting things our way, wanting more, raging and blaming others for not being on the same page.

We can act with an open heart, with persistence and patience (and in my case being patient with my lack of patience), not so attached and compelled that we burn ourselves out by caring so damn much.”

Caring too much in the wanting-to-controloutcomes and wanting-to-

know-it-all sense makes us anxious and spreads anxiety.

It puts everyone on edge.

By contrast, being carefree exudes feelings of joy and ease and confidence: Whatever happens, happens.

We will deal.

Yet beneath that carefree surface lies a deep well of caring, of love. Having to choose what to care about and what not to care about is unnecessary. Our heart makes those choices on its own, choices we can trust.

We can accept our desire to be secure but also listen when our mindful awareness tells us that we cannot know or control outcomes, and in the stillness that lies beneath our chaotic surface, we can feel a strength that comes from loving without striving.

Whatever it is you care about: Love it and also let it go. ●

“

ILLUSTRATION BY BLUELELA / ADOBESTOCK

We have to find a way to strike a balance: learning how to love and care without caring yourself to death. That’s the art.

BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

by AMBER TUCKER, BARRY BOYCE, STEPHANIE DOMET, and OYINDA LAGUNJU

THIS ONE WILD AND PRECIOUS LIFE The Path Back to Connection in a Fractured World Sarah Wilson • Dey St.

Anyone who read Sarah Wilson’s First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, her remarkable 2018 memoir about shifting our approach to anxiety and mental illness, will have high expectations for this new book. Her goal, she writes, was to find a way to talk about the feeling that “Something is not right. We’re not living life right. To try to grasp such a pain, to find the beginning and end, is like trying to bite your own teeth.” Instead of grasping too hard, then, she bravely explores what feels so wrong in her unforgettably wholehearted way. The common link among our personal, social, and global struggles—climate chaos, environmental destruction, local and global conflict, and our inability to come together to solve any of it—boils down, Wilson finds, to disconnection.

The age of social distancing makes that truth more plain than ever before. So, where is healing to be found?

It sounds like an impossibly big task, but Wilson sets out to reconnect us with a series of short chapters, from “become a soul nerd” (unexpectedly, this is about evolutionary psychology) and “get full-fat spiritual” (an expansive vision of purpose and interconnectedness) to “start where you are #buylesslivemore.” She urges us to reconnect with ourselves, with our natural collectivity, with our higher selves, and with the earth. Interspersed with these topics are chapters about her many adventures hiking on nearly every continent, and how simply walking has shaped her understanding of life. On top of all this goodness, the book is peppered with poetry and with Wilson’s delightful marginalia.

Whether it fires you up to change the world, or replenishes your sense of human goodness, this lovely book will not disappoint. -AT

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HELLO, HABITS A Minimalist’s Guide to a Better Life Fumio Sasaki • W. W. Norton & Company

Fumio Sasaki explores human insecurity by tapping into his own vulnerability and exposing his fear of merely being average. He successfully demystifies the myth that legends are simply born and brings the goal of success down to earth, where it is available for everyone to touch. He does this in a series of steps that echoes the concept that legends are made with a set of recurring habits.

While the idea of structuring

your life around a set of habits might seem rigid and lacking in spontaneity, Sasaki does a terrific job of highlighting the fact that we are already made of habits, which we can restructure and relearn. Hello, Habits is a self-help book that aims to help without being condescending; it approachablyf breaks down the idea that success isn’t only for a lucky few, but for everyone willing to embrace new habits. -OL

CREATIVE MIND, HAPPY SOUL Melissa Lloyd • Doodle Lovely Inc.

