Mindful Magazine February 2022 - Welcome Everything

FEBRUARY 2022 mindful.org

CONTENTS THE WELCOME EVERYTHING ISSUE

CE

LEBR ATING

ILLUSTRATION BY GERALDINE SY. COVER ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTEN DE PALMA.

I SS U E S

The Power of Gratitude

A growing body of research shows that gratitude isn’t merely a pleasant feeling, writes Misty Pratt. Learn how noticing the goodness that’s always present in our lives boosts our mental and physical health, our relationships, and our sense of joy.

p.34 February 2022 mindful 1

contents

34

Explore the Power of Gratitude Misty Pratt digs in to compelling research that shows how opening up to gratitude benefits our well-being.

44

Lean In to Love Through ongoing discovery, Frank Ostaseski shares his transformative journey of welcoming everything.

On the Cover 44

Welcome Everything Embrace Change, Savor Joy, Celebrate Your Life

18

The Truth About Grief

26

How to Stay When You Want to Run

28

The Science of Curiosity

56

Following the Path of Mindful Self-Discovery

STORIES

18 Mindful Living

Living in a World of Grief

22 Health

Healing With Integrity

26 Inner Wisdom

Finding a Way to Keep Your Seat

28 Brain Science

The Science of Curiosity

56

A User’s Guide to a Journey Called Mindfulness What does the path of mindfulness look like? Barry Boyce lets us glimpse how acceptance, wisdom, and even humor can unfold as we practice.

2 mindful February 2022

4 From the Editor 7 In Your Words 8 Top of Mind 16 Mindful–Mindless 64 Bookmark This 72 Point of View with Barry Boyce

VOLUME NINE, NUMBER 6, Mindful (ISSN 2169-5733, USPS 010-500) is published bimonthly for $29.95 per year USA, $39.95 Canada & $49.95 (US) international, by Mindful Communications & Such, PBC, 515 N State Street, Suite 300, Chicago IL. 60654 USA. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Mindful, PO Box 469018, Escondido, CA 92046. Canada Post Publication Mail Agreement #42704514. CANADIAN POSTMASTER: Send undeliverable copies to Mindful, 5765 May St, Halifax, NS B3K 1R6 CANADA. Printed in U.S.A. © 2022 Mindful Communications & Such, PBC. All rights reserved.

ILLUSTRATION BY GERALDINE SY, ASIA P, PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY FRANK OSTASESKI

EVERY ISSUE

oods 11 044 Ed e n F © 2021

edenfoods.com

Nourishing Snacks. Satisfaction of Great Taste.

Pure & Purifying. The Best They Can Be. Real Organic Nuts, Seeds, Dried Fruit, and Seasonings. 1 oz. Pockets and 4 oz. Resealable.

Wisdom is Love in Discerning.

Clinton, Michigan

from the editor

JOIN US

The Healing Healthcare Summit Join us February 8-10 for a free online conference for healthcare professionals. Together we’ll share our stories, celebrate what’s working, and envision a way forward that can bring humanity back to healthcare.

Featuring conversations, meditations, and teachings with 30+ experts. Sign up at mindful.org/healthcare

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

4 mindful February 2022

Lately, I’ve been practicing what I call “active non-doing.”

It’s a liminal way of being where I observe the things I’m “supposed” to do—as a mother, a wife, the caretaker of my dying father, a manager, an editor, a friend, a homemaker, even a musician. I notice all the deeply ingrained ways I believe I’m supposed to show up. And rather than immediately acting on my inclinations, I’ve been just not doing anything for a little while and seeing what happens.

This practice doesn’t come naturally to me. By nature, I’m a doer. For me, the pull to act is a whole-body sensation: tension in my chest, flush cheeks, hot hands, as well as a rush to judgment and immeditate problem-solving. My whole being doesn’t just scream “do something”; it insists “here’s how!” I try to pause, relax my (probably) tensed-up shoulders, and breathe until the feeling passes, noticing the swirling eddies of ideas, emotions, and physical sensations my halting leaves in its wake.

This “active non-doing” practice didn’t come my way by choice. I resisted fervently, choosing instead to barrel into situations with ideas, projects, answers, and solutions. It’s only been through my most difficult pain point, caring for my father, that I have been able to see active non-doing is sometimes the most compassionate action to take.

And honestly, I don’t like it. At all. I would much rather jump in and do something. But I’ve discovered through this practice that welcoming everything—the discomfort, the heat, the disappointment in myself, the judgment—and letting it be (even when wanting to act feels like a blazing fire) opens up options that I never would have thought of, but are often the perfect next thing to happen. I’ve been getting in my own way for so long that I missed the magic of allowing. The beauty and grace of it. The compassion and joy that’s always there, waiting for us to gently tap in.

So, to celebrate 50 issues of Mindful magazine, and welcome a new year, our team gathered stories and practices that offer you the opportunity to welcome it all, not just in your mind, but with your whole body, your whole heart.

So you can meet your stresses, your challenges, your difficult conversations, your joys, and your celebrations with a bit of ease, a bit of trust in yourself. So you can take a breath, lower your shoulders, and know that you have everything you need in this one beautiful moment, in this one beautiful life.

