SHIFT YOUR HABITS • CALM YOUR ANXIOUS MIND • CONNECT WITH NATURE WHY BEING KIND TO YOURSELF IS THE MOST POWERFUL THING YOU CAN DO
DISCOVER WHAT'S TRUE
Unhook from false ideas about yourself and others
By cultivating authentic kindness toward ourselves, writes Kristin Neff, we’re also connecting with our inner strength and our compassion for the world. p.56
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Lately, I’ve been spending time contemplating what it means to be safe. My answers change all the time: a home for my family, a reliable income, a mask, a vaccine. For women, safety sometimes requires silence or lack of eye contact. Safety can mean freedom from oppression. Sometimes safety, not just for yourself, but for the people around you—your family, your coworkers—requires deep knowledge of your purpose and your boundaries, and fierce honesty in the face of your worst habits.
But safety can also be found in the center of our being. In the spaciousness of our inner knowing. That spaciousness is available to all of us—it’s part of our birthright as human beings. It’s also easily obscured by clouds of doubt, fear, self-judgment, and cultural conditioning. We can fool ourselves into thinking that peace and safety aren’t meant for us. Especially if, like me, you have a hard time with self-compassion.
But, if there’s one thing most of our Mindful contributors can agree on, it’s this: To love your life, you need to love yourself. That can be a tall order for some of us. Which is why, for this August issue, we’ve gathered a host of voices to remind you to include yourself in your circle of care.
On page 18, writer Heather Shayne Blakeslee shares what experts say about how to love your body as it is— reminding us that our bodies are a process, not a product. On page 26, longtime Mindful contributor Elaine Smookler offers valuable insight into how to be your own best friend, even when you’re exhausted or feeling unseen or unappreciated. On page 56, compassion researcher Dr. Kristin Neff explores how we can show up for ourselves with the same fierce energy we use to care for others. And on page 46, 10 powerful women of the mindfulness movement share the insights they’ve gained through years of practice.
There are so many ways this world tries to separate us from our knowing—and sometimes the biggest culprit is our own fearful voice. But with a little self-compassion, perhaps we can awaken to each moment, safe and strong, and open to the wisdom in our hearts.
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Mindful readers share how they connect with themselves and their communities.
How has the meaning of connection changed for you?
“Connection has taken on a deeper meaning. It’s so valuable to connect with those we can’t see on a regular basis. I do miss hugging and look forward to those hugs. They’ll be sweeter when it’s safe again.”
Robin R.
“The more I started to connect, discover, and accept my inner self, I discovered I wanted more company. Then I forgave any misalignments with my family and friends. At some point I realized true connection meant connection to the entire world, just as it was.”
Tiffany P.
“1. Being present when connecting with family and friends.
2. Taking a genuine interest in what makes others happy and showing that you care about what matters most to them.”
Lisa C.
“Normally, connection for me is ‘being there,’ telephonically, virtually and personally. It hasn’t changed; just how much I use them has shifted.”
June N.
“Connection is the realization of oneness.”
Mike M.
Where do you find a sense of community?
“With my book club” mykincloud
“On my meditation app” maslow40
“Meeting friends out for food, drinks, & laughter and staying long after the food is gone!” patzymarie
“With yoga friends” rlsbeachpeace
How much social connection do you need to feel your best?
• EVERY FEW WEEKS
• ABOUT ONCE PER WEEK
• A FEW TIMES PER WEEK
• EVERY DAY
19%
30% 27% 24%
How do you tap into creativity?
Send an email to yourwords@mindful.org and let us know your answer to this question. Your response could appear on these pages.
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@yoga4socialjustice brings people together to use their bodies and learn about diversity, equity, and social justice.
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@cementalbreak offers a colorful reminder to connect with the breath.
← @andreabogart says, “So many amazing moments take my breath away with this little human.”
An awkward portmanteau of calm and entertainment, “Calmtainment” made the Wunderman Thompson
Agency’s list of trends that will define 2021, which means mindful play is on the rise and brands
are beginning to take note. None other than LEGO released an adult line they describe as therapeutic, immersive, and relaxing. There’s a flower bouquet and a bonsai set that are meant to help you focus mindfully as you
play, experiment, and decompress. There’s even a relaxing Spotify playlist featuring white-noise soundscapes made using LEGO bricks. LEGO wants you to toss the instruction book and “enjoy the sheer pleasure of creation, just like the kid you used to be.”
Staff at Bon Appétit and the homecooking website Epicurious spoke out about racism in the workplace after a photo of then editor-inchief Adam Rapoport in brownface circulated online. As a result, Epicurious launched the Repair Project, auditing 35,000 recipes dating back to 1965. They’re addressing issues relating to authorship, appropriation, and
racial insensitivity, editing words like “exotic” and bringing honesty to the history of certain dishes.
While many spent quarantine in tooclose proximity to family members (taxing patience and internet connections), others experienced severe loneliness due to a lack of connection. In response to this, researchers at the Cambridge School of Medicine reviewed the literature on loneliness and found that mindfulnessbased therapy, laughter therapy, and talking about art can all help people feel less lonely. One study even found that robot puppies given to people in long-term care facilities can help take the bite out of loneliness. Meanwhile, people in the US are paying $75 an hour to cuddle with real farm cows. One farm owner, Suzanne Vullers, says her cows are booked months in advance. “When
Keep up with the latest in the world of mindfulness.
people couldn’t hug their friends, or hug their grandkids,” she told NPR, they could still hug her cows Bella and Bonnie.
People tend to act with less kindness and civility in the beginning of the week than they do as Friday approaches, according to a recent study in the Journal of Applied Psychology. They also found mindfulness can help you have a smooth and stable ride through the work week. People who exhibited mindful traits were
less likely to act in an uncivil way, and exhibited less variability in their behavior over the course of the week than their less mindful counterparts.
When harsh February storms stranded millions of Texas residents, the city of Houston got help from its sister city, Karachi, Pakistan. President Dwight D. Eisenhower founded Sister Cities International in 1956, and 65 years later, sister cities around the world support
each other in very real ways. For example, in Houston, the PakistaniAmerican community groups launched a collaborative called Texas Storm Relief Efforts to coordinate flood relief. Volunteers distributed food, water, blankets, and PPE to at least 1,000 families. This was just their most recent action—Texas Congressman Al Green noted that this sister city community collaborative also helped support Houston residents during Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina.
A 13-year-old from Maidenhead, England, is bringing joy to people and pooches alike during COVID quarantine by hand-making and delivering dog treats. His name is Josh and the business is called Mustard’s Miracle Services. He makes the dog treats in his family’s kitchen and delivers them by bicycle to be eco-friendly. Last winter, he donated half of his proceeds to a food charity in his area.
rink manager who let her boys get extra time on the ice when they were young. The former arena manager, Graham Nesbitt, would open up the rink on snow days and after hours so kids could skate and “stay out of trouble.”
Bonnie O’Reilly, the mom of two professional hockey players, Ryan and Cal O’Reilly, donated one of her kidneys to the
Community fridges have been popping up on city street corners, in community centers, and other public spaces in the US, Canada, and the UK (Mindful highlighted Philadelphia’s community fridges in our Winter 2020 issue). The idea is that people can fill the fridges with donated food so others can take what they need.
UK charity Hubbub says fridges in busy locations draw upwards of 1,000 visitors per month.
by B. GRACE BULLOCK
Research gathered from the University of WisconsinMadison, University of Southern California, and others
GETTING ANGRY
Cognitivebehavioral group therapy (CBGT) and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) are frequently used to ease social anxiety. We know little about whether anger—expressing or holding it back—affects how well these therapies work. In this study, 108 adults with social anxiety disorder were randomly assigned to either a CBGT group, an MBSR group, or a waitlist. Their levels of anger expression and social anxiety were assessed before treatment, and social anxiety symptoms were measured following the
intervention and every three months for a year’s follow-up. Both MBSR and CBGT sessions ran for 12 weeks in 2.5 hour sessions. CBGT included psychoeducation, skills for examining thoughts, and gradual exposure to social situations, while MBSR included standard MBSR instruction. Neither intervention explicitly addressed anger. After treatment, CBGT group members who coped with their anger showed greater reductions in social anxiety than those who managed their anger in the MBSR group. Over the follow-up period, higher anger expression was linked to a smaller reduction in anxiety symptoms in the MBSR group. Further research is
needed to explore the effects of expressing or suppressing anger on various therapies.
Researchers in the Netherlands asked one group of adults to perform a 4-minute body scan, and a second group to listen to an audio recording about tourism. People in both groups then drank water through a straw, and identified their first sign of feeling that they’d had enough to drink. They then continued drinking until their stomachs were completely full. Both groups reported having had enough and feeling full at about the same
time, suggesting that such a brief mindfulness intervention did not increase eating-related body awareness.
To date, few mindfulness interventions have focused on the needs of Latinx children and their parents. A recent pilot study examined whether 27 families with 10- to 16-year-old youth who engaged in a communityderived mindfulness intervention would experi-
response to community feedback, the intervention was delivered to groups of parents and children in seven weekly 1-hour sessions in both English and Spanish. It included instruction on mindfulness, stress reduction, and other life and relationship skills. Following the intervention, parents in the mindfulness group reported significantly less stress, and their children noted feeling greater social support from family members than those in the control group.
ence less stress and greater mindfulness, emotion regulation, and social support than a non-intervention control group. In
Researchers wanted to know whether a brief mindfulness training could
improve participants’ working memory (WM) performance under stress. They randomly assigned 162 undergraduate students to one of four training groups: a breathawareness group, a loving-kindness meditation group, a gratitude reflection group, or an attention task group. All trainings were delivered in 12-minute audio instructions. Before and right after training, all participants completed a questionnaire about their mood, and solved simple math problems while simultaneously memorizing a set of letters to assess their memory capacity under stress. No differences in WM were found between the loving-kindness, gratitude, or attentional control groups Those who did breath-awareness training had the poorest memory performance. The take-home: Not all mindfulness practices have the same effect.
Latinx parents who took part in a mindfulness intervention reported significantly less stress, and their children noted feeling greater social support from family members.
Amit Bernstein recounts a pivotal moment in 1990 when his mother found a letter she’d never seen before in her aunt’s filing cabinet labeled “soucis familiale” (family troubles, normally soucis familiaux). “The letter had been hand-written in 1943 by my mother’s parents, Rose and Felix, from a train car in Paris, moments before it departed. The letter asked her aunt and uncle to care for my mother until their return,” he says. “My mother’s aunt and uncle raised her along with her cousins in the years after the Second World War, after she lost her parents, on that train, to the brutality of forced displacement and genocide.”
Bernstein, who earned a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Vermont, followed by a clinical internship and postdoctoral work in California, moved back to his native Israel in 2008 to take a job at the University of Haifa in the psychology department, where he founded the Observing Minds Lab. His lab’s research focuses on ways science can help alleviate mental suffering and promote human flourishing.
That letter, which hangs framed in the childhood home that Bernstein shares with his wife and three kids, is the reason he founded the Moments of Refuge Program, a global
project focused on the transformative impact of Mindfulness-Based Trauma Recovery for Refugees (MBTR-R).
“Moments of Refuge, and my group’s work to care for the well-being and human rights of refugees and asylum seekers, is part of my own effort to find and to make meaning from injustice, trauma, and loss from forced displacement. To find and create humanity where it’s most needed, despite the odds. I am deeply grateful for the privilege to do this work.”
An unprecedented 79.5 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes by conflict, persecution, and brutality. MBTR-R aims to serve effective, safe, brief, cost-effective, transportable, and scalable mental health interventions to displaced people around the world. And a recent study indicates its effectiveness, showing a reduction in chronic and debilitating mental health resulting from trauma, loss, PTSD, depression, and anxiety.
“We must bring the most ambitious, rigorous, and compassionate science that we can envision to help refugees and asylum seekers,” Bernstein says. “I believe that science, with a focused human rights mission, is critical to help people heal from, and ultimately thrive following, forced displacement.”
We must bring the most ambitious, rigorous, compassionate science we can envision to help refugees and asylum seekers.”
Getting stuck in painful emotions brings me back again and again to an insight that has profoundly changed my life—selfcompassion is essential to homecoming. I have to love myself into healing.
When emotions are strong, my first step toward kindness is usually pausing, opening to the feelings, and telling myself “this belongs.” It helps me remind myself that there’s nothing wrong with the arising of irritability, anxiety, or aggression. They are our limbic caretakers, our survival brain’s primitive way of trying to protect and promote our well-being. Even self-judgment is well intended because it tries to
improve us in ways that will make us more lovable and worthy. Seeing those feelings as primitive forms of self-love helped me accept them as part of my human experience. And that acceptance was the beginning of loving myself into healing.