There’s more than one way to keep a journal, as Lloyd shows in her Doodle Lovely series. Her Creative Mind, Happy Soul guided journal is a colorful treasure, encouraging readers of any age to take a soothing creativity break. Every page includes a gratitude prompt and an emotional check-in. Some pages also have lined space

to write, others, a variety of imaginative doodling prompts (no art skills required). Psychological research suggests this kind of “spontaneous drawing” helps us bypass the judgy part of the brain, allowing our inner creativity and playfulness to come through. Honestly, just flipping through it makes me happy. -AT

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PODCAST

WHAT’S YOUR STORY? A Journal for Everyday Evolution Rebecca Walker and Lily Diamond • Sounds True

Rebecca Walker and Lily Diamond are no strangers to innovating the memoir. Several of Walker’s earlier published works are autobiographical— including Black, White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self—while Diamond’s best-selling Kale & Caramel: Recipes for Body, Heart, and Table is a fusion of memoir and cookbook. Their established creativity within the genre, and the fact that they met at a memoir-writing workshop Walker was leading on Maui, forecast how thoughtfully they have crafted What’s Your Story?, a guided journal that not only helps the writer express emotions and thoughts, but leads them to grow more deeply into themselves on a level that’s conscious, joyful, and authentic.

Walker and Diamond assure readers, “you will look back, let go, and move forward. You will rigorously assess your thoughts and beliefs, and make decisions to write a more empowering truth into being.” The structure of the journal mirrors the ebb and flow of normal daily moments, rituals, interactions: You awaken, touch in with your body, relate to the people around you, and go about your work. The topics also dive into our connections to technology, spirituality, and nature—and, importantly, loss, grief, and mortality.

Be aware, you won’t find any half-baked journal prompts here—rather, soul-searching queries like “What are your assumptions about who, where, and what you should be at this moment in your life?” and “How do you relate to your state of mind over the course of a day? How can you make your mind an ally?” The progression of questions is skillfully designed to create a strong foundation of self-knowledge, both within chapters and as you move through the whole book.

You’ll be asked to consider where you play within broader social dynamics: “What decisions have gone into crafting your online persona? What values do those decisions reflect?” and “Which people, places, and traditions have your communities lost?” It’s the process of dismantling your assumptions, the authors say, that “will allow you to tell a new story.” We have no doubt that the authors’ direct, kind, and confident voices will empower readers to find their own. —AT

reviews MEDITATIVE STORY Episode: “Stories of New Beginnings” In the season 2 finale of Meditative Story, we get a melting-pot perspective on new beginnings from five different people. Each of their stories is rooted in a shared human experience, from the unspoken conversations surrounding life and death to feeling like an outcast and finally finding a space that

feels like home. It’s a podcast that makes you feel a little less isolated—reinforcing that you’re not alone in your feelings. Among the wide range of guests you’ll be sure to hear a voice that resonates, especially in the times we’re living in right now. It makes us excited for what season 3 has in store. -OL

TAKING OFF THE MASK Episode: “The Conqueror Narrative” In this insight-filled conversation on his recently launched podcast, Ashanti Branch and social entrepreneur and engineer Chris Ategeka discuss their experiences with the “conqueror narrative”: When we talk about success stories, we often neglect the complexities of where someone came from and how they struggled to “conquer”

their circumstances. They bring in Branch’s One Million Masks movement (see page 11) and why being vulnerable, even with those we trust, can be difficult. “Everything in life comes down to two things. It’s safety and security,” Ategeka says, and that includes how readily we allow ourselves to be open and honest about what we’re going through. -AT

TEN PERCENT HAPPIER Episode: “Depression and Anxiety: Your Old Enemies, Your Best Friends” with Zindel Segal Zindel Segal, Distinguished Professor of Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto and founder of MindfulnessBased Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), talks with Dan Harris about what first intrigued him about the science of mindfulness, and why treatments like MBCT help us “make friends” with depression and anxiety.

“The real way of bringing

curiosity,” to our mind, Segal says, “also has [kindness] embedded in it, so that as you see these features show up in your body, there’s also a kindness to the person who’s experiencing this.”