With love and gratitude for you all,

PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAIRE ROSEN

An Invitation

In-Person Certified Mindfulness Teacher Training 2022 - 2023 with Mark Coleman and Martin Aylward SF BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA Train to teach the practice you love, radically

This training is uniquely distinguished in being

deepen your own understanding, and support

in-person, transformative and supportive. You will

others in discovering meditation and mindfulness.

join a select group of committed practitioners

Learn to lead mindfulness courses with confidence

and be personally taught, every step of the way,

and clarity, studying with world-renowned teachers

by two teachers deeply respected in their field.

and trainers, Mark Coleman and Martin Aylward.

At the Mindfulness Training Institute, students

Mark and Martin have taught worldwide for over

are trained to understand Buddhist perspectives

20 years and, through their Mindfulness Training

on mindfulness, yet teach in a secular format to

Institute, have created a profound yet intimate,

diverse populations and settings. So, if you wish

in-person mindfulness training experience in

to deepen your practice and teach mindfulness

Europe and America, training over 300 teachers

effectively, this is the training is for you!

who are now teaching in 25 countries.

Free Webinar Join Mark and Martin to learn more about our certified training on our free webinar. Visit our website to sign up for free.

mindfulnesstraininginsitute.com International Mindfulness Teachers Association Accredited

Healthy Mind, Healthy Life

Welcome to

We are dedicated to inspiring and guiding anyone who wants to explore mindfulness to enjoy better health, more caring relationships, and a more compassionate society.

mindful magazine • mindful.org Editor-in-Chief Heather Hurlock heather.hurlock@mindful.org

Creative Director Jessica von Handorf jessica.vonhandorf@mindful.org

Managing Editor Stephanie Domet

Associate Art Director Spencer Creelman

Founding Editor Barry Boyce

Junior Designer Paige Sawler

Senior Editors Kylee Ross Amber Tucker

Associate Editors Ava Whitney-Coulter Oyinda Lagunju

MINDFUL COMMUNICATIONS & SUCH Mindful is published by Mindful Communications & Such, PBC, a Public Benefit Corporation.

Chief Executive Officer Bryan Welch bryan.welch@mindful.org

President Brenda Jacobsen brenda.jacobsen@mindful.org

By reading Mindful and sharing it with others, you’re helping to bring mindfulness practices into the world where the benefits can be enjoyed by all.

Chief Financial Officer Tom Hack

Founding Partner Nate Klemp

Accounting Kyle Thomas

Vice President of Operations Amanda Hester

Thank you!

Director of Technology Michael Bonanno

Vice President of Marketing Jessica Kellner

Application Developer Garang Thiong

Director of Marketing Leslie Duncan Childs

Manager of Information Systems Joseph Barthelt

Marketing Manager Alissa MacDougall

Director of Human Resources Lauren Owens

Marketing Coordinators Audhora Rahman Tequiera Howes

Director of Coaching Zina Mercil

Print magazine & special topic publications

Office Manager Deandrea McIntosh Administrative Assistant Lydia Kajumba

30 Day Mindfulness Challenge

FREE! Guided meditations & podcasts

Events Manager Maggie Colby Director of Client Services Monica Cason Client Relations Assistant Abby Spanier

Board of Directors David Carey, James Gimian, Brenda Jacobsen, Eric Langshur (Chair), Larry Neiterman, Bryan Welch ADVERTISING INQUIRIES

Mindfulness video courses

Advertising Director Chelsea Arsenault Toll Free: 888-203-8076, ext 207 chelsea@mindful.org

Advertising Account Representative Drew McCarthy Toll Free: 888-203-8076, ext 208 drew@mindful.org

CONTACT / INQUIRIES

Visit online at mindful.org

Publishing Offices 5765 May Street Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3K 1R6 Canada mindful@mindful.org Corporate Headquarters 515 N. State Street, Suite 300 Chicago, IL 60654, USA

Get More Mindful 6 mindful February 2022

Editorial Inquiries If you are interested in contributing to Mindful magazine, please go to mindful.org/submission-guidelines to learn how.

Customer Service Subscriptions: Toll free: 1-855-492-1675 subscriptions@mindful.org Retail inquiries: 732-946-0112 Content Licensing inquiries@mindful.org

in your words

Along for the Ride Mindful readers share how they cope with the certainty of change.

Has your outlook on life changed in the last couple of years?

Sometimes I think about change as it relates to habit.

Experiencing change keeps me present and awake. Habit is like a lullaby that puts me to sleep. Practicing mindfulness helps me to stay present and experience whatever change is happening in the moment, without the urge to push it away or hold on too tight. debbienutleyauthor Definitely. Small joys mean so much more. libbies.images

How does change make you feel?

ANXIOUS

67

%

IT DEPENDS

8%

I notice that each time I’m going through a challenging life moment, a new book or creative project is born.

Tapping into my creativity and imagination brings a joy that helps me know I’ll be OK.

What helps you manage change?

Having a system for myself, where I can think through what it is, plan and gather information, write it down, take achievable goal steps, and congratulate myself each step of the way.

Tina Q. Accepting that everything is temporary helps me to release attachment to what was while welcoming the new reality of what is.

Bev V.