An allowing presence is the ground of love. As we then embrace the pain of our limbic caretakers with a tender heart, there is a profound and healing shift: The identification with an angry, judgmental, deficient self dissolves. It is clear that while emotions and stories will come and go, this loving awareness is the truth of who we are. Any moment of remembering this is a moment of true freedom.
An expression of nostalgia for how things used to be pre-COVID-19. The before times were “before masks and social distancing, when we could occupy restaurants and concert halls without risking the spread of disease,” according to Webster’s.
When you find yourself stuck in self-judgment, pause for a few moments to honestly face the suffering of believing you are “not OK.” Notice where you feel that suffering in your body. How is it arising in your mind? Then offer some gesture of kindness and understanding to these painful feelings—you might place your hand on your heart and softly whisper to yourself, “Please trust your heart.” Or “Please be kind.” Notice what happens when your intention is to love yourself into healing. (Read more about Tara on page 48.)
Excerpted from Trusting the Gold: Uncovering Your Natural Goodness by Tara Brach. Copyright © 2021 by Tara Brach. Cover & Interior Illustrations © 2021 Vicky Alvarez. Published by Sounds True in June 2021.
Tame it: Despite our best efforts, a word or an image can pull us inward and our thoughts can spiral into “what if.” When you find yourself ruminating on the before times, take a deep breath, focus on the sensation of breathing, and kindly observe your thoughts without judging them.
Card games have been around since the 9th century, enjoyed by mystics and magicians, homebodies and high rollers alike. Here are three ways cards games have been mindfully reimagined to be more inclusive, relational, and healing.
You may have caught his meditations on the Calm and 10% Happier apps. Now you can study with Je Warren in person.
During this weekend retreat, you learn how meditation works from the inside and how to adapt your meditation to fit your own unique circumstances and nervous system. Total beginners as well as more experienced practitioners are welcome.
A new deck of cards aims to deliver community-based end-of-life planning for Chinese-Americans. Reported in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, the cards are used in gatherings called Heart to Heart Cafés, which encourage meaningful conversations about death and end-of-life care. Groups are led through a card game with end-of-life prompts written out in both Chinese and English. The prompts cover spiritual, financial, social, and physical concerns, with participants choosing which cards are most important to them. Facilitator Leyan Li says the game has a twofold emphasis: to open up conversations about end-of-life wishes, and to help empower more people to fill out advance directives.
Traditional gender norms are toppled in the Gold Silver Bronze deck, created by Dutch card fan Indy Mellink. Seeing how existing playing cards reinforce sexist gender hierarchy, she dreamed up a genderless deck of playing cards which takes the antiquated images of king, queen, and jack and transforms them into gold, silver, and bronze.
At their core, games are a way for people to bond, and a new card game, Parents Are Human, brings a deeper sense of bonding to family game night. Cofounder Joseph Lam created this bilingual game as a way to learn about his aging parents while bridging the language barrier as a first-generation Chinese-American. Parents Are Human is a game that aims to build relationships and express feelings of love and gratitude that can often go unsaid.
Our take on who’s paying attention and who’s not
by AMBER TUCKERThat driver’s license may be expired, but it’s the caring that counts: A man and his daughter, with help from a veterans’ organization, successfully returned a missing wallet to its owner, former Navy meteorologist Paul Grisham—53 years after Grisham lost the wallet while posted in Antarctica.
Icons and symbols representing older people usually conform to negative stereotypes about aging. To help change this, the UK’s Centre for Ageing Better has released a series of age-positivity icons, free for anyone to use, that depict older individuals and couples thriving instead.
Tara Kiwenzie, an Indigenous woman from Wikwemikong Unceded Territory (on Manitoulin Island, Ontario), brings joy, comfort, and a cultural flair to face masks by creating beautiful, colorfully beaded “ear-savers,” modeled after barrettes that powwow dancers traditionally wear.
In a proposal that sounds like science fiction, scientists suggest sending a huge sample of cryogenically frozen sperm, egg, spores, and seeds (encompassing some 6.7 million earth species, including humans) to the moon, in case of events risking mass extinction. It’s estimated this would require 250 rocket launches.
“Blue Check Homes” is a satirical website. In creating it, San Francisco artist Danielle Baskin hoped to spur critical thought around the assumed authority of the “blue check” on social sites like Twitter that authenticate identity, but her stunt was taken at face value: Nearly 500 citizens applied requesting the blue-check crest on their home.
Fisher Price recently launched a “Home Office” playset with a pretend laptop, headset, cell phone, and takeout coffee: “All the gear little office workers need for important pretend business.” What’s next, Baby’s First Burnout? ●
Every
Enjoy
Our bodies are a process, not a product.
“Drink water. Get sunlight. You’re basically a houseplant with more complicated emotions,” reads a meme that was ubiquitous online in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It wasn’t unusual in those days to need a reminder to tend to the basics of body maintenance. Between shelter-in-place orders, high anxiety, and disruptions of all kinds to the routines many of us have for self-care, the last year and a half have wreaked havoc not just on bodies, but on our feelings about those bodies.
The pandemic has affected our bodies and our body image in numerous ways, according to studies in the UK and North America. Research reveals increases in eating disorders and sedentarism, as well as an increased desire for thinness among women and muscularity among men. The
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
By Heather Shayne Blakeslee • Illustration by Spencer Creelman Heather Shayne Blakeslee is the founder of Red Pen Arts and publisher of Root Quarterly in Philadelphia.stress and uncertainty of COVID-19 has been written on the body, and on the way the mind observes and judges the body.
“The cultural stigma around weight gain and larger body size and the idealization of thinness is so pervasive. Nobody escapes it,” says Diana Winston, UCLA’s Director of Mindfulness Education and author of The Little Book of Being And that has long been the case. That pervasiveness isn’t due to the pandemic—though it has been heightened by it.
Even elite athletes—from four-foot-eight gymnasts and nimble jockeys to muscled shot putters and swivel-hipped soccer players—don’t always love their strong and talented bodies, which, it’s worth emphasizing, come in incredibly different shapes and sizes. In a 2019 post on the Relentless Athletics website, Callie Smith, recently a Division 1 diver, shared her story of forced diets and ongoing body shaming that left her in tears after most practices. “I spent my entire freshman year hating myself,” she wrote. Eventually a nutritionist intervened in the abuse from her coach.
If even elite athletes are feeling body shame, what about us mere mortals? Whether you’re a guy who isn’t loving his “dad bod,” or you’re
one of the throngs of office workers whose commute is now to the couch, the connection between the shape we’re in and the way we experience the world, including our mental health, is clear. Sometimes dark or judgmental thoughts arise from the messages our culture gives us about who is considered healthy or attractive. Sometimes we judge ourselves even when no one is watching, playing the role of our own worst critic.
Jessamyn Stanley, a much-loved yoga teacher and mindfulness practitioner, and the author of two books, including the forthcoming Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance (see review on page 66), makes a point of working with many different kinds of people and body types, and continually works to accept her own larger body. Our bodies are how we show up in the world, she says. “Your skin color, your body size, where on the planet your body was born, what it is shaped like, what it has and doesn’t have, what it does and doesn’t do.”
At the same time, she encourages us to remember that how our bodies look isn’t everything. She advises us to do three things to break the cycle of rumination about how we look: checking in with how we feel, even if the emotions are painful; remembering that our body is →
The connection between the shape we’re in and the way we experience the world, including our mental health, is clear.
a process, not a product; and, finally, always going back to our breath.
“It’s important to notice your body, and the way that you communicate with your body," says Stanley. Trying to have a healthy body without noticing how you're talking to yourself is "like slapping a BandAid on a deep infection,” she says. “So much of negative body image comes from worrying about how you look and worrying about what other people are going to think about how you look. And for me, it’s really helpful to just think, ‘How do I feel right now?’”
Noticing your self-talk about your body can help break the cycle of judgment. Then we can take the next step, says Stanley. “The ‘how do I feel’ can guide everything,” she says. “How do I feel can guide what you eat, it can guide what you wear, it can guide what type of activity you do.”
Eating shouldn’t be a fraught activity, and Diana Winston is a proponent of the Intuitive Eating movement, and the work of Christy Harrison, an anti-diet activist whose work is backed by a large trove of data that tells us that diets, which Harrison characterizes as “life thieves,” just don’t work.
Stanley says that, “If you can focus on how you feel, then you can start to trust yourself, trust how you perceive the world. and that you don’t need to look to anyone else for guidance or approval. You don’t need to look to anyone else for guidance or approval. You don’t even need to ask yourself ‘How do I look?’ because you know how you feel.”
Winston is collaborating on a pilot study at UCLA to look at whether self-compassion practices related to one’s own body might reduce weight stigmatization in others. She theorizes that the combination of mindfulness and loving-kindness practices may engender a profound shift in how we feel about our own forms.
“If you can just focus on how you feel, then you start to trust yourself and trust how you perceive the world, and that you don’t need to look to anyone else for guidance or approval.”
JESSAMYN STANLEY, YOGA TEACHER AND AUTHOR OF YOKE: MY YOGA OF SELF-ACCEPTANCE
Winston also encourages a focus on what the body can do. “If it’s not exactly the size and shape that we want it to be…what’s it capable of? What’s joyful?” she asks. “Tuning in to the goodness in the body regardless of the shape,” she says, is a way to begin shifting focus.
“Practices of loving-kindness are so important right now,” says Winston. If you're new to loving-kindness practice, she advises starting “gently and slowly.” Think about someone you love and imagine them sending you love. She emphasizes that it may be too hard at first to send yourself that love, so pick anyone, even the family dog or cat! You might then move on to picking a part of the body that you do like, and sending kindness there yourself. Use a phrase like, “May I be at ease.”
You can also use mindfulness to check in with your body in any moment, any day and hour and minute of your life, and to accept your body as an ongoing process that is constantly changing.
Your body doesn’t always look the same, Stanley reminds us. “It’s in a never-ending state of change from start to finish.” Here, Stanley says, is where the real acceptance is. “Every stage in the process is important. From birth, to babyhood, to adolescence, to car accident, to baby, to… There are so many things that happen to you in your life that you can’t really be hung up on what your body looks like.”
Loving your body as it is means accepting all the ways it will change. “All that matters is that you’re breathing, you’re still here, and focusing on that breath and letting the breath guide everything,” Stanley says. “The breath can connect you to everything that is everlasting. The body is not everlasting. And that—that’s OK,” she says.
Our self-esteem can always shift, says Winston. “Using mindfulness to notice the thoughts and feelings that arise in relation to weight is a great practice," she says. “Connecting with the health of the body and the feel of the body is key.” ●
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AUDIO
What the Mirror Can Teach You Mirror gazing expert Tara Well offers a practice to see yourself with kinder awareness. mindful.org/ mirror-gazing
As opioid addiction rates climb, a mindfulness-based therapy helps chronic pain patients by opening up space for acceptance and curiosity.
By Caren Osten Gerszberg
Emily Johansson takes opioids to help with her myofascial pain syndrome. While the medication provides some relief from daily chronic pain, five years ago she noticed a dangerous pattern: She had begun taking them to curb her anxiety as well. Mindfulness, Emily says, helped her emerge from a very dark place. “Pain wants to control your brain and get your full attention until you give it a pain med,” she says.
Since 2016, Emily’s used techniques she learned in the Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) program, pioneered by University of Utah professor Eric Garland, PhD. Aimed at decreasing patients’ use (and misuse) of prescription drugs, the program teaches mindfulness and savoring techniques to ease pain and craving, while shifting awareness toward pleasant emotions. Johansson learned to “drink in” the sights, sounds, and smells in her present moment as they flow through her body. Sometimes instead of a pill, she’ll opt for a walk to the park. “When I am feeding the baby ducks and geese, I don’t think about the pain,” she says.
Chronic pain—experiencing pain every day for at least three months—afflicts more than 20% of American adults. But pain itself is not the only problem. Opioids, such as oxycodone (OxyContin) and hydrocodone (used in Vicodin), are prescribed to treat chronic pain, but are highly addictive, and their misuse has skyrocketed. About two million Americans aged 12 and older have a problem with opioids—and in 2019, reported deaths from drug overdose in the US reached an all-time high of almost 72,000, with opioids involved in more than twothirds of the total deaths, according to the CDC.
The probability of long-term opioid use rises sharply after just five days of taking them. “Most people begin with a prescription for pain relief and take opioids as prescribed by their physicians,” says Garland. But some patients “begin to slip down this cycle toward greater dependence on the drug and migrate into misuse.” The standard treatment for opioid use disorder is not without complications and controversy, and the surge of misuse and fatal overdose has prompted a much-needed examination of alternative treatments.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caren Osten Gerszberg is a writer, certified positive psychology life coach, and mindfulness teacher. She helps clients find balance, resilience, and positivity during challenges. Also a contributor to The New York Times and Psychology Today, Caren writes about health and wellbeing, mindfulness, and education.