Or, as Harris quips: “There is this notion of slaying the dragon in Western myth, but actually, hugging the dragon is a much better form of disarmament.” -AT

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TUNE IN TO

mindful Visit mindful.org for featured meditations from Ed Halliwell, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Mark Bertin THREE WAYS TO NAVIGATE TOUGH EMOTIONS

1

A Guided Meditation for Resting in the Flow from Ed Halliwell

One of the many joys of being human is that we are dynamic and multifaceted. However, the impact of this is that we often have a front-row seat to a wide range of issues, which can cause a loss of perspective. Issues seem bigger than they are, and we grip them more tightly. This meditative practice allows us to experience the joy of losing control.

When we let go, we can give ourselves a break and have a moment to catch our breath.

2

A Meditation on Observing Thoughts Nonjudgmentally from Jon Kabat-Zinn

It’s easy to fixate on one thought, to ruminate on whatever might be causing us stress in the hope that it might solve the problem. This practice allows us to harness the skills to approach those thoughts and let them go without getting sucked into them.

It will enable us to visualize our beliefs as a steady stream, relinquish control over these thoughts, and free us to live our life.

3

A 15-Minute Meditation for Patience and Resolve from Mark Bertin

It can be difficult to quiet down our minds, especially this year. It seems as though the list of things to worry about never stops growing. It’s human to push those thoughts to the side; however, the feeling of discomfort just keeps building. When we can sit with those thoughts and recognize our emotions, we can approach them with kindness and compassion. This can allow us to welcome a sense of self-awareness and clarity.

68 mindful Spring 2021

MINDFULNESS-BASED STRESS REDUCTION Protocol, Practice, and Teaching Skills Susan L. Woods and Patricia Rockman, MD • New Harbinger

It’s easy to think that everything that needs to be said about Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction has already been said. Woods and Rockman’s contribution, billed as “A Comprehensive Guide to Facilitating the 8-Week MBSR Program,” puts the lie to that. While MBSR’s founder, Jon Kabat-Zinn, established a standardized, repeatable format—which, among other benefits, allowed the program to be more easily subjected to research—he never intended it to become static and staid. He has often said it could just as easily have been called “heartfulness” as “mindfulness.” This book shows why.

Woods and Rockman amply demonstrate that MBSR exists to lessen suffering. Their goal is to help teachers “teach to the heart of MBSR,” which is not garden-variety self-improvement, but deep caring. It’s clear that decades of experience encountering participants has opened their hearts and invited them to explore how each person may be helped, listened to, and entered into a journey. For them, MBSR is a living, breathing organism, not merely a curriculum.

And yet, Woods and Rockman are clear that curriculum and protocol are essential to provide a container and guardrails within which teachers can be most effective. After opening with a little background on how MBSR emerged and what’s required to teach it, the next 100 pages offer an expert tour of the eight sessions that form the curriculum. From there, they discuss what lies “beyond curriculum”: the teacher’s embodiment of mindfulness and the inquiry process. Embodiment “consists of a teacher’s embracing of a present moment orientation” to whatever arises, and inquiry is “the interactive manifestation of embodiment, the conversation that takes place between the teacher and the group about what has arisen during the mindfulness practices and exercises.” MBSR offers much more than calm acceptance and a shiny new storyline: It provides pathways to the depths of what makes us human. This book also offers in its final chapters and appendix a treasury of information and materials to support bringing MBSR into many real-world settings. -BB

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DEEP KINDNESS A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness Houston Kraft • Tiller Press

Here’s an engaging handbook for moving past “confetti kindness” (the stuff Instagram influencers promote) to the skillful, targeted, regular, deep kindness that, in Kraft’s words, “the world desperately needs.”

A few years into his work as a kindness motivational speaker, he meets Helga on a flight. She tells him the last time she flew, it was because her father was ailing. Upon arrival at her destination city, she received word he had died.

She sank to the floor in the

airport and wept for two hours, and not one person stopped to help. In that conversation, Kraft realizes he, too, a sought-after kindness expert, might have passed her by. That encounter taught Kraft to ask: What gets in the way of our being kind?

He arrives at: incompetence, insecurity, and inconvenience.

The book is organized around these barriers, with kindness exercises to take readers to the determined, practiced, habitual kindness Kraft believes will change the world. -SD

“Wise words to touch your heart, change your mind, and affect your actions—a path to view and experience life differently.”