EXCITED

25%

First accepting it, like my father’s Alzheimer’s. Then I try to focus on what I can control to feel empowered and try to let go of what I cannot control to lessen the discomfort that change can bring.

Karen K.

_michelefoote

Next Question…

What sparks wonder for you?

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

→ @andreabogart feels lucky to be able to ride the waves of change with two little ones in her arms.

↑ @latashamarie shares this photo by photographer Shakira Hunt of what it feels like to embrace every part of who she is. ↓ @sass_allard shared this pic celebrating a big accomplishment at the beach.

top of mind

reef will be monitored to gather data for Renfro to continue her research on coral reef sustainability.

TOP OF

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

SIT A WHILE It may take 21 days to adopt a new habit but a group in Minneapolis is looking to do more than that—they’re looking to create

change. Community members in a Minneapolis neighborhood got together last spring to “interrupt violence” in the area by opening up lawn chairs

and taking a seat in one of the most dangerous spots in the neighborhood, with “intentional activations of prayer, persistence and presence” as their Facebook page notes, in what they call ​​the 21 Days of Peace project.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post,

two of the group’s members write: “The people sitting on these corners in chairs are members of the community. We know our young people, and they know us.” As the project continues past the original 21 days, members hope that law enforcement and elected officials will be inspired to pull up a chair and begin to work with the community to meet the needs that, left unmet, can lead to violence.

CORAL SUPPORT Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Bobbie “Sponge Bobbie” Renfro, a PhD candidate at Florida State University doesn’t, but she does outplant sea sponges to support damaged coral and add natural filtration to reefs in the Florida Keys. “We’re trying to save the entire coral reef ecosystem, which includes so much more than just corals,” Renfro told EcoWatch. The

Yoko Sen was a patient in hospital when she noticed the frequent beeps and jarring alarms of the medical equipment that surrounded her, the other patients, and the healthcare workers who cared for them.

“Sound has a way of affecting us, even though we may not be aware,” Sen says. She wondered whether healthcare workers and patients should be exposed to these sounds daily. “Thinking about sound is more than just about fixing noise or [playing] some nice music,” Sen says. She founded SenSound, which collaborates with hospitals and medical device companies to transform and “humanize” hospital soundscapes.

“When we are not the actual people who have to hear those sounds day to day, I think it’s very important that we come

PHOTOGRAPH BY MILOS PREVELIC / UNSPLASH, 21 DAYS OF PEACE

SAFE AND SOUND

top of mind

from a place of humility.”

BY ANY OTHER NAME

PHOTOGRAPH BY UNITED PAINTING, ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN

The parenting app Peanut encouraged women to share words they encountered in the reproductive medical system that were hurtful, unhelpful, or offensive using #RenamingRevolution. Hundreds responded, calling out terms like “geriatric pregnancy,” “incompetent cervix,” and “spontaneous abortion.” Inspired by the response, Peanut published the Renaming

Revolution, a glossary of alternative terminology that shifts the focus away from shame and blame toward empowerment and education. They send the book out to clinics and classes.

A TRUE REFUGE “Community art for social change” is the message of a collective of artists, writers, and designers called United Painting that leads public art projects around the world.

In 2016, they took on painting the inner and outer walls of a disused

prison in Amsterdam that had been repurposed as a refugee shelter.

To make this “a more humane and liveable situation for refugees,” while providing skills training and bringing community members together, United Painting invited Dutch locals and newcomers alike to join in painting. The result is striking and joyful: Newcomers incorporated a dazzling array of cultural art styles, turning the onceimposing building into an expression of beauty, uniqueness, and multicultural pride.

ACTS OF kindness

by AVA WHITNEY-COULTER

LABOR OF LOVE

The Heighton family of six, plus three pets, lost their home when their rental house in the small town of Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, was sold.

Due to the area’s housing crisis, the family couldn’t find affordable housing so local people and businesses donated time, labor, and money to build the family a home before the weather got cold.

HEART OF GOLD

Tijana Kawashima Stojkovic, a volunteer at the Tokyo Olympics paid for a taxi to help track athlete Hansle Parchment get to

his event after he took the wrong bus. After Hansle won gold, he thanked Stojkovic in his speech, reconnected with her to repay her, and the Jamaican Minister of Tourism invited Tijana to Jamaica as a gesture of thanks for her generosity.

PLAY TOGETHER

High school student Nick Priest is bringing video games and human connection to kids in hospitals with cancer and other diseases through his organization Nick’s Power of Play. Nick was six when he lost his dad to cancer, and was inspired by his fond memories of the love his dad had for video games and the time they spent playing together.

February 2022 mindful 9

Mindfulness Coaching School MindfulnessCoachingSchool.com

top of mind

Research News

by B. GRACE BULLOCK

Join mindfulness practitioners from around the world for lively and contemplative online classes.

For coaches and non-coaches alike! Register online or call us at +1.505.906.6700.

Research gathered from Harvard Medical School, University of Regina, Shanghai Mental Health Center, and others.

NEW CLASSES FOR 2022 Navigating Trauma: Mindful Skills to Enhance Safety and Regulation Deeper Than Words: Compassionate Communication for Today’s Leaders Group Coaching: Unleashing the Transformative Potential of Community

ENROLL EARLY. CLASSES FILL QUICKLY!