Garland’s research focuses on using mindfulness therapeutically to target chronic pain and opioid use simultaneously. The results of a
2014 study, led by Garland and published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, showed the MORE program significantly decreased participants’ pain and opioid misuse. The number of participants who met the qualifications for opioid use disorder decreased, from the beginning of the study to its end eight weeks later, by 63%. A 2019 follow-up study, published in the journal Science Advances by Garland and colleagues, showed that for a sample of chronic pain patients who had been misusing opioids and then underwent the mindfulness intervention, the more their brains were activated by rewards such as “enjoying the beauty of nature, social connections, and positive life experiences,” the less they misused opioids in the future.
Garland says that one of the major theories about how and why addiction occurs asserts that, over time, drug users become hypersensitive to drugrelated cues, such as “driving past a pharmacy →
“When people get wrapped up in fighting their pain, they end up unintentionally causing suffering, which makes the subjective feeling of pain worse.”
BRANDON YABKO, PHD
or seeing a pill bottle, and dulled to the pleasure derived from natural, healthy rewards.” As a result, drug users lose touch with the ability to feel joy naturally, says Garland, and may “take higher and higher doses of the drug to obtain comfort and relief.”
“We need a treatment,” says Garland, “that targets not only addictive behavior but also the pain that drove the person to start taking opioids in the first place.”
The MORE program aims to train the participants’ minds to be aware of automatic habits and engage more fully in their presentmoment experience, using three components:
• Mindfulness practices, such as mindful breathing and body scans, lay the groundwork for learning focused concentration as a way to gain a nonjudgmental stance toward pain and craving. Brandon Yabko, PhD, a psychologist who has led MORE groups with veterans in Garland’s lab, says they use chocolate—asking participants to examine the urge to eat it—to practice being mindful of cravings. Participants are then asked to imagine the chocolate is their pain pill, and are given the choice of eating or throwing out their “pill.”
• Reappraisal helps participants to reframe the meaning of a stressful life event, such as conflict at work or with family, in order to see that event with greater flexibility. Then,
after a breathing practice, participants are asked to look at their beliefs from a different perspective. “Most of the time, they begin to see that there are other ways to look at this event, and some even hold off on using their pain medication for a few minutes, hours, or maybe longer,” says Yabko.
• Savoring pleasant events teaches participants how to mindfully focus on a naturally enjoyable experience, as a way to concentrate on and expand positive feelings. During a meditation session, for example, participants learn to focus on the colors, scents, and textures of fresh flowers, noticing how pleasure and joy arise. With mindfulness as part of recovery therapy, chronic pain patients learn to change their relationship to pain. They can go from a nonaccepting, combative, judgmental perspective, to one of acceptance, openness, and curiosity. “When people get wrapped up in fighting their pain, they end up unintentionally causing suffering, which makes the subjective feeling of pain worse,” says Yabko. “Opioid misuse often has that suffering component.”
Bringing mindfulness to a pain treatment plan reduces pain intensity by teaching people to shift from a more emotional way of processing pain to a sensory way of processing pain, Garland’s research finds. Unlike focusing on pain as emotionally agonizing, mindfulness can help
people deconstruct the experience into its sensory components—such as heat, tingling, or tightness—and to notice neutral or even pleasant sensations.
In a recent, full-scale clinical trial involving 250 chronic pain patients—currently under review for publication—the results showed that the MORE therapy program “is efficacious for reducing chronic pain and opioid misuse,” Garland says. The intervention is based on the neuroscience of addiction and targets specific mechanisms underlying addictive behavior and chronic pain.
“[MORE] restructures reward processing, from valuation of drug reward to valuation of natural rewards, and also uses mindfulness practices to strengthen self-regulation of automatic drug-use habits,” says Garland. “In our studies, we were able to measure how MORE changes the brain’s ability to regulate pain and
respond to natural rewards, as well as deepen our understanding of exactly how these changes in neural mechanisms happen.”
Bottom line: A mindfulness-based intervention, Garland says, “reduces the brain’s activity in response to drug-related cues.”
With practice, patients come to see their cravings “like emotions that come and go, they don’t last forever, and patients begin to experience the transient nature of these experiences,” says Yabko. For Emily Johansson, learning how to “zoom in on her pain, accept it, and let it go” has made a huge difference. “I went out to my car after it snowed one day and I stood there, watching the snowflakes,” she says. “They had spikes on them and are such a simple, cool part of nature, something I’d never noticed before.
When I slow down, I can see there are things going on in my life that can be enjoyable.” ●
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Does this sound familiar? You’re exhausted, you can barely get out of bed, you feel unappreciated, unseen, sad. You’re doing everything right: meditating, writing in your gratitude journal, eating well, volunteering. Yet days and nights are still colored by shades of blue.
We all want to feel well, but here’s the thing: Traveling in darkness can also be a part of a mindful life. Sometimes, a large part. Most of us will suffer and feel low at some points in our lives. All moods are part of the human experience. At any given time, feeling crushed, fried, or burnt might be on the menu.
When we look to mindfulness to block out unwanted emotions or adverse life experiences, we’re bound to be thoroughly disappointed. Mindfulness can’t keep us from hard times. But choosing to live mindfully can keep us from making a rotten situation worse.
Whether you experience chronic depression, perpetual ennui, or just a feeling that life is a losing battle, you can find ways to soften the situation, even as the burning bogs of despair burn even brighter.
These ways are broadly available to anyone who seeks them. Be your own best friend. Be there for yourself. Treat your low mood with curiosity and gentleness. We take the mindful path when we show up for our own suffering, honor its presence, and find ways to just be there with it. ●
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
By Elaine SmooklerFeeling unwell can be hard work sometimes—and that might be a sign that it’s time to stop trying so hard. Taking the mindful path means making room for suffering, too.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.
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When we feel low, our perspective on life can shift. A painful moment can cause us to see the world as hideous. Why not turn this darkly charged moment into a reminder to tune in to beauty? As we look for Choose kindness always. There will never be a situation where being unkind to yourself, others, or the situation that confronts you, is going to make anything better. Ever. You don’t have to like how things are going, but you can soothe the savage breast.
See if you can recognize anything that helps you feel OK. Only you know how much it cheers you up to sing along to “I will survive!” Or maybe you’ve noticed that eating a For some, meditating regularly can be a way to increase tolerance to the most distressing thoughts and feelings. If we wait until things are at their worst to meditate, focusing on breath might be agonizing. We practice regularly to increase our tolerance to life’s most unbearable
beauty, we may find many lovely things to soothe and refresh us. The sound of the wind, the satisfying crunch of leaves underfoot, an empty pizza box that dances in the breezy moonlight.
tuna sandwich makes a day a little less gloomy. Or how once you get in the shower, the water feels so good. What’s on your list?
In moments when you might not feel utterly terrible, try to notice what gives you some small joy.
Feeling low can cause an over-amplification of adverse experience. So notice that you feel overwhelmed and seek to remind yourself that the sky may be falling—or maybe it just feels that way. moments. We practice to bring greater awareness and compassion to whatever is being experienced: Breathing in, we feel what’s here, we notice that it feels like acid, or knives, or pressure—we don’t ignore what we are feeling. As Dr. Shelley Taylor describes it, we tend and befriend, as best we can.
Notice how you are seeing the world, right now.
Tend with tenderness.
Practice.
(It’s what gets you to Carnegie Hall)ILLUSTRATION BY ANN_ETC / ADOBESTOCK
Our own cognitive biases, combined with a fast-paced chaotic environment, wears down our ability to discern false narratives from facts. Amishi Jha explains the science behind what it takes to shift away from divisiveness and boost your brain’s resilience.
Imagine you’re 16 months into a global pandemic. False narratives are running rampant. Social and political divisiveness is growing. Tempers are flaring as a stress-induced cognitive fog has settled in. OK, you don’t
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amishi Jha is a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami. Her current projects investigate how to best promote resilience in high-stress cohorts, using mind-training techniques that strengthen the brain’s attention networks. She is author of the upcoming Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day (HarperCollins, October 2021).
have to imagine—this is the reality we’re living in. Under these circumstances, it’s urgent that we correctly categorize ideas as true or false, yank attention back when it’s been pulled away, and broaden our perspectives. Yet the very cognitive resources we need in order to accomplish all this have become depleted because of the high-stress circumstances we’ve been enduring. Is there a way out of this terrible Catch-22 of our collective moment? Yes, and it involves practicing mindfulness in action.
At the University of Miami, my research team and I study the impact of
mindfulness training on high-demand groups like soldiers, first responders, and elite athletes. We research questions about their psychological and cognitive resilience, as well as their ability to perform at their best when circumstances are extraordinarily stressful. The bad news is that over high-stress intervals, their mood sours, cognition fails, and performance suffers as they go on autopilot. The good news is that mindfulness training protects against these effects and helps them bounce back. Findings like these lead me to ponder the role of mindfulness in boosting our collective resilience. →
First, let’s discuss what we’re up against—the three built-in features of the human brain that may contribute to the spread of false information and divisiveness.
1. The brain has a truth bias: The moment you understand something you read or hear, your brain believes it’s true. This is why the moment just after is so critical. This is when your brain does the cognitive work of assessing if new information should be “un-believed.”
2. The brain has a novelty bias: Attention is captured by novel, surprising, fear-inducing information, whether on your social media feeds or generated in your mind. Novelty’s ballistic and automatic pull on your attention can happen without your awareness, over and over again.
3. The brain has a confirmation bias: What you believe narrows your attention. Information that aligns with what you already believe is given precedence in your attention networks, while disconfirming information goes virtually unnoticed.
To halt the rise in false narratives and divisiveness, we must overcome these brain biases. This means we need to be aware of the ways in which the brain can lead us astray.
It is a cornerstone of democracies around the world that they highly value free speech: We believe ideas should be freely expressed. Just like a marketplace for produce, democracy is a marketplace of ideas; and just like fruits and vegetables, ideas can be inspected and selected for consideration, or disregarded.
This deeply held belief that humans are capable of comprehending ideas before accepting or rejecting them undergirds modern science
and our democratic freedoms. It also resonates with our intuitions about how we think: We feel we are capable of understanding and evaluating an idea before deciding if it’s true. But the research does not support this intuitive take. Many studies have now confirmed that understanding an idea and believing in its truth occur simultaneously—it’s only after that initial belief that we can engage in further cognitive processing to un-believe an idea. Why? Because the brain’s capacity to comprehend ideas—which is an evolutionary outgrowth of its capacity to perceive sights and sounds from the environment—has a built-in “truth bias.” Seeing something co-occurs with your belief in its actuality. You see a cup on your table, and you don’t question whether it is really there or not. Seeing is believing. And, it turns out, comprehending is believing, as well.
In research studies, participants who are overloaded or time-pressured and told that the ideas they presented
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are false, still believe them to be true. They even make consequential decisions guided by this false information. This happens not only when participants are told the ideas are false after they are presented or as they are presented, but also before they are presented.
How does this happen? Again, studies suggest that after the initial belief stage, we further probe ideas to test their truthfulness, but we need three things to do so: knowledge, reasoning, and cognitive resources (attention and working memory). When participants were overloaded with demands or time-pressured (conditions that deplete attention and working memory), they failed to un-believe false information, because they lacked the cognitive resources to do so.
Multiple waves of COVID outbreaks, economic uncertainty, social unrest and political divisiveness, personal grief, hardship, and frustration describe some of the causes and consequences of our collective experience. In other words, the conditions are ripe for depleted attention and working memory—and there has been a commensurate rise in the spread of false information. Which brings us to another feature of your brain: Your attention is captured by novelty.
Our brains evolved to pay attention to information that is novel, surprising, and fear-inducing because that skill gave us a survival advantage. Now, false information (not sad or inspiring—but novel and fear-inducing information) spreads more rapidly, broadly, and deeply than true information, according to a study of viral Twitter posts. And we can’t blame it on bots. The researchers found that people are uniquely culpable for the disproportionate viral spread of false information. In addition to being
captured by novelty, information processing is narrowed by confirmation bias. We selectively pay attention to information confirming our already held views, becoming increasingly blind to disconfirming or contrary information. This makes us more entrenched in our views and breeds divisiveness.