—MO GAWDAT, former CBO of Google X, author of Solve for Happy

PHILANTHROPY REVOLUTION How to Inspire Donors, Build Relationships, and Make a Difference Lisa Greer & Larissa Kostoff • HarperCollins

This extremely readable book—the only one, according to its publisher, written from a donor’s point of view—makes the case for a new way of giving, and receiving, philanthropic gifts. Lisa Greer’s husband invented a revolutionary bit of tech, and overnight, their family’s circumstances changed from paycheck-topaycheck to wow-that’s-areally-big-paycheck, and the Greers entered the world of large-gift philanthropy. Greer argues that as traditional philanthropy dies (literally—as donors to hospitals, foundations, arts organizations,

and more are aging and dying), traditional fundraising methods that alienate new generations of would-be donors must die too. Greer is values-driven, and she wants to offer her experience and expertise along with her dough. Here, she makes an impassioned plea for authenticity, on the part of both donors and fundraisers. If both parties would be more real about what they’re seeking—and relational rather than transactional—nonprofits that rely on donors, and donors themselves, would be better served. -SD

Written as a love letter to those in pain, Wait encourages us to choose peace rather than harm and seek out a path to peace and freedom from suffering.

SHAMBHALA . COM

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PRACTICING MINDFULNESS Finding Calm and Focus in Your Everyday Life Jerry Braza • Tuttle

Each of the fourteen chapters in this handy little book is short, readily digestible, and presented in plain language.

There are also many reflections and “tests” to engage you, so the experience is not simply about passively reading. Instead you enter into a dialogue with the teacher within your own mind. For example, in the “Why Mindfulness?” chapter we’re asked to consider whether we “measure happiness by anticipated future outcomes” or “suffer from

‘hurry sickness,’” or “deny or push away pain.” Then, we are asked to get specific and consider a “stressful problem” in life and how mindfulness might reduce the distress it’s causing and mitigate some of its negative consequences. In this way, Braza is emphasizing the “everyday life” in the subtitle, so that mindfulness can become less an abstract goal and more of a practical skill that’s inherent to us all and that we can draw on in any situation. -BB

STEP BACK How to Bring the Art of Reflection into Your Busy Life Joseph L. Badaracco • Harvard Business Review Press

What does reflection have to do with succeeding in business? Written for the executive who may not be intrigued by the word “mindfulness,” but who may be convinced by the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard, Step Back is both accessible and well-researched. Badaracco draws from interviews with 100 managers who “had made thoughtful choices about how they wanted to live their lives and what they wanted to accomplish” in this slim volume that’s also a serious download of usable advice.

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Badaracco goes into detail on each of four “design principles” that provide a template for the art of reflecting: Aim for good enough; Downshift occasionally; Ponder your hard issues; and Pause and measure up. These principles reflect not only what’s realistic in a high-paced life, but also some pithy distillations from philosophers like de Montaigne. It’s almost a truism now that you don’t need X time per day to meditate in order to practice mindfulness. Still, this book is a skillful contribution to that message. -AT

GRAMMAR FOR A FULL LIFE How The Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us Lawrence Weinstein • Lexigraphic Publishing

There’s a well-worn admonition, variously credited to Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher, to “watch your thoughts for they become your words, watch your words for they become your actions, watch your actions for they become your character, watch your character for it becomes your destiny.” Lawrence Weinstein might offer a friendly amendment to watch your grammar, for it becomes your way of being in the world.

Weinstein, cofounder of the Harvard Writing Center and now the director of Bentley University’s Expository Writing Program, is equal parts grammarian and mindfulness coach in this nerdishly charming handbook for better living through grammar. He makes the case many a writing coach does in favor of the active voice, which enlivens writing. But Weinstein further notes that the passive voice robs us of agency, making us more acted upon than acting. When we reframe “I’ve been on hold for 10 minutes,” to “I’ve been holding for 10 minutes,” he argues, we can see the choice we have in the matter—and we can continue to hold, or we can hang up. Similarly, he invites readers to consider the imperative form as an opportunity to engage with assertiveness; crossing out and editing as ways to self-improvement; and for those of us who hew tightly to rules of grammar, to make space for new constructions and allow the language and the rules governing it to evolve, because this “can be the occasion for learning how to deal with change of all kinds in this world.”