“Part of my Mindfulness Coaching School training is coaching clients to accumulate hours. I went one step further. I sent all the proceeds to my Mom who then bought and distributed food to Venezuelan people in need. This project revealed the importance of interconnectedness when we ‘take it to the streets’ and show up for ourselves and others. When I connect with my own humanity, I connect with yours!”

BLANCA PRADO MCS Student from Venezuela

EASING TEEN ANGST Can mindfulness help teens to ruminate less?

Led by researchers at Harvard Medical School, a new study tested whether 80 adolescents would use and benefit from a smartphone-based mindfulness app.

Teens were asked to complete surveys on their mental health, including tendency to ruminate. Those who noted a moderate tendency were provided a mindfulness phone app and taught how to use it. For three weeks, they received random reminders to engage with

the app based on their availability, and had a greater likelihood of being asked to complete an exercise if they reported a worse mood on the initial survey.

Mindfulness instruction lasted 1—12 minutes, and included focused attention on the breath, sounds, or bodily sensations. After each session, teens rated their level of rumination and emotional state. In the end, 90% of the teens used the app, with the typical user completing 29 minutes of training, or an average of 1.5 sessions per day, with 91% of these sessions lasting 1 minute.

Girls and older teens showed the most immediate improvements in mood and rumination after

10 mindful February 2022

each session.

Those who were more likely to get stuck in repetitive unpleasant thoughts and suppress their emotions at the beginning of the study had better overall results.

Researchers concluded that teens who tend to get lost in negative thoughts might be best served by mindfulness approaches that accentuate present-moment awareness and attentional control.

MBSR FOR PERIMENOPAUSE In a study led by researchers from the University of Regina in

top of mind

Saskatchewan, 104 perimenopausal women with no prior meditation experience were randomly assigned to either a standard eightweek Mind-

control group participants.

Women in early perimenopause appeared to see greater improvements than those in later stages. For all the women, the more

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN

Mindfulness may have an added benefit in treating schizophrenia. fulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, or a waitlist control group. Baseline estrogen levels and daily mood were assessed for all participants for 30-50 days prior to training.

Depression, anxiety, mindfulness, and other factors were evaluated immediately before and after the intervention, and every two weeks for the following six months. Results showed women who attended MBSR classes noted significantly less depression, anxiety, and perceived stress, and higher levels of mindfulness and resilience than

they meditated on their own during training, the less depressed they were at program’s end.

TREATING SCHIZOPHRENIA To see if mindfulness training might serve as a helpful add-on to routine treatment for schizophrenia, researchers in China randomly assigned 100 patients to either six weeks of general rehabilitation (GR) treatment or GR plus a mindfulness-based

intervention.

GR control group members attended 1.5 hours of instruction per day, five days per week, on topics such as health education, life skills training, reading, and art. Mindfulness group members received 45 minutes of mindfulness instruction, including breathing exercises, identifying emotions, sensations and thoughts, and self-acceptance, plus 45 minutes of GR training per day, five days per week. Both groups continued to follow their medication regimens. At program’s end, those who received mindfulness training reported significantly fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety and modest improvements in cognitive functioning, compared to the GR group.

Findings suggest mindfulness may have an added benefit in treating schizophrenia above and beyond medication and standard rehabilitation strategies.

February 2022 mindful 11

Self-confidence and self-awareness for your physical safety!

Online Self-Defense Course

Empowered

for Women

A 4-session self-directed course that has helped thousands of women with simple techniques for physical self-preservation - and the confidence to react quickly and powerfully in times of stress.

With Empowered for Women, you’ll learn to anticipate and proactively act, all while staying calm and in emotional control.

We promise - you’ll learn simple, effective ways to access your own power!

To learn more, or to register, visit

karate5.com/empowered

Online courses for your mental, physical and spiritual well-being

karate5.com

Burnout BEGINNER’S MIND Q&A

Q

Sometimes I’m just too tired to run through my self-care things and I know it’s a bad cycle, but I work as a nurse and some days, I just can’t do it.

A

Self-care can feel like a burden. We can get lost in the gap between where we are and where we think we should be. So, when you’re too tired for self-care, try the threeminute breathing space.

First, check in with where you are, what is here for you right now in thoughts, emotions, the body. Just get to know your current experience, wanted or unwanted. Then narrow your attention to the sensation of breathing, the rising and falling of the abdomen with each in-breath

Patricia Rockman, MD, is a family physician with a focused practice in mental health. She is Senior Director of Education and Clinical Services at the Centre for Mindfulness Studies, Toronto. She answered this question on burnout at our Healing Healthcare Summit in 2021. Register for the next Healing Healthcare Summit, February 8-10, 2022, at mindful.org/healthcare.

12 mindful February 2022

and out-breath. And finally, widen your attention to the entire body around the breath, taking in any and all sensations. This brief inquiry into our own experience can give us the awareness we need to be able to take care of ourselves and others.

When even the threeminute breathing space feels like work, we may just need to give ourselves a break.

Forget the big self-care list.

What is a small thing you can do? It might be something that you might not think of as particularly healthy if it was to become chronic, but what are the things that make you feel good? When you’re tired, choose something small and manageable, and let it be enough.