To make matters worse, we are no longer living in a broad marketplace of ideas. For over a year now, the pandemic has constrained our social outings in the real world; meanwhile social media algorithms are creating social silos, where people interact almost exclusively with others who share the same views. And, even if you have managed to keep a multitude of perspectives in your social media feeds, anonymity and lack of direct face-to-face contact with others has eroded civility. Civil discourse, which has been a corrective force against false news, is a rarity. So, what can we do about this?
Many of us lean on our mindfulness practice in our personal lives to help us manage distressing thoughts and feelings generated within our own minds. We learn to pay attention to body sensations in the here-and-now, when a difficult memory or a worry
threatens to overwhelm. We remember that thoughts are not facts, which loosens their grip on us. We embody compassion and kindness.
And now, we must apply mindfulness in our social and political lives. The good news is that mindfulness training bolsters the cognitive fuel we need to resist our brain biases. There is growing evidence that mindfulness training strengthens attention and working memory, even in high-stress circumstances. Alongside our dedicated mindfulness practice, we need to do the cognitive work to un-believe false information. We can use our knowledge, reasoning skills, attention, and working memory to evaluate information as true or false, and actively work to un-believe it when false. This involves noticing when our attention has been grabbed by novel, fear-inducing content. We notice if it’s overly narrowed on confirmatory information, and remember that we have the power to redirect and broaden our attention. This practice allows us to be intentional before we act. Start by not mindlessly clicking, liking, retweeting when online.
Just knowing we have biases doesn’t unhook us from them, because many of our judgments are routed in processes we don’t have conscious access to. We think others are prone to bias, but that we are exempt. Not so—we just have a blind spot for our own biases. Knowing this means we must have humility. We must take note of how often we have civil discourse and dialogue with those who don’t share our views. Our bubbles will keep us insulated from reality unless we challenge ourselves to engage with those outside of our bubble more often.
By engaging in mindfulness practice, we are strengthening the very capacities we need to curb the spread of false information, reduce divisiveness, and expand understanding. Mindfulness in action is how we give peace a chance—in our own minds, and in our communities. ●
Novelty’s ballistic and automatic pull on your attention can happen without your awareness, over and over again.
The natural world and its processes have much to teach us about the flexibility creativity, and resilience that’s already within us, just waiting to unfurl.
BY KELLY BARRON
The lodgepole pine cone is a curious thing. Squat and egg-shaped, the pine cone seals its symmetrical scales shut with a sticky resin, protecting precious seeds within.
Such a design appears to disadvantage the lodgepole. Survival seems slim when your seeds are locked in a botanical safe. And, yet, lodgepoles dot landscapes as wide-ranging as the wild, sparsely populated Yukon and the balmy coasts of Baja, California—growing in cold, wet winters and dry, hot summers.
Extreme heat such as that produced in wildfires, it turns out, is one of the magical keys that unlock the lodgepole’s seeds, scattering them to the ground. (The other is direct sunlight, of the kind rarely available in dense forests.) Lodgepoles don’t just survive catastrophes. They thrive in their aftermath.
As clever as the lodgepole’s propagation strategy is, its ingenuity is not unique. Endlessly inventive, unrelenting, and forever evolving, nature’s hallmark is resilience. Engineers, designers, and scientists have long looked to nature, emulating its genius to innovate and improve upon human pursuits and inventions from wind turbines to bullet speed trains. The field of biomimicry, or biometrics, observes the way “nature uses diversity, redundancy, decentralization, and self-renewal and self-repair to foster resiliency,” as the Biomimicry Institute puts it. Japanese engineers designed the Shinkansen Bullet Train’s nose after the narrow, cone-shaped beak of the kingfisher, for instance, mimicking the bird’s ability to soundlessly dive into water and solving the train’s problem of creating sonic booms as it rushed into tunnels.
Of course, we can learn far more from nature than how to design faster trains. For around 3.8 billion years, nature and the millions of creatures who inhabit the planet’s humid jungles, sun-drenched deserts, forested mountain ranges, and expansive waterways have devised strategies to endure. We too can apply nature’s wisdom to improve our mental, emotional, and physical well-being, learning to adapt, collaborate, and renew ourselves so that we not only live more sustainably on earth, but also—like a towering lodgepole pine—we flourish in the face of adversity.
In a bright, white-walled laboratory at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, a teal- and orange-spotted tokay gecko hangs upside down, effortlessly adhering to a vertical pane of glass.
Dr. Alyssa Stark, a Villanova biology professor, runs the lab. And for more than a century, scientists like Stark have been on a biological quest to understand the gecko’s remarkable adhesive capabilities. Densely packed, tiny hairs within the lizard’s toepads and stiff tendons in their feet grant them Spider-Man-like superpowers, allowing them to climb up walls, hang from ceilings, and stick to everything from sandpaper to wet Teflon. A five-inch tokay in Stark’s lab can produce an adhesive force equivalent to carrying 11 pounds, or the weight of a gallon of paint up a wall, without slipping.
More astonishing: The gecko didn’t always have this superpower.
“Geckos have independently evolved and lost their adhesive abilities multiple times,” says Stark, her voice animated with a mix of awe and enthusiasm.
The gecko not only embraces change, it flexibly adapts to the demands of its ever-evolving environment. It’s a theme that plays throughout nature, across ecosystems, and among the species who live within them. Languid three-toed sloths can swivel their heads up to 270 degrees to spot predators before they strike, thanks to →
We often have the perception that nature is remote. It’s somewhere out there in the distance, and to fully access it and benefit from it we have to leave our workaday lives behind. Wherever we are, nature surrounds us and we’re a part of it.
Symphonies of birdsong play overhead as we load groceries into our car trunk. The tangy scent of earth dampened by dew fills the morning air. And even alongside highway on-ramps, flowers grow.
Biomimicry expert Jane Benyus has said when she’s outside she tries to quiet her analytical mind. She listens, observes, and puts herself in the presence of nature, allowing its beauty and surprise to unfold before her.
We can do the same whether we’re walking along city streets or sitting quietly in a meadow. Next time you step outside or travel deep into the wilderness, try the following mindfulness perspectives and practices to invite the wonder of nature into your life and learn a bit from its majesty.
Whenever you’re outside, open up your senses. See the sky overhead, feel the ground beneath your every step, look for insects that might be hiding in narrow sidewalk cracks. Nature can be warm, wondrous, and welcoming, but also raw, gray, and punishing. When we allow nature to be just as we find it, our perspective widens, inviting delight or invigoration and helping us put our daily worries into perspective, even if only for a few moments.
Whether we realize it or not, we spend most of our time indoors. In doing so we cut ourselves off from the wideranging benefits of being in nature, which include everything from lessening depression to boosting our immune systems. As we begin our day, we can become more mindful about the indoor/outdoor balance we’re striking. And if we’ve had a roof over our head for too long, we can plan a walk, a day at the beach, or a hike in the woods.
Awe is a powerfully uplifting emotion and most everything in nature is awesome—whether it’s a raspberry-sherbetcolored sunset or the elegantly repeating spirals found in the bright-yellow center of a daisy. We can invite more awe into our daily lives by marveling at nature’s genius. Next time you’re outdoors, take a few moments to bring your full, patient attention to an aspect of the natural world. It can be something as small as a blade of grass or as all-encompassing as a mountain vista, as mild as a mud puddle or as fearsome as a lightning storm. By more closely observing the natural world, we can discover the splendor we often take for granted but that always surrounds us. ●
the evolutionary gift of as many as three extra neck vertebrae. Gorillas’ teeth evolved to chew tough leaves when mushy fruit is scarce. And Red Crossbills fly hundreds of miles from their primary Pacific Northwest habitats when seeds are sparse in their hometowns.
We also need to adapt to changing conditions. Our tendency to bristle against change is as reflexive as an eye blink. And we’ve devised plenty of structures and systems to keep change at bay—particularly in industrialized countries where everything from air conditioning to DoorDash seeks to supersede nature’s inconveniences in the service of unending human comfort.
“We’ve been fed a story that the world is not changing,” says Danya Baumeister, an Arizona State University professor and cofounder of the Biomimicry 3.8 consultancy, which works with universities, organizations, and corporations like Nike and Patagonia to find solutions in nature to tricky design puzzles.
While we’ve learned to handle small, predictable change—taking shelter under umbrellas when it rains, flicking on lights when it’s dark—large, unpredictable events, such as global pandemics, upend us, revealing our reactive inflexibility and exposing our vulnerabilities.
We can’t prevent upheaval. But if we look to nature we can learn to become more resilient. We can start by identifying critical functions for well-being: food, shelter, work, occasional pleasures and recreation, and so on. Then, →
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We too can apply nature’s wisdom to improve our mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
mindful.org/ nature
ensure we maintain them by duplicating the diversity, redundancy, and decentralization found in nature. Ecosystems—whether wetlands or deserts—contain a diversity of plants that are distributed across the landscape in a decentralized pattern. So, when a storm threatens, the ecosystem has a life insurance policy.
“We are hardwired to behave like nature because we are nature,” says Baumeister.
We can plan for contingencies, and adapt to what life serves us. Buying our groceries online and using curbside pickup during pandemic shutdowns, or planning birthday celebrations that don’t rely on gathering indoors, having socially distanced book-club meetings outdoors in lawn chairs six feet apart, or converting kitchens and living rooms into home offices and schoolrooms. And we can make those contingency plans stronger by turning to our networks—swapping childcare duties with another family in our bubble, borrowing a neighbor’s laptop when ours conks out, participating in mutual aid groups that have sprung up across the country. Like nature, we can endlessly problem solve and evolve.
And we may even find opportunity in change. For Carmen Ventrucci and her family, that meant finding a way to strengthen family bonds and have an enriching experience, even during a chaotic time. Ventrucci, a leadership coach in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, was grateful to be in a position to take advantage of change when her school district gave parents the option of distance learning during the pandemic. She and her husband were able to rent out their home and take their six kids and dog on the road, living, working, and going to school in a recreational vehicle towed behind their Chevy Yukon. Equipped to troubleshoot everything from patchy internet to COVID-19 outbreaks, the family hit the road for nine months in hopes of creating a memorable adventure in the midst of the pandemic.
Ventrucci knows nothing is guaranteed—and that her family is lucky to have the resources to respond to circumstances in this way. “Change is going to happen no matter who you are,” she says. “We’re creative enough to embrace whatever happens on the trip.” And, she adds, that includes her family changing its mind and coming home early if needed. →
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Imprinted in our cultural imagination is the silhouette of a lone wolf against a blue-gray sky, howling at a dinner plate of a moon. But a different picture emerges in the dusty foothills of the Angeles National Forest, at Wolf Connection, an educational sanctuary and retreat center. There, 30 wolves rescued from fur farms or roadside attractions form a unique pack that teaches essential lessons of belonging to at-risk youth, families, and adults who participate in Wolf Connection’s therapeutic programs.
“A lone wolf is a dead wolf,” says Amanda Beer, Director of Programs for Wolf Connection. Relationships between wolves, who work together in a shared circle of leadership where even alpha males care for pups, provide potent examples of interdependence.
“Part of our self-protection as humans is to isolate,” says Beer. “But we have a primal need for connection.”
And nature is more connected, collaborative, and communal than we realize. Survival of the fittest refers not to the competitive strength of a species but to a species’ “fitness” to adjust to its changing environment.
While conflicts arise between species jockeying for territory or food and during mating, they’re short-lived. It takes too much energy to fight. Instead, nature adapts through cooperative relationships.
Wolves work together as a pack to bring down prey that a single wolf couldn’t. Oxpeckers feeds off parasites on a rhino’s back while removing the pests from its hide. And 90% of flowering plants have relationships with mycorrhizal fungi that help colonize roots, passing nutrients to neighboring plants and trees in an underground network of connectivity called the wood-wide web.
Humans too are interconnected—consider how easily COVID-19 has spread and also how the social seclusion of the pandemic has taxed our mental health and reinforced our need for togetherness. The pandemic has also revealed our innate ability to collaborate for mutual survival. Wearing masks, standing six feet apart, and getting vaccinated are forms of social solidarity— ways we work together to keep each other safe.
But in a high-tech world where digital connections often prevail over face-to-face friendships, human bonds fray. Even before social distancing, three in five adults reported they felt lonely, creating an epidemic of loneliness. The pervasive give and take that exists in nature offers us a model for how we might deepen friendships and create supportive networks.
Karen Allen, a restoration ecologist and biomimicry consultant, suggests we form relationships within the context of a helpful exchange and ask: How can I benefit a potential partner, friend, or colleague, and what do I need from them? Allen notes that relational exchanges in nature aren’t necessarily equivalent but they reward both parties.