Chapters include “Grammar to Take Life in Hand,” “Grammar For Morale,” and “Grammar For Mindfulness,” which includes an impassioned argument against exclamation marks because they can be mongers of fear, which is an inspired take on punctuation and its power.

Weinstein even includes a chapter on death and dying, called “Grammar For The End.” Weinstein is terrific company throughout the book: pedantic enough to please the grammar freaks, but with a puckish sense of humor, and a clear and cogent argument that a more mindful life just might begin with good grammar. -SD ●

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point of view

TECH FOR THE GREATER GOOD

by BARRY BOYCE, FOUNDING EDITOR

m

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and create in real time without their members having to be under the same roof. Social revolutions have even been spurred. And yet…

As the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma argues, the world the smartphone has wrought carries many dangers. In the opening minutes, Tim Kendall—former president of Pinterest and an early Facebook executive—says that while digital tech has brought

Social Dilemma that he had no idea the gnarly places such a simple thing would take us to.

The film features the work of the Center for Humane Technology, whose cofounder Tristan Harris’s rallying cry has long been “minimize distraction & respect users’ attention.”

That’s a mindfulness message, but we can’t wait for the world of social media technology to transform itself into a

If we can insert pauses into our automatic behavior, its momentum can be interrupted, and our innate awareness of what’s going on can leak in. us “many good things, we were naïve about the flip side.” That flip side is a potent combination of tech addiction and behavior modification, on a massive scale. The beeps, bloops, and blinks from our little box tap into the same “reward” system that can entice us to polish off a bag of potato chips or a pint of ice cream. Our phone is so vital to us, it’s become like a new appendage. (In his book Irresistible, Adam Alter reports that 46% of teens he surveyed would rather have a broken bone than a broken phone.)

We underestimated how the gods who give us social media gradually, incrementally, insidiously inch our behavior in directions beneficial to their customers.

But, wait, aren’t we their customers? Not so much. Facebook is like the amusement park in Westworld.

Customers come to play, but they are in fact the product. Learning what we “like” and then influencing how we’ll act turns a profit for social media. In fact, the inventor of the Like button, Justin Rosenstein, admits in The

more humane, mindful force for the greater good. That’s a noble goal, but for now, as the expat tech executives who appear in the film tell us: We need to pay attention to our own habits.

The possibility for mindfulness practice to contribute to reversing tech addiction and promoting awareness of how our behavior is influenced lies in the basic pattern the practice sets up: Pause and notice. If we can insert pauses into our automatic behavior, its momentum can be interrupted, and our innate awareness of what’s going on can leak in. We can decide whether we eat that next potato chip or not. It’s time to do so, before 80% of us say we’d rather have a broken bone than a broken phone. Meanwhile, the Dick Tracy in today’s funnies—a cop who otherwise needs an update and upgrade in every conceivable way—has reverted to a screenless wrist radio with an analog watch dial. ● 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.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL

In 1946, at the outset of the baby boom, readers of the “funnies”—what comic strips were often called back then—saw uber-cop Dick Tracy communicate for the first time with his squad using the “Two-Way Wrist Radio.” In the sixties, it became a wrist TV, and the cops communicated using an early form of FaceTime.

Like many children, I thought the wrist TV was super cool, and my friends and I even pretended we had one. We never dreamed that such a gadget could become a reality. Apparently, engineer Martin Cooper thought differently: The two-way wrist device inspired his invention of the mobile phone, which morphed into today’s smartphone, and ironically enough, wrist phones of all kinds. Now, almost everyone is Dick Tracy—connected to our squad and the rest of the world with a device at the end of our arms.

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