PHOTOGRAPH BY FEEH COSTA / UNSPLASH

BALM

WHEN EVEN THE THREE-MINUTE BREATHING SPACE FEELS LIKE WORK, WE MAY JUST NEED TO GIVE OURSELVES A BREAK.

top of mind PEOPLE TO WATCH • GRANT JONES

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY GRANT JONES, ILLUSTRATION BY VECTORTWINS / ADOBESTOCK

Where music and meditation meet

by AVA WHITNEY-COULTER

“

For Jones, mindfulness and music are streams that flow to the same river.

Grant Jones knows firsthand the healing potential of Black music.

When he was growing up in Boston in the ’90s, pop divas, rap, and R&B ruled the American radio waves.

He would imitate Usher, Lauryn Hill, and Aaliyah, and now credits these artists as some of his first vocal teachers who introduced him to his own voice and to Black music. “It’s the first contemplative practice that I ever knew.”

Today, Jones is working on an album with Black music culture at its heart and mindfulness instruction on the track list.

With guidance from Grammy Award winning jazz bassist, singer, songwriter, and composer Esperanza Spalding and contemplative thought leader Lama Rod Owens, the project is part of Jones’ clinical psychology PhD research at Harvard. The album, with the working title HEALING attempt, will be used in a study that tests its healing efficacy for Black folks experiencing elevated stress and anxiety, then be published on major streaming platforms. Jones expects to finish it in 2022.

He released an EP called Constellations in summer 2021, which explores similar themes and offers a taste of what’s to come.

For Jones, mindfulness and music are streams that flow to the same river, offering peace, healing, and creative flow. “I can’t make anyone take part, but I can definitely try to invite some folks that have never been invited before because I’m sure that a lot of people would say yes.”

Jones, who is Black and queer, notes that barriers like cost, availability, and cultural relevance can make mindfulness harder to access for communities of color.

Jones spent his childhood commuting from his mostly Black neighborhood to a predominantly white private school, continuing on to Harvard post-grad.

“To exist within these academic institutions that are predominantly white, it has meant to bring certain parts of myself at some times and not at others.”

Succeeding academically for him meant keeping parts of his Blackness siloed, including his love of Black music, and he’s grieved those pieces of himself. “I got so many invitations that it made me think, ‘maybe I should do this,’” he says, of HEALING attempt.

“I think the way I’m showing up is activating something within the space.”

February 2022 mindful 13

CLINICAL MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELING Explore our online graduate-level programs.

• Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling • Doctor of Education in Sport and Performance Psychology, Clinical Mental Health Counseling Specialization

LEVEL

UP

Meditation may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of gaming, but mindfulness has been appearing among the pixels in some recent video games.

A HAPPY ENDING A magic-infused game about death and saying goodbye? In Spiritfarer, you play as Stella, a ferry driver who transports friendly spirits to the afterlife, granting their final wishes along the way—like a colorful, compassionate spin on the Greek myth of Charon and the River Styx. Stella also learns to care for herself, during a scene where a snake spirit named Summer teaches her a sort of open-awareness mindfulness practice. “Meditation, Stella, is an affair of wholeness. Wholeness, and oneness,” says Summer.

A CALMING QUEST

LEARN MORE uws.edu/mindful-cmhc

Popular among educators, Minecraft provides endless possibilities for creativity and learning. In “The Mindful Knight,” designed for ages 8-13, a wizard teaches players to “cast a spell” by focusing on breathing and not getting distracted by thoughts. Sound familiar? There are further exercises for observing your sensory experience and labeling emotions, and players can record their responses for their teacher in a virtual journal.

14 mindful February 2022

top of mind

ONE THING AT A TIME

PHOTOGRAPH BY JAVEIR MARTINEZ / UNSPLASH, IMAGES COURTESY THUNDERLOTUS, MOJANG, NINTENDO

In Animal Crossing, the mindfulness is more built-in than explicit. While hanging out on a remote island, players perform relaxing tasks like talking with fellow villagers, going fishing, or tending to their virtual gardens—a structure that game designer and writer Jennifer Scheurle describes as a “gentle progression.” There’s no way to get ahead or defeat anyone else. You just have to do a little bit every day to get results in the game, which Scheurle compares to the way we gain benefits over time from meditating.

February 2022 mindful 15

top of mind

MINDFUL OR MINDLESS? Our take on who’s paying attention and who’s not Can toilet-training cows help save the planet? Researchers have a new system to control ammonia emissions from cows’ waste that contribute to greenhouse gases—by providing a “latrine” and rewarding cows when they use it. The bovines’ “toileting” abilities, studies show, are similar to those of young children.

by AMBER TUCKER

In Thailand, many taxi drivers are out of work due to COVID19. Some are raising awareness of their situation, and helping to feed their families, by growing vegetables in an unexpected place: in tiny plots on the roofs of their taxis.

MINDFUL

16 mindful February 2022

14 football fields’ worth of “blankets” cover the slopes at Swiss ski site Mount Titlis.

In recent years, ski resort workers spread these huge polyester sheets over the glacier’s slopes to stave off melting due to warming temperatures.