A weathered flyer taped to lamp posts throughout a Los Angeles neighborhood puts Allen’s point in a human context. In bold red letters, the sign asks: “Are you OK?” and lists phone numbers for folks to call if they need help with grocery shopping, picking up a prescription, or if they just want to talk to someone. Whoever calls for help might appear to get more out of the exchange, but whoever answers the call will likely feel good for doing so.
As wildfires blazed through the Western US in the fall of 2020, images of San Francisco under an apocalyptic sky filled the media. So, too, did news of forests, property, and lives lost to wildfire. But as fires quelled and smoky skies turned to faded denim, the scorched earth offered itself to new life. For millions of years, fires have been part of nature’s cycle of disruption and regeneration. Life on earth doesn’t evolve in a straight line. It oscillates, as gently as the ebb and flow of a low tide—or as cataclysmically as the destruction and rebirth of an old-growth forest.
“Life is hard, but it persists,” says Meg Krawchuk, an associate professor at the College of Forestry at Oregon State University. Looking out her office windows at maple trees waving in the wind, Krawchuk relays how species like maples inherited traits for rapid regrowth. So much so, there are websites devoted to →
techniques for weeding maple seedlings from lawns, flowerbeds, sidewalk cracks, and gutters. Other opportunistic species leverage major disturbances to foster their growth, setting off a chain of events that sparks ecological renewal.
In the aftermath of a wildfire, lodgepole seedlings can be so numerous they cover the ground like a lime-green carpet. Ash-infused soil—rich with nutrients such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—nourishes plants such as the aptly named fireweed. Sunlight flooding onto forest floors once darkened by tree canopies feeds the fireweed’s pink flowers, fueling its spread. And black-backed woodpeckers forage for wood-boring beetles nesting in fallen trees that provide life long after their own death.
Nature breaks down, lets go, and allows the next succession of growth to continue. Human beings have a harder time with loss. We seldom greet life-shattering events such as divorce, job loss, or illness as periods of renewal and regrowth. But by observing nature’s cycles, we can learn to accept the disruption and renewal that occurs in our lives. We can acknowledge the messy middle of transitions and the inevitable growth they foster.
Like a maple tree, extroversion might help us network for new employment and move on after a job loss. Or, like a lodgepole, a catastrophe might propel us into a new stage of growth. While we often hustle through transition, nature allows time for restoration. Trees shed their leaves, drawing in energy for winter dormancy and springtime renewal. Box turtles and bears enter torpor and hibernation. The sun rises and sets. Bound up in the busyness of life, we often ignore the wisdom of following activity with rest.
“Rest is not work’s adversary,” writes author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. “Rest is work’s partner. They complement and complete each other.”
If we pause, we might discover that our renewal not only mirrors nature but also lies within it—in the thick woods, gleaming oceans, and windswept chaparrals that beckon beyond our hurried lives.
When wildfires sullied the sky in her hometown of Bend, Oregon, giving restoration
ecologist Karen Allen headaches and making her skin crawl, with deep gratitude for her circumstances, she was able to recharge as she always has. She drove three-and-a-half hours west through cascading mountains and low-lying valleys to the coast. At the shoreline, she pulled on her brown rubber boots, breathed deeply, and engaged her senses, wading in tide pools filled with emerald-green sea anemone.
On the way home, she stopped at an oldgrowth forest where western hemlock and douglas fir have stood for 500 years. Looking up at the trees’ imposing trunks and soaring limbs, she wondered how many fires, windstorms, and snow loads they’d survived.
She thought about the vast spans of time through which nature endures, and, in a moment of hopefulness, she thought that we, too, can withstand the tumult of life. We, too, can renew. ●
Nature is more connected, collaborative, and communal than we realize. Survival of the fittest refers not to the competitive strength of a species but to a species’ “fitness” to adjust to its changing environment.
Research shows that time in nature offers an abundance of psychological and physiological benefits. However, according to data gathered by Statista, over half of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 2021, with around 82% of North Americans, 80% of Latin Americans, and 75% of Europeans residing in cities. Luckily, even if you don’t have easy access to lush forests or fresh sea air, opening up to the benefits of nature is as simple as tapping into your five senses.
BY AVA WHITNEY-COULTERTuning in to your five senses can help you experience and benefit from the bounty that nature offers—no matter where you live.
People who look out their windows at a natural landscape report higher life satisfaction, happiness, and self-esteem, and less loneliness and depression. But if your view offers more grey concrete than green leaves, consider some houseplants or even artwork depicting nature, which have been shown to reduce stress and offer an increased sense of mental health.
LOOK Take a peek out your window or around your room and be intentional about noticing nature—the birds flitting overhead, the way the sun hits the leaves on a potted plant, or the dandelions pushing through cracks in the pavement. How does the nature around you look today? How is it different from yesterday, or a season ago?
Whether in the city or the wilderness, total silence makes us feel like something is amiss, partly because, in nature, other animals tend to go silent when they sense danger. Natural sounds like birdsong, crickets chirping, and flowing water give us information that helps us to understand our environment and to assure us that we’re safe.
Smell isn’t our strongest sense, but its association with our emotions is powerful. Participants in a 2014 study associated the smells of beeswax and fresh summer air with happiness, and others reported that natural scents from blooming plants make them feel more calm and alert while boosting their mood.
LISTEN If you can, open your window or go for a walk and listen for bird chatter or the wind through the trees. If you live in a city where the ambient rush of cars seems to penetrate every corner, recordings of nature sounds can also help you feel grounded and relaxed.
Food can be a source of sensory and emotional appeal, as long as we’re paying enough attention to notice how it makes us feel. Meanwhile, folks who grow their own food aren’t only reaping the benefits of their crops, but tend to feel more self-fulfilled, subjectively happier, and affirmed in their identity.
NOTICE What are the natural scents in your home or neighbourhood? How do they change over the course of a day or week? If the fragrance of nature is smothered by the odors of city life, house plants like jasmine and silver drop eucalyptus smell great and help keep the air fresh.
SAVOR Herbs like basil, oregano, and thyme can thrive indoors so you can grow some of your own food and acknowledge where the food comes from. This is a simple mindfulness practice that can help even if you lack outdoor garden space. When it comes time to eat, try to focus on the tastes and textures to help you appreciate food more.
When we walk barefoot on soft, damp grass, feel the papery texture of a dried leaf in our hands, or brush against the delicate petals of a flower, we feel more connected with nature.
FEEL Touch is also a powerful force in social bonding and comfort, and one of the primary ways we can access those benefits is by petting an animal. Petting a dog, for example, is shown to help people relax, reduces blood pressure and heart rate, and provides social bonding without the energy it takes to have a conversation.
There are many ways to meet the moment. If you practice mindfulness, it’s safe to say you aim to meet any given moment with wisdom and skill. That can feel like a tall order these days. And while turbulent times certainly offer endless opportunities to practice, sometimes you need a little help. A little borrowed wisdom. A mentor or role model, even. What we realized as we built our third annual list of powerful women of the mindfulness movement was that there’s no shortage of powerful women practicing mindfulness, offering wisdom and mentorship in their own communities. We’re shining a light on these women, chosen by their peers, who are also shining their light for you.
what a moment it’s been. What remains, amid loss and suffering, uncertainty and fear, is the breath. Ten women of the mindfulness movement offer the wisdom of their practice, from their hearts to yours.
Meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach has been curating moments of connection throughout the pandemic. Every Wednesday she hosts live mindfulness classes online; Saturdays she hosts small-group question-and-answer sessions. “Saturday has been so touching for me. The big questions people bring these days are about how to deal with the judgment and anger they feel toward those who don’t agree with them.”
Among her most popular practices is her RAIN practice, which clears a path for honest, direct contact with our own vulnerability, self-compassion, and healing. “First, I say, if you’re feeling anger toward someone, don’t try to ignore or get rid of it. There’s something in that anger that’s asking for your attention—anger alerts us, but then we need to keep on deepening our attention. [Then] you make a kind of U-turn and ask yourself, ‘What feels vulnerable inside me?’ By contacting that hurt or fear with care, you’ll reconnect with the tenderness and goodness of your own heart. And then, you can have more choice about how to respond wisely.”
She’s not just teaching this, she’s putting it into practice. “I am continually making mistakes and continually at the mercy of my conditioning. I’ll read something in the news and just immediately think, ‘That’s the bad guy.’ And then I do RAIN on blame, because whenever blame comes up in me, I know I’m in a trance. All I’m seeing is some idea of what’s wrong with another. I’m not seeing their humanity, their suffering. And I’m not inhabiting the wholeness of my heart.” (Read more from Tara on page 13.)—HH
“I didn’t realize until I started practicing yoga just how much of my life was being lived inside of boxes,” yoga teacher and author Jessamyn Stanley says. “I decided all of these boundaries for myself.” Boundaries that included what a fat, Black body like hers could do and where it could fit in. The yoga studio she practiced at featured a mirrored wall, and those boundaries became obvious when she was on the mat.
“I was very much consumed by self-hatred, and I would be looking at myself in these yoga postures or attempting to practice these yoga postures,
and I would just be like, ‘You can’t do it. Why did you even think you could come? Look at everybody else. You don’t look anything like them.’”
But Stanley stayed with it, and began to feel a change. With repeated exposure, she was able to see the boxes she was putting herself in. “Just seeing them and accepting that they’re there and through that process, establishing compassion for myself.”
She kept practicing, at home, and began filming her yoga sessions and posting them on Instagram, looking for feedback on her postures. She soon
“When you are compassionate toward your human imperfection, you can open to feedback with an undefended heart and continue awakening.”
TARA BRACHPHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE DIANI (TARA BRACH) TARA BRACH
Psychologist, Author, Meditation Teacher
“We are in a period of deep collective healing and healing only happens through tearing it open and letting the wound breathe.”
JESSAMYN STANLEY
discovered that she wasn’t the only person who was putting her in a box. “I was surprised by the number of people that seemed to believe that fat people don’t do physical things. I was like, ‘Fat people do all kinds of stuff all the time.’
So really what we have is a visibility issue.”
Stanley pursued yoga teacher training, though she wasn’t sure the world needed another yoga teacher. But she soon came to another realization. “There’s so many different ways to show up in this world and we’re not all speaking the same language, and if the way that
I speak and convey myself can resonate for even one person, and that one person finds compassion for themselves and then can share that compassion with the world, that is motivation to me.”
That compassion is necessary, Stanley notes, as we navigate this moment. “We are in a period of deep collective healing and healing only happens through tearing it open and letting the wound breathe. And that is when the actual new skin can form. And so we’re in this experience of deep healing and also, very deep collective sadness. It’s just all got to be there.” —SD
In her 2010 paper “Superwoman Schema: African American Women’s Views on Stress, Strength, and Health,” Dr. Cheryl Woods Giscombé writes, “The legacy of strength in the face of stress among African American women might have something to do with the current health disparities that African American women face.” Dr. Woods Giscombé developed this framework to investigate the epidemic of health and health-care disparities plaguing Black women—from adverse birth outcomes to untreated depression.
“It’s important to remember that we, Black women, are not alone,” she says. “Our ancestors have passed the baton to us, and we decide what we can do to continue that legacy in the time that we are here and widen the gap so others can continue to come through.”
Dr. Woods Giscombé experienced the effect of stress on her own well-being while pursuing a PhD in social and health psychology, and a master’s in nursing. When she encountered Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are, she recognized mindfulness as the piece she needed to create a healthy life for herself—and to help others.
“We are always trying to negotiate how we use our energy; how do we use it to keep moving forward and engage in a way that will be useful for future generations,” she says. “It’s important to engage in the most effective way, engaging your strengths without harming yourself. Mindfulness provides the wisdom to do that.” —OL
In her 17 years as a high school principal, and a teacher before that, Tovi Scruggs-Hussein witnessed passionate teachers doing their best while being overworked and undersupported. And she noticed that while the teachers struggled, the students were underserved as a result— especially students of color.
“I deeply believe that working with children and education is sacred. We’re literally growing the future of humanity,” she says. She sees pain and oppression continuously occurring in the education system as teachers try to connect across differences of race and trauma, without knowing how to do so, and without having done the work to heal themselves first.
So, she says, to create a better system for the kids, she now teaches teachers. She founded a consulting company called Tici’ess which provides information and training for educators so they can reach their full professional potential, therefore helping kids reach their full academic
potential. She also provides programming for leaders in other fields, as well as for people interested in learning about trauma and understanding race and racism. Her consulting is based in emotional intelligence and leadership training, neuroscience, and mindfulness.
Scruggs-Hussein has practiced mindfulness and meditation for over 25 years. She lost her mother to AIDS when she was in grade nine and says she turned to overachievement to temper her loneliness. After finishing two degrees in three years at UC Berkeley, she recognized that she had not made peace with her mother’s death. In her attempts to reconcile her grief, she connected with a group of African healing women who instructed her to simply sit and breathe.