A startup aptly called Colossal wants to use gene-editing technology, elephant surrogate moms, and a whole lot of private funding to bring the Woolly Mammoth back from extinction. They claim this will enrich the tundra environments where the creatures would live, plus pave the way to resurrect other species—though we’ve all seen how that can end.

… In other cake news, a man was charged with dangerous operation of an aircraft in Saskatchewan. He landed his chopper in a parking lot, and a passenger hopped out, went to a nearby Dairy Queen, and bought an ice-cream cake.

Police deemed the landing “not an emergency.” (That cake, though!) ●

MINDLESS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN

Let them eat cake, but only if they have $2,400 USD. A slice of cake from the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, preserved by a royal staffer, sold recently. “It appears to be in exactly the same good condition as when originally sold,” read the auction-house website, “but we advise against eating it.”

MINDFUL WRITING WORKSHOP! Join Stephanie Domet, award-winning author and managing editor for Mindful Magazine, for the first-ever Mindful Writing Workshop!

Try this creative practice to nourish attention and well-being—in a fun, interactive live setting!

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Sign up now! $39 LEARN MORE AND REGISTER

mindful.org/mindful-writing-workshop

mindful living

LIVING IN A WORLD

of Grief

In the midst of the pandemic, we're finding a new language of loss, one that holds space for all the ways we grieve.

By Leslie Garrett

18 mindful February 2022

mindful living

PHOTOGRAPH BY YOUSEF ALFUHIGI / UNSPLASH

In the days following the death of my mother almost 14 years ago, I was desperate for words to describe the chasm that had opened beneath me.

So when a friend who’d recently lost her own mother insisted I read C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, I got the book and opened to the first words of the first chapter: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

If you’re familiar with the five stages of grief as famously characterized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, you’ll know that among the well-known DABDA (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) framework, there is no F for fear.

It’s an omission that grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith has thought a lot about. The author of Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief, she had lost both of her parents to cancer by her 25th birthday. The way this grief manifested in her didn’t seem to align with what we expect grief to look like: “I felt enormous anxiety,” she says, in part because “our culture isn’t so great at talking about grief,” and in part because she didn’t recognize anxiety as grief. Even the doctors she saw in ERs in her late teens and 20s didn’t connect her symptoms with her losses. “If they had stopped to ask me anything about my life,” she says, “I think we could have gotten fairly quickly to the fact that it was a panic attack.”

It took a few more years, a few more panic attacks, and enrollment in a psychology program at college before she

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Leslie Garrett is the author of more than 15 books for children, as well as a journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and Cottage Life. She currently works as co-editor of Bluedot Living, Martha’s Vineyard, which focuses on local grassroots solutions for climate issues, and aims to expand to locations around North America.

herself made the connection. A class focused on trauma helped her understand that her anxiety was rooted in loss, that her fear was grief. She also noticed some markers of trauma. Once she began to put the pieces together, everything she’d been experiencing began to make sense.

Kate Bowler was already a Duke Divinity School historian when, at 35 and as a new mom, she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, driving her into a deeper exploration of grief. Her resulting memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, as well as her most recent book No Cure for Being Human and her podcast Everything Happens, allow Bowler to continue to examine our discombobulation when bad things happen.

She has settled on the word “finitude” to describe what so many of us are experiencing in our COVID world. “It’s the perpetuity of it,” she says, “when we can’t feel like our lives are marked by unlimited choices.” Grief embodies finitude. It reminds us that we are, as Bowler says, “stuck in our bodies and our life and in a world whose global health…” She trails off, and then says, “We don’t get to choose.”

Accepting the Messiness of Grief Bidwell Smith, whose work helps people process their pain around loss, has noticed just how often grief masquerades as anxiety and fear. She’s noticed too how many people experiencing this anxiety seek her out because they think they’re grieving wrong, that their anxiety isn’t grief at all, or that their grief isn’t following the prescribed trajectory DABDA seems to represent.

What she has learned as she helps others is that the stages don’t work as neatly as we expect. “Elisabeth Kübler-

Ross herself wrote…that they weren’t meant to necessarily be these strict, linear guideposts,” says Bidwell Smith.

And yet, she understands why so many of us use the five stages as a grief checklist. “It sounds really appealing to think, OK, I just have these five stages I need to get through…when I get to the other side, I’m going to feel so much better than I do now.”

Alongside Bidwell Smith’s desire to encourage us all to turn toward the messiness and lawlessness of grief, Kate Bowler notes that social expectations also underlie our impatience to have grief over and done with. “Our culture loves to pretend that nothing is lost and nothing is wasted and…nothing’s a setback, it’s just a setup,” says Bowler. “Grief is such an important place to stay, to help us face the reality of our lives. And I don’t mean the terrible reality, just the reality.”

Bidwell Smith sees her role as disavowing her clients, and the rest of us, of such rigid expectations, so we can begin to recognize grief in emotions where we might not expect it, such as anger or irritability or anxiety. “I give people permission to grieve and educate them on all the differAUDIO ent ways we can Working grieve,” she says.

With Grief “Recognizing the grief that is there Judy Lief leads helps people a practice for move through it in journeying a way that yields with grief. more healing than steeping in anger mindful.org/ or anxiety.” working-withIt’s not just grief death that leaves us grieving.

Bidwell Smith has had clients dealing with →

m

February 2022 mindful 19

mindful living

Rules Grief The only rule, our grief experts say, is that there are no rules.

You get to define your grief and your response to it. (You can curl into a ball. You can cloak yourself in black. You can go back to the office.)

Beyond that, Kate Bowler suggests the following.

1. Lean in to what is meaningful for you. You may ask, as Bowler did, “Is there some place of service or gift or job that gives me purpose and momentum right now?”

2. See what is possible today. Gently recognize that, even with finite choices, there are, nonetheless, choices. In Bowler’s words: “Somewhere between the idea of nothing is possible and everything is possible, we are able to ask, ‘What is possible today?

What is mine to do?’”

3. Let go of the need to fix other people’s grief. “If you don’t think someone’s life is a problem to be solved or a tragedy to be fixed, you’ll feel less scared about being around them," says Bowler.

“They will take great comfort in knowing that they are not alone. It’s such a nice feeling when you’re allowed to pivot, when you’re allowed to move between laughing and crying.”

20 mindful February 2022

health issues, or divorce, or moving.

They need permission to grieve too, she says. Bowler has noticed that lots of us disqualify ourselves from grief because we don’t feel like our losses are big enough, or tragic enough, or, as a friend said to her, “problem-y enough.” “We’re all worried that our things don’t count, but it all counts,” Bowler says.

COVID and Collective Loss This past year has brought us all nearer to grief. Whether we’ve experienced the loss of someone close to us or have read the mounting numbers of COVID deaths with horror or have mourned the absence of so many moments we’d taken for granted, not one of us has avoided grief—even if we have yet to acknowledge it. Over a year into the pandemic, Bowler describes it as a “longform grief.”

“So much of what we’re trying to get at with understanding grief is just by asking ourselves those questions in the Serenity Prayer: ‘What are the things that I can change? Can I have the wisdom to know the difference?’” says Bowler. “Because if there are things that we can’t change, that’s when grief begins.”

COVID has offered us a master class in understanding the ways we’re affected by loss and has handed us the opportunity to speak openly about grief, to express the anxiety it’s often wrapped in, and to broaden our recognition of trauma. But only if we’re willing to have that reckoning. As we navigate our way out of the pandemic, Bidwell Smith cautions us against resisting grief, against moving too quickly to reclaim our previous normal. “We need to be able to talk about it, we need to share our stories of loss, and we need to have someone bear witness to what we’re experiencing,” she says.

And while she senses a positive shift

in our cultural willingness to examine what we’ve all been through, she believes there’s more work to be done— for example, by introducing death ed classes, she says, “like sex ed.” She’d like medical professionals and those working in education to be better versed in the language of loss and end of life to better deal with what comes up for those grieving, “emotionally, physically, and logistically,” she says.

What to Expect When We Weren’t Expecting This Even with the benefit of preparing ourselves better, grieving will remain a process for which individuals, families, and communities need to allow real time and care. It’s not a to-do list item; it asks more from us.

Bowler relates how her psychologist shared with her a story of hiking the Appalachian Trail. The newbies arrived at the beginning of this long, arduous hike loaded down with supplies. “They want to carry everything because it’s such a long journey and, naturally, they’re scared,” she explains. Only when they realize what they’re carrying, and for how long, do they accept that they need to put some of their load down. Bowler’s point— and that of her psychologist—is clear: What, we must ask ourselves in grief, can I put down?

It shouldn’t surprise any of us who’ve survived this pandemic to note that grief cloaks itself in anxiety, that grief can feel like fear. Or, as writer Joan Didion put it, “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” What both of our grief experts want us to know is that we can move through that grief and emerge somewhere on the other side, accepting our finitude and finding peace with it. It won’t be neat and it won’t be easy. But it also won’t be wrong. ●

PHOTOGRAPH BY YOUSUF ALFUHIGI / UNSPLASH

for

mental health

The dangerous rates of distress and burnout among healthcare workers are like a canary in the coal mine for the increasing mental health struggles that we all face. Here’s what a mindfulness-based program for nurses can teach us all about the inner skills that help prevent burnout.

HEALING WITH INTEGRITY

by Caren Osten Gerszberg

22 mindful February 2022

PHOTOGRAPH BY LUIS MELENDEZ / UNSPLASH

mental health

In April 2020, Caitlin McGeehan, a critical care and palliative medicine nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, found herself facing an unimaginable situation. Cloaked from head to toe in a biocontainment suit, McGeehan entered the room of a COVID19 patient experiencing respiratory failure. As the doors slid shut behind her, McGeehan felt as if she’d walked into an isolated moonscape—whooshing sounds circulated through her air-purifying hood, with the hiss of the lifesupport machines keeping her patient alive. Between the stressors of COVID, wearing the containment suit in this eerie environment, and feeling emotionally and physically isolated by the pandemic, McGeehan momentarily lost confidence. “I was acutely aware that I didn’t necessarily have the resources and support to do my job well and safely,” she recalls.

“The patient was breathing fast and unable to articulate his needs, and I just tried to steady my breath and calm my body, so I could act more quickly in response to what he needed.”