“They really felt that I was my own healer and that healing is about empowerment and everything we need is within us, and so that’s literally how I approach all of my work,” she says. —AWC
TARA HEALEY Health Educator, Mind the Moment Founder and DirectorA lifelong curiosity about how the mind works led Tara Healey to mindfulness.
“I wasn’t coming to mindfulness from a place of dissatisfaction, but a realization that life throws us a lot of curveballs,” Healey says. “So, how do we manage the things we wish didn’t happen?”
She experienced one of life’s curveballs when Harvard Pilgrim, where she was a health educator and organizational development professional, went through financial turmoil in 2005. With professional fear and anxiety rampant, she wondered if mindfulness could help her and her colleagues navigate the upset.
“Mindfulness is about seeing what’s actually happening, clearly. It’s this capacity to understand change and impermanence,” Healey says. “It’s a way of relating to everything that happens to us with more receptivity and interesting curiosity.”
What began as a six-week introductory course on mindfulness in the workplace became Harvard Pilgrim’s Mind the Moment program. Healey’s initial goal to “help people suffer a little less” has bloomed into a flourishing program that now provides workplace mindfulness education to more than 10,000 people across all kinds of industries.
“My hope is that with so many more people who are practicing, all of us can show up in the world with a greater degree of kindness and compassion. Because when you go out into the world, and you engage, you’re going to bring that kind of discriminating wisdom that can really change things.” —OL
“Healing is about empowerment, and everything we need is within us.”
TOVI SCRUGGSHUSSEIN
After an early career as a nurse, Susan Bauer-Wu returned to graduate school—and started meditating. “I was in my 20s, my mother had died, I was coming out of a bad marriage, and I was going back to graduate school.” Alone and in a new city, Bauer-Wu saw an ad that said: Feeling stress? Learn to meditate.
“Meditation helped me realize I had more control over my life than I thought I did—that my life was impacted by my thoughts and my feelings.” As she practiced more, she experienced “micro moments of peaceful mind and peaceful heart—these little moments of light were coming in through the dark and the more I practiced, the more those moments began to expand and become second nature.”
Path and purpose aligned when she did her postdoc in the late ’90s at the University of Massachusetts Medical School where Jon Kabat-Zinn was leading the Center for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic. “I met Jon and immediately began my training as an MBSR teacher. Then I went to Harvard and began studying mindfulness with people with serious illness and cancer.” Now, as president of the Mind & Life Institute, she integrates her scientific and clinical background with the wisdom of mindfulness.
For Bauer-Wu, the pandemic has highlighted some essential lessons. “We’re all taught that we’re mortal. And we all know that it’s important to slow down in order to wake up. But even with that intellectual knowledge, most of us didn’t do it. We just kept going on as if those things weren’t truths.” Mindfulness practice teaches that in slowing down and listening, we gain access to our own wisdom. “Deep inner listening can guide you on how to show up— help you discover what you’re called to do.” —HH
Nurse-Midwife, Mindfulness Teacher, Founding Director of the Mindful Birthing and Parenting Foundation
If you talk to Nancy Bardacke about her work developing and teaching Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP), she’ll likely introduce you to her daughter. Bardacke says Daisy was a heck of a labor— three years—and it hurt like hell to push her out. Daisy is the nickname Nancy has given to her book Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body, and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond in which she lays out MBCP. And Bardacke views the process she went through to write Daisy as similar to the human universal that sparked her curiosity at the beginning of her career: childbirth.
When Bardacke first started practicing as a
licensed nurse-midwife, she felt tension between her mindfulness practice and her work with expectant parents. “My meditation was my own practice,” she says. “There weren’t teachings about how to bring mindfulness into your life. And there was this kind of disjunction.” She wished she could tell those parents about being in the present moment when they experienced fear and pain. “But I couldn’t do it,” she admits. “I didn’t have the language.”
Bardacke can still point to the spot where she was sitting at the Mount Madonna Center in California when a way to weave her two worlds together fell onto her meditation
“Taking the time to practice, and really, taking time to listen to what’s emerging from the practice, can guide you on how to show up—help you discover what you’re called to do.”
SUSAN BAUER-WU
SUSAN BAUER-WU
Researcher, Scholar, Teacher
“If we’re going to evolve into more caring, compassionate, connected creatures, mindfulness seems pretty key.”
NANCY BARDACKE
cushion. She describes the exact moment in onomatopoeia—bam! At a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) retreat for healthcare professionals led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Bardacke realized that she could adapt the format to help people in her care.
“Having a child is a profound life transition and it’s normal to have fear because you’re going into the unknown,” she says. Mindfulness equips expectant parents and healthcare providers with the skills not only to reduce stress and pain during pregnancy, but to foster kind, compassionate parenting.
Two decades since Bardacke first brought MBCP
into the world, she’s now stepping back and thinking about how her work might serve future generations. With 164 MBCP teachers across 28 countries and promising new research coming out of the Mindful Birthing and Parenting Foundation, she hopes we’re moving toward a global mindful childbirth movement. “Being an agent of change is difficult and midwifing awareness is a challenge,” Bardacke says. However, she emphasizes that a mindful approach is more important than ever. “If we’re going to evolve into more caring, compassionate, connected creatures, this seems pretty key.” —KR
As the gravity of the pandemic dawned, Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang considered how to help herself and her colleagues stay afloat in the storm to come.
“From a healthcare professional perspective, we know that burnout was a pandemic even before the COVID-19 pandemic,” Dr. Liang, director of pulmonary integrative medicine at Coastal Pulmonary Associates, says. She knew the demands on medical professionals would only increase, so she set about creating a support system.
She recruited eight collaborators in the medical field from across the US and founded the Mindful Healthcare Collective in mid-March 2020. They offer up to three free online mindfulness-based sessions per week, tailored to healthcare workers on topics from basic breath-awareness meditations to mindful eating to anti-racism work.
Mindfulness has long been a pillar for Liang. She says staying intentional about daily loving-kindness meditation and mindful breaks in her routine has become essential since the beginning of the pandemic. “If I don’t show up to the best of my ability, I’m less able to help those that I serve.”
Liang hopes the collective will still support healthcare workers even as the stress of COVID lessens. “Providing this service to my colleagues near and far has fed my soul.” (Read a review of Ni-Cheng’s Mindful Healers podcast on page 67.) —AWC
DR. NI-CHENG LIANG PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY NANCY BARDACKE; BY ANDREA BERRY PHOTOGRAPHY (NI-CHENG LIANG)
Ruth King found ease for her inner crybaby when she was young—in the plumbing systems her father worked with, and the jazz music her mother played. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the heat of the civil rights movement, she understood that “feelings were dangerous to express. Being a crybaby was like being a target.”
comma, not a period. “One of the things that mindfulness teaches you is that what’s happening in my mind is not personal, permanent, or perfect. So you can relax into the nature of it being impermanent, that what’s happening right now is not going to be forever.”
When neuroscientist Sara Lazar began studying meditation, she was one of the few. “Initially everybody was skeptical,” she recalls. “I can’t tell you how many times I heard someone say, ‘Meditation is ephemeral, there is nothing to measure.’” Though her PhD work focused on molecular biology, adopting a mindfulness practice while in grad school was so profound for her that her research focus shifted. Her first study, published in 2005, examined the brains of long-term meditators and found the practitioners had significantly more gray matter in several brain regions than the non-meditator control group—findings that were met with “a lot of doubt.”
In the 16 years since, though, “all these findings have been replicated and extended,” and there’s been a major shift in the scientific community’s approach to mindfulness and meditation.
Along with the very outward-facing work of heading the Lazar Lab for Meditation Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, Lazar is equally engaged with her inner, personal mindfulness work. She says the practice can help to create a more compassionate society through increasing our awareness of thoughts and actions. “We all think we are kind and compassionate people, and with mindfulness we start to become aware of the times when we act in ways that are perhaps not in line with our values,” she says. “As you start to practice, you become aware of so many details that you previously ignored. Mindfulness really can change your life.” —AT
Her father showed her the plumbing system beneath a building. “I was struck to see a system of meaning at play. In order for the water to flow, it had to be aligned and connected.”
Meanwhile, at the jam sessions her pianist mother hosted, Ruth saw the musicians working with suffering. “They found a way to express that sense of struggle creatively.”
These two lenses gave Ruth a way to be. “Together it just created this freedom and lyricism inside my heart and mind that I could then bathe the crybaby, inconsolable parts of myself, and it became a base of inquiry for me.”
That led Ruth to her work as a therapist and an organizational development consultant, and as founder of the Mindful of Race Institute and training program.
And while Ruth says her “crybaby” still cries, she knows that crying is a
This lets Ruth honor the sorrowful parts of herself without letting them take over. Because there’s work to be done.
“I do a lot of work around race, understanding what you bring to racial harm and what you can bring to racial harmony. I find myself in a place where I can be more responsive, less on fire, but more with fierce clarity. As an elder, it’s important to me to not waste my energy. I want it to make a difference.”
This requires Ruth to be mindful of the past with an eye on the future—while living in the present. “I think about my ancestors, people who have been in this struggle for generations. So there might be a feeling of urgency, but I don’t think we should expect that it’s going to happen in the next moment or in our lifetime even. But we are responsible for the seeds we plant because they will bloom. We’re seeing blooms of what’s been planted in the past.”—SD
“Be willing to be with yourself as you are with love and compassion.”
CHERYL JONES
mAUDIO Guided Practices
Find a collection of meditations from each of the women featured in these pages.
mindful.org/ women-ofmindfulness
“We’re seeing blooms of what’s been planted in the past.”
RUTH KING
Authentic self-compassion is empowering, and practicing it can help create the change we need.
BY KRISTIN NEFF
For women, it’s easy to internalize the message from our culture that we are the weaker sex, helpless maidens who need a big, strong man to save us. For too long we’ve been taught to value dependence over independence, to be attractive and sexy—not as a way of expressing ourselves, but as a means to attract a man who can protect us. We don’t need men to protect us, we need to protect ourselves. Women are strong. We handle the pain of bearing children. We hold families together and skillfully navigate interpersonal conflict and adversity. But until we learn how to stand up for ourselves with the same fierce energy we use to care for others, our ability to take on the world’s big challenges will remain limited.
Some people worry that self-compassion will make them soft, but it actually gives us incredible power. Olivia Stevenson from the University of Northern Colorado and Ashley Batts Allen from the University of North Carolina examined how self-compassion and inner strength were linked in over 200 women. They found that participants with higher scores on the SCS (self-compassion scale) felt more empowered: They felt stronger and more competent, asserted themselves more, felt more comfortable expressing anger, were more aware of cultural discrimination and committed to social activism. These findings are echoed in other research showing that self-compassionate women are more likely to confront others when needed and are less afraid of conflict.
The three elements of self-compassion— self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness—each have an important role to play when compassion is aimed at protecting ourselves. When we’re fighting to keep ourselves safe, the three components of self-compassion manifest as brave, empowered clarity.
From the book Fierce SelfCompassion lc by Kristin Neff. Copyright © 2021 by Kristin Neff. Published by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Reprinted by permission.
This short practice cultivates fierce self-compassion in service of brave, empowered clarity.
1
Think of a situation in your life in which you feel the need to protect yourself, draw boundaries, or stand up to someone. Maybe you’re being taken advantage of or treated unfairly, or there’s something happening to a group you identify with that is unjust.
2
Connect with mindfulness. Slowly and with conviction, say to yourself: “I clearly see the truth of what’s happening.”
3
Call on the wisdom of common humanity, especially the power of connection, so you can draw strength from others while protecting yourself. Say to yourself, “I am not alone. Other people have experienced this as well.”
4
Now, put a fist over your heart, as a gesture of strength and bravery. Commit to being kind to yourself by keeping yourself safe. As a reminder, assert confidently, “I will protect myself.”
5
Finally, put your other hand over your fist and hold it tenderly. The invitation is to combine the fierce energy of brave, empowered clarity with the tender energy of loving, connected presence.
6
Give yourself full permission to feel the force of your anger, your resolve, your truth, but also let this force be caring. Call on your fierceness to commit to taking action, while still keeping love alive? ●
Some people worry that self-compassion will make them soft, but it actually gives us incredible power.
Our automatic reactions are the result of unexamined habits buried deep in our bodies. Even anxiety can become a habit. Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judson Brewer says that mindfulness and curiosity can help us weed out unhelpful habits and create the space for well-being to flourish.
As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, I’ve been doing research for decades, and I’ve loved learning and discovering new things about the way our minds work. But I’d have to say that the single most interesting and important connection I’ve made is the link between anxiety and habits—why we learn to get anxious, and how even that becomes a habit.
Anxiety hides in our habits. It hides in our bodies, as we learn to disconnect from our feelings through myriad different behaviors. While psychologists and treatment specialists have identified several strategies for breaking harmful habits like anxiety, overeating, and procrastination, a therapy’s effectiveness often depends on one’s individual genetic makeup. Fortunately, modern science may have revealed how certain ancient practices can bring the old and new brain together to defeat these harmful habits, no matter whether you’ve won or lost the genetic lottery.
Wait—we only have one brain, right? you may be asking. You’re not wrong, yet in a difference sense, our brain is more complex. What’s sometimes called our “old brain”—that is, the collection of brain structures that evolved early on in human existence—is set up to help us survive. In addition to reward-based learning (the process that sets up daily habits and even addictions), it has another trick up its sleeve: It takes what it learns and moves the learning into “muscle” memory as soon as it can. In other words, our brains are set up to form habits so we can free up the brain space to learn new things.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Judson Brewer is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and thought leader in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery. He is currently Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University, and has practiced mindfulness for more than 20 years. He is also author of The Craving Mind (Yale University Press, 2017).
Imagine getting up every morning and having to relearn how to stand, put on your clothes, walk, eat, talk—you’d be exhausted by noon. In “habit mode,” we act quickly, without thinking, as though our old brain is telling our new brain: “Don’t worry, I’ve got this. You don’t have to spend energy here and can think about other things.” This division of labor is partly how the newer parts of our brain that evolved comparatively later, such as the prefrontal cortex, were able to evolve the ability to think and plan ahead.
This is also why old habits are hard to change. No one wants to spend a beautiful weekend indoors cleaning a cluttered closet when there’s still space to shove in more junk. It’s only when the closet is stuffed to the gills that you are forced to clean it. Well, it’s the same with your brain, which won’t bother with the old stuff until it reaches a critical level. The newer parts of your brain would much rather spend time on “more important” matters such as planning your next vacation, answering emails, learning the latest tricks for staying calm in a frantic world, and researching what the current nutritional trends are.
Besides serving as the location for thinking and planning ahead, the prefrontal cortex is also the part of the brain that you count on for controlling your urges. If you see a doughnut, your old brain impulsively tries to pounce on it, thinking, Calories! Survival! The prefrontal cortex also helps you keep your New Year’s resolutions (and ironically, it’s that same inner voice that judges you when you fail).
Now, an anxiety habit doesn’t just magically disappear simply by the realization that it is born and bred through repetition. The first step is to recognize our “habit loops”—patterns that consist of a trigger, a behavior, and a result (see “Why Does My Anxiety Keep Coming Back?” on page 64). Then we can use strategies in order to change entrenched bad habits—even an anxiety habit.
…and how well they work (or don’t work) to calm your mind.
When you tap into your willpower reserve, your new brain is supposed to tell your older brain to take a hike and simply order the salad instead of the hamburger, right? If you’re anxious, you should be able to tell yourself to relax, and then be more relaxed. Willpower seems like it should work, but there are two big caveats.
First, recent research is calling into question some of the early ideas on willpower. Some of these studies have shown that willpower is genetically endowed for a lucky subset; still other studies have argued that willpower is itself a myth. Even studies that acknowledge willpower as real tended to find that people who exerted more self-control were not actually more successful in accomplishing their goals—in fact, the more effort they put in, the more depleted they felt. Buckling down, gritting your teeth, or forcing yourself to “just do it” might help in the short term (or at least make you feel like you are doing something), but are unlikely to work in the long term.
Second, while willpower may be fine under normal conditions, when you get stressed (saber-toothed tiger, email from the boss, fight with a spouse, exhaustion, hunger), your old brain takes control and overrides your new brain, basically shutting the latter down until the stress is gone. So exactly when you need your willpower—which resides, remember, in the prefrontal cortex/new brain—it’s not there, and your old brain eats cupcakes until you feel better and your new brain comes back online. Think of the prefrontal cortex this way: As the youngest and least evolutionarily developed part of the brain, it is also the weakest.
If we found it easy, when anxiety reared its ugly head, just to tell ourselves to stop being anxious, I would happily be in another line of work. That’s not how our brains work, especially when stress and anxiety are shutting down the very parts that are supposed to be reasoning us through a tough spell. If you don’t believe me (or the data), try this: The next time you’re anxious, just tell yourself to calm down and see what happens.
Dr. Judson
Brewer offers simple steps to interrupt your habits by noticing how curiosity feels in your body.
mindful.org/ curiosity
If you have a craving for X, do Y instead. Like willpower, substitution relies on the new brain. This strategy is backed by a lot of science and is one of the go-to strategies in addiction psychiatry. For example, if you want to quit smoking but crave a cigarette, eat candy instead of lighting up. This works for a subset of folks, but as research from my lab and others has shown, it may not uproot the craving itself. The habit loop stays intact—the behavior is simply changed to something healthier. (Okay, okay, we can argue about how healthy candy is later, but you get the idea.) Since the habit loop is still there, this also makes it more likely that you will fall back into the old habit at some point in the future.
Substitution is also a strategy suggested for use in handling stress and anxiety. For example, when you’re anxious, distract yourself by looking at pictures of puppies on social media. This won’t fix our anxiety (nor our procrastination), and our brains start to tire of these tactics.
If you are tempted by ice cream, don’t keep cartons of it in the freezer. Again, this strategy involves the pesky new brain. Several labs studying priming an environment have found that people with good self-control tend to structure their lives in such a way that they don’t need to make self-control decisions in the first place. Getting into the habit of exercising every morning or buying healthy food at the grocery store makes staying fit and cooking nutritiously a routine, so it’s more likely to stick. There are two caveats here: (1) You have to actually get into a habit of doing the healthy thing; and (2) when you slip, because
your brain has grooved your old habits much more deeply than your new ones, you’re prone to fall back into the old habit pattern and stay there. How does priming your environment work for anxiety? You can’t not keep anxiety in your freezer or avoid the anxiety store so you aren’t tempted to pick one of its 31 flavors up on your way home from a hard day at work. As nice as an “anxiety-free zone” in your house sounds, even if you build it, the anxiety will come.
Anxiety hides in our habits. It hides in our bodies, as we learn to disconnect from our feelings through myriad different behaviors.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, defines mindfulness as “the awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.” Basically, Kabat-Zinn is pointing to two aspects of experience: awareness and curiosity.
Let’s unpack that a bit. Our old brains react to positive and negative reinforcement to determine what to do, and then are really good at turning that behavior into habits. If you aren’t aware that you’re doing something habitually, you will continue to do it habitually. Kabat-Zinn describes this in terms of operating on autopilot. If you’ve driven the same road a thousand times, your trip becomes pretty habitual. You tend to zone out and think of other things while you’re driving—sometimes to the point where you don’t even remember how you got home from work. Is this magic? No, it’s habit.
Building awareness through mindfulness helps you “pop the hood” on what’s going on in your old brain. You can learn to recognize your habit loops while they’re happening, rather than “waking up” at the end of them when you’ve almost crashed the car.
Once you’re aware of your habit loops—when you’re on autopilot—you can then get curious about what is happening. Why am I doing this? What triggered the behavior? What reward am I really getting from this? Do I want to keep doing this?
Curiosity is a key attitude that, when paired with awareness, helps you change habits—a connection backed up by research done in my lab and by others. Curiosity is key to being open and receptive to change.
Carol Dweck, a professor and researcher at Stanford University, talked about this when she contrasted fixed and growth mindsets. When you’re stuck in old habit loops (including judging yourself), you’re not open to growth. Staying out of habit mode frees up the new brain to do what it does best: make rational and logical decisions.
While scientific research into mindfulness is still in its early stages, studies from multiple labs have found that mindfulness specifically targets the key links of rewardbased learning. For example, my lab found that mindfulness training was key in helping smokers recognize habit loops and be able to decouple cravings from smoking. In other words, patients could notice a craving, get curious about what it felt like in their bodies (and minds), and ride it out, instead of habitually smoking. Breaking this habit loop led to five-times-greater quit rates than those from the current gold-standard treatment.
My lab found some remarkable shifts in habitual behaviors when people learn to understand that habit-loop process and apply mindfulness techniques. Learning to pay attention led to behavior change not only with smoking but also with problem eating and even, as our clinical studies show, with anxiety itself.
I’m a “fixer.” Here’s how mindfulness helps me choose to listen instead of fix.
You know the maxim, “Don’t just do something, sit there!”? This is a simple and powerful paradox that has had big effects on me both personally and professionally. If a patient of mine is getting anxious or worried while in my office (which can result from simply telling me about something that has happened or discussing an upcoming event), I might catch that social contagion and become anxious or worried (“Oh no, this is serious. Will I be able to help her/him?”).
Why? For one, if I start going down the anxiety rabbit hole and my prefrontal cortex has trouble thinking, I might habitually react to my own anxiety and jump in to try to “fix” my patient. This usually results in making things worse, as then my patient doesn’t feel that I understood him or her, or the solution isn’t really a good one because we haven’t gotten to the root cause of what was making him or her anxious (because we were inadvertently focusing on me). Rather, by being there, deeply listening to my patients, I am often doing the best thing I can do for them in that moment: empathizing, understanding, and connecting. My willpower instinct, which is to do something, is a habit loop itself (well-meaning but misguided) that I can simply observe. Observing that instinct—letting it bubble up in my consciousness before it fades— is really the only necessary “action,” and ironically the most effective one. ●
From Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind by Judson Brewer with permission from Avery, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Judson A. Brewer.
Sometimes willpower and reframing aren’t enough to break a habit. Here’s why anxiety keeps pulling our strings, and how we can break the cycle.
We easily recognize our anxiety when it shows up as an anxiety attack, or when a cascade of anxious thoughts is triggered by a stress-inducing event like public speaking. Yet anxiety is a lot less noticeable when it’s our constant companion—part of the background noise in our thoughts on a regular basis. In those situations, it’s most likely that anxiety has become a habit.
“But how can anxiety be a habit?” we may ask. It’s not something we do —it just seems to pop up, bringing our body and brain along for the ride—and most people who deal with frequent anxiety see it as a problem, rather than fulfilling a need. The answer lies in our brain’s built-in reward system. According to the latest research on habit change, anxiety hides in a habit loop that consists of a trigger, a behavior, and a result. While we tend to think of habits as outward actions that bring us a perceived reward (like smoking to feel
calmer, brewing a warm drink to wake us up, or brushing our teeth often to prevent dental problems), the evolutionarily older part of our brain—the part that’s continually scanning our environment for danger—can also get a sense of reward from an emotion that prompts a behavior.
For example, you could feel anxiety about a work project that’s due soon (trigger). Then, you devote long evenings and your entire weekend to reading, researching, and planning for the project (behavior). Then, perhaps you feel more prepared and confident about the project (result). This is a classic example of an anxiety habit loop.
Emotion / Thought
Rumination / Action
Adding to the complexity, anxiety can spin off of any point in a habit loop. For example, pulling out your phone and checking your social feed might offer some brief anxiety relief, “but this just creates a new habit, which is that when you’re stressed or anxious, you distract yourself,” says psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judson Brewer.
This is how a habit loop can, at least temporarily, give us “the reward of feeling less anxious,” says Brewer. “It’s like playing a slot machine in a casino and winning just enough times to keep us coming back for more.” But when the distraction doesn’t work, you’re left with having to come up with another solution. This can lead to more worrying, and that worrying becomes its own trigger, says Brewer.
REASON 1 : Anxiety makes you feel safe. No joke: According to research, the act of worrying can sometimes feel good. A 2019 study at Penn State found that anxious people who were doing a relaxation exercise were reluctant to let go of their anxious thoughts. This reluctance to relax, the researchers found, stemmed from an attempt to shield themselves from the bigger, more dramatic swings in emotion—from anxious to relaxed and back again—that participants feared. In other words, it felt “safer” to simply stay anxious all the time.
REASON 2 : Your brain thinks it’s solving a problem. Then there’s the (counterintuitive) notion that ruminating on a problem can provide the illusion of working toward a solution, rather than doing nothing. And occasionally, our worried minds do come up with solutions, which can make it seem like anxiety itself yields productive results—or, at least, a sense that we’re in control of the anxiety-inducing situation. After a while, reacting to our everyday life with anxiety can turn into a mental habit.
BREAK THE LOOP: The first step to disrupting this cycle is paying attention and becoming aware of our anxiety. In one of Brewer’s studies, mindfulness training (which included noticing anxious habits and becoming aware of worry habit loops) reduced anxiety in people with generalized anxiety disorder by 63%.