Feeling enormous responsibility to treat her patient with care and empathy, McGeehan called upon tools she learned in 2016 during a mindfulness and resilience program for 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. Also a contributor to The New York Times and Psychology Today, Caren writes about well-being, mindfulness, and education.

nurses. Bringing awareness to her physical experience— with the help of mindful breathing and a body scan— allowed her to self-soothe and regulate the emotional whirlwind she felt. Asking herself questions such as, “How can I serve?” and “What is the need here?” gave her the focus she needed to effectively care for her patient, as well as be the touchpoint for the patient’s family.

What McGeehan experienced when she first entered the patient’s room was a moment of moral suffering, a concept that has emerged through research on healthcare communities.

When a nurse finds themselves in a situation where what they believe they ought to be doing differs from what they are doing in the context of patient care, there is a dissonance that occurs—and the result is moral suffering, explains Dr. Cynda Hylton Rushton, a professor of nursing and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, and coauthor and editor of Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare.

“Moral suffering leads nurses to feel compromised at a deep level,” Rushton says. “How do I make sense of the conflict I feel when asked to do things that I thought caused more harm than good and I was the implementer of those decisions, and saw the consequences firsthand?”

The challenges most of us navigate daily may not be of this life-and-death magnitude. Struggling to make an organizational decision that could adversely impact employees, or feeling

unable to provide your children with care and attention while balancing the demands of work and your own need for rest, represent situations where moral suffering could arise. Whatever the exact nature of the decisions and dilemmas we face, the feeling of being too pressured or undersupported to act in alignment with our values has real effects on our mental health, and on whether we reach a point of burnout.

A Prescription for Resilience It’s a problem for which Dr. Rushton has helped us, literally, to find new words. Rushton coined the term moral resilience: the capacity to sustain integrity in response to morally difficult circumstances. (Integrity is defined by Rushton as a sense of wholeness and being in alignment with your values, personally as well as in relationships).

In response to the crisis of burnout in healthcare—a 2021 study in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association showed that among nurses who reported leaving their current job, 31.5% reported leaving because of burnout in 2018—Rushton developed an educational program for nurses called Mindful Ethical Practice and Resilience Academy, or MEPRA, launched in 2016. Research on the program’s efficacy showed significantly increased levels of mindfulness, ethical competence, confidence, work engagement, and resilience for the nurses who participated, →

February 2022 mindful 23

a non-profit supporting your meditation practice since 1975

mental health

made in vermont

m e d i tat i o n c u s h i o n s m e d i tat i o n b e n c h e s japanese incense Lo j o n g s Lo g a n c a r d s m e d i tat i o n g o n g s

take your seat.

as well as lower levels of depression, anger, and intent to leave their jobs.

By teaching skills including mindfulness, self-regulation, and somatic awareness—tuning in to body sensations—Rushton aims to educate and empower nurses. “Our work is really hard and there will always be ethical challenges and tradeoffs,” says Rushton. But when observing the nurses move through the MEPRA program, she notices a transformation. “They are so depleted and discouraged when they begin, and like a lotus flower slowly unfolding, they become themselves—confident, resourced and replenished, with tools and skills to meet the moment, and feel capable of facing issues, knowing there’s something they can do now.”

A March 2021 survey of US employees found that 52% of respondents feel burned out, and more than two-thirds (67%) report the feeling has worsened over the course of the pandemic.

If moral resilience training can reduce burnout among frontline nurses, can it help the general, non-healthcare population?

How to Tune In to Your Integrity

30 ChurCh Street, Barnet, Vermont 05821

samadhicushions.com 1.800.331.7751 Save 5% on Meditation Seats with code MINDFUL

This research indicates that mindfulness practices offer a path to cultivating personal and relational integrity when faced with a morally challenging situation—and, Rushton says, this also applies to non-healthcare workers.

“Everyone these days is confronting dissonant and

24 mindful February 2022

conflicting views, commitments and perspectives, and we are all searching for a path to greater clarity, confidence, and contentment,” explains Rushton.

“Integrity, being whole and undiminished, is one pathway for finding our way back ‘home’ to who we really are, what we stand for, and what matters most in life and work. Integrity is not perfection but rather honoring our strengths and limitations with honesty and compassion.”

For Caitlin McGeehan, maintaining her integrity while serving others at work looks like practicing listening to the signals of her body to identify how she feels before responding, and recognizing the value of perspective-taking—the ability to negotiate based on the understanding of different vantage points.

“If I’m going to provide whole patient care and have a good sense of where everyone—the various teams, surgeons, family, and, of course, the patient— is coming from and each facet of their experience in the process, then I need to be whole myself,” she says.

“A lot of what I do is give courage to people who are anticipating really difficult times, and that takes a lot of energy and effort.”

Leaning in to that energy and effort is key to building resilience. “Integrity requires us to ask hard questions, to not turn away from hard things, to be courageous and make clear to ourselves and others who we really are,” says Rushton. “It’s about restoring our ability to choose as fully aware moral agents.”

mental health

Change From the Inside We know that having healthy boundaries between work and family or leisure improves well-being. Mindfulness, among many of the principles of moral resilience, is a research-backed way of practicing the skills of presence and self-kindness that let us maintain those boundaries. “When I wake up in the morning, the ticker tape in my mind starts about all I have to do and worries