To reset the reward values our brain attaches to specific habits, writes Brewer, “We need to give our brains new information to establish that the value they had learned in the past is now outdated. By paying attention to the results of behavior in the present moment, you can jolt your brain out of habit autopilot and see and feel exactly how rewarding (or unrewarding) the habit is for you right now.” ●
—Oyinda LagunjuYOKE
My Yoga of Self-Acceptance
Jessamyn Stanley • Workman PublishingJessamyn Stanley lets it all hang out in this collection of essays, her follow-up to the wildly successful Every Body Yoga . Stanley came to prominence on Instagram (see profile on page 48), and that might make some discount her out of hand. But, through her Instagram and in the pages of Yoke, Stanley reveals herself to be deeply authentic as both a student and a teacher of yoga. Where Every Body Yoga primarily offered richly illustrated suggestions for practicing physical yoga along with some personal stories and dips into the history and spirituality of yoga, Yoke concerns itself with every aspect of yoga, and Stanley’s life in it: “I call it the yoga of everyday life,” she writes. She shares candidly about living her yoga in a fat, Black body under a white supremacist system. She tackles her own uneasiness about cultural appropriation, as a Black southern practitioner who has learned to read and write some Sanskrit words, but does not find her place in classical yoga lineages. She writes movingly about her journey to self-acceptance, and self-love, and the many roadblocks along the way.
If you require your books about yoga and meditation to be primly reverential, Yoke is not the read for you. Here, Stanley gets extremely real about the trials and tribulations of yoga on and off the mat, with writing that is friendly and familiar, peppered with swears and slang and moments of hilarity, a dash of spirituality, and the occasional side order of astrology. If you like Stanley on Instagram, you’ll love her in Yoke —and if you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong on a yoga mat or meditation cushion, Stanley’s honest writing, fresh insights, and unabashedly fun approach ought to make you feel right at home, wherever you are. – SD
HOME
A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul
Najwa Zebian • Harmony Books
Welcome Home follows the structural metaphor of building a house, as LebaneseCanadian poet Najwa Zebian guides us to uncover and construct our way to feeling at home in ourselves. First, we deconstruct any obstacles to settling into our authentic, worthy selves so we can use the pieces to build the pathway that will point us in the right direction. By the end of the book, we have a fully formed, personalized
home built with compassion, forgiveness, and clarity—with the option to continue renovating. Zebian’s gentle and honest words hold the reader in an environment of realness and encouragement. Meeting us where we are, she equips us with tools and exercises that help us step into the role of architect. With her interwoven poetry and stories, she shows us her heart—and keeps us connected to our own. – AWC
FRIENDSHIP IN THE AGE OF LONELINESS
An Optimist’s Guide to Connection
Adam Smiley Poswolsky • Running Press
While forging friendship as an adult isn’t as easy as walking up to someone on the playground, Adam Smiley Poswolsky makes it seem that way in Friendship In the Age of Loneliness. A book aptly written during the COVID-19 pandemic, Poswolsky’s guide explores another grim epidemic in this digital age: loneliness. With wit and vulnerability, Poswolsky
holds up the mirror to our social habits and provides us with the tools necessary to make changes in our lives and form genuine relationships. It’s a book that will make you chuckle, might make you squirm, but most of all, it will remind you of the importance of showing up and being present in a world of swipes and likes. – OL
WORK BETTER TOGETHER How to Cultivate Strong Relationships to Maximize Well-Being and Boost
Bottom Lines
Jen Fisher and Anh Phillips • McGraw Hill Education
Work has always been hard. That’s why they call it work. It’s also caused untold suffering over the centuries. In the modern era, though, we like to think work is much safer and saner. While that may be true in many ways, we’ve also been facing more insidious forms of workplace injury. Technologies supposed to ease work’s burden have created more strain and pain than flexibility and freedom. In a Deloitte Consulting survey mentioned in Work Better Together, “three out of four respondents said they have experienced burnout.”
As Deloitte’s Chief Well-Being Officer in the US and host of the WorkWell podcast, Jen Fisher focuses on building a workplace culture of well-being. Anh Phillips, a leading researcher at Deloitte, and coauthor of The Technology Fallacy, promotes the understanding that for technologies to deliver on their transformational promises, cultures must be developed that foster sound human interactions with technology and with each other. That is, we need to make “our interaction with technology benefit our individual and collective well-being as much as our productivity.” And while we are more connected than ever digitally, we’re “actually connecting less.” Phillips shares a poignant story of bringing her daughter to a family dinner, excited that she would have lots of time to hang out with her cousins, but the children spent all their time on devices, leaving Phillips’s daughter bored and sad.
Are we doing any better at work? Each day the average knowledge worker, the authors report, gets 100 emails and is interrupted over 50 times. New tech forces rapid change, as if a carpenter had to learn how to use a new-fangled hammer every month. The “workism” lifestyle is rampant—eat at desk, work late in-office and at home, check messages anywhere anytime, earn your merit badge—leading to strain on “today’s most important work skills, like empathy, communication, and focus.” This is not a bad-news book, however. It’s filled with lots of personal stories, helpful prescriptions, illustrations, and wisdom about how to develop teams that “put people first, systems second.” – BB
LIFE KIT
Episode: “You’re Probably Not As Open-Minded As You Think”
Rose Eveleth, creator of hit podcast Flash Forward, says shaping the future requires us “to reconsider pretty much everything.” It sounds like an easy feat for anyone willing to explore other perspectives (that are not dehumanizing or inherently racist). But here’s the catch: The odds of being openminded are stacked against us. We’re programmed with
cognitive processes beyond our conscious awareness. With the help of experts in clinical psychology, Eveleth reveals open-mindedness as a personality trait we can hone through practice, and that requires dedication. For all of our benefit, Eveleth has smartly curated a sequence of five well-researched ways to be more open-minded.
– KRTHE MINDFUL HEALERS PODCAST
Episode: “What Would Love Do?”
This is the first episode of a series called Mindful Love, where Dr. Jessie Mahoney and Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang offer insight into how mindfulness can support relationships. But in this episode, they offer a tool that can be transferred to any situation in which you wish another person were different Scott Shute wants to spend the rest of his career “operationalizing compassion at the company level.” In this in-depth conversation, the Head of Mindfulness and Compassion Programs at LinkedIn tells Sharon Salzberg about what that might look like in the corporate world. It’s about what Shute notes as moving from “me
than they are: Ask yourself, “What would love do?” First, consider what the loving response would be for yourself, then for the other person. From this place of spaciousness and curiosity we can move forward with intention. (To read more about Ni-Cheng Liang, see page 53) – AWC
METTA HOUR WITH SHARON SALZBERG
Episode: “Ep. 153 – Scott Shute”
behavior to we behavior.”
In day-to-day operations, it shows up in the workplace as choices that prioritize employee and customer well-being—honoring a user experience over generating clicks, or building a relationship over meeting a quota. And at the root of this shift is cultivating compassion for ourselves and others. – KR
Mindfulness can help us to simply examine our thoughts without being carried away by them. When we find ourselves focusing on judgmental thoughts that cause us to doubt our worthiness, mindfulness can step in and remind us to celebrate ourselves exactly as we are. Join Diana Winston in a guided meditation to help us acknowledge the self-critical voice and gain a newfound sense of self-compassion, even for our flaws.
Oftentimes, we find it easy to be kind to other people, yet when the time comes to direct some of that kindness to ourselves, it can become challenging. We can see ourselves as undeserving or unworthy. In this guided meditation, Sharon Salzberg reminds us that practising kindness and love toward ourselves is the foundation for being able to show up with wholehearted care for those around us.
As we move through the world, inevitably we will get hurt and face challenges that might cause us to guard our hearts and emotions. But when we find ourselves in a safe space, it’s easy to let go and release any difficult feelings we might be holding in our body and heart. Boo Boafo shares a bodymind meditation practice to create that safe space, allowing us to make room for the tools that will help us connect to our fearless hearts. – OL
Recognize your Self-Critical Voice with Diana Winston
Direct Kindness Toward Yourself with Sharon Salzberg
Connect to Your Fearless Heart with Boo Boafo
Mark Bertin and Karen Bluth • New Harbinger
Research shows that mindfulness can benefit children and adolescents, but can a practice of paying attention work for young people who have ADHD? Yes, it can, write Bertin and Bluth, in this book that directly addresses teens, either with ADHD or whose symptoms may point to ADHD. The authors validate common ADHD challenges like high self-criticism, low confidence, and lack of understanding from family, teachers, or peers. Accessible yet never speaking down to young readers, they move through topics like why your brain may need extra support
with self-management; notes on handling stress and being kinder to yourself (“Treat yourself as you would a friend”); working with your inner critic, and building new habits that support you. In-text mindfulness practices include links to the audio versions. Besides practices, there are sundry tips for applying mindfulness: while driving, at school, on social media. The authors present mindfulness and self-compassion as complementary to, not a substitute for, ADHD medications, which they emphasize should be discussed as an option with your caregivers and doctor. – AT
In the foreword, Dan Siegel writes, “The sensation of pain, when coupled with the resistance of the mind to accepting it fully as part of your life, leads to a magnification of your distress, which we can simply call ‘suffering.’” Our physical pain is “amplified” by resistance; we can learn to recognize and defuse a lot of its power using mindfulness. Physician and meditation teacher Christiane Wolf has taught mindfulness for people with chronic disease and pain since 2005. Here, she shares her wealth
of knowledge and wisdom. Outsmart Your Pain features stories from patients, 10- to 15-minute guided practices designed for those coping with pain, and straightforward, research-supported advice to shift how we experience chronic pain—from battling it toward accepting it, tuning in to the body with self-compassion. “When pain is intense, it’s often hard to be aware of anything outside of the pain,” writes Wolf. “With increased awareness, though, the world starts to open up again.” – AT
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I’ve always enjoyed having places to go and hang out with a collection of people, somewhere where they know your name. When I lived on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village for a time, back when it was still an Italian neighborhood, I admired the old folks who hung out in front of their buildings on simple chairs passing time together. On the Lower East Side, a few blocks south and east, alter kakers (roughly and generously meaning “old folks” in Yiddish) whiled away the time sharing park benches with pigeons. In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee beautifully captured the stoop- and sidewalk-sitting culture of his native Brooklyn.
As I write this, hanging out is discouraged and even outlawed during the pandemic, and we’ve relied on technological substitutes.
flourish when fed by the shared beliefs and rituals that define a culture, when that culture is righteously exclusionary—like an angry subreddit—it can create a nasty tear in the fabric of the larger community. Since we’re all interconnected, we’re perforce part of ever-larger communities, up to and including the planetary one—simply because we’re alive on earth.
We will always cluster in affinity groups, and yes, sometimes they’ll
accountability, the cornerstone of the deepest kind of friendship, where we rely on each other to let us know when we’re full of ourselves, when we’re creating a mutual and hateful lie to make ourselves feel superior. In ancient times—the ’60s and ’70s—it was popular for someone to “call your trip.” If you never washed dishes or ate other people’s food unbidden or pontificated about the right way to do things when it was really just your way of
PODCAST
Real Mindful Founding editor Barry Boyce and managing editor Stephanie Domet dig deeper into these ideas on the new Real Mindful podcast. mindful.org/ real-mindful
mNevertheless, no virus can remove the human propensity to gather. Community is essential to life.
And yet, our pull to community requires continual examination, because the very glue we use to hold ourselves together in community can fester into in-groupiness, where the key defining feature of the group is who is excluded. While a subcommunity can
be based on creating distance from an existing community. Some young people growing up in small towns will gather, as I did, around the shared ethos of “getting the hell out of this place.” People from difficult families will construct chosen families. People who don’t “fit” will find a way to fit. These communities are a source of resilience in tough times.
But clannishness can turn what starts out being homey into something quite ugly. Many of us have been part of groups that veered toward (or became completely submerged) in cult behavior, where the internally constructed belief system becomes an addictive source of nourishment that blinds us to how it excludes others.
What can undercut that? What can keep our group-forming propensity from becoming incestuous and toxic? In my experience, one main ingredient is an ethos of honesty, a kind of gentle
doing things—your housemates might well call you on your trip. It could be revealing and enlightening, but it could also become self-righteous.
As mindfulness continues to grow beyond the traditional bounds of religious communities and people keep forming communities of mutual support and joyous interaction, relying on mutual honesty—and maybe some teasing and ribbing rather than harsh self-righteousness—will be essential. Otherwise, however beautiful mindfulness may be, when it becomes an us-and-them kind of thing, it will be just another ego trip. ●
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.
Gentle accountability is the cornerstone of the deepest kind of friendship, where we rely on each other to let us know when we’re full of ourselves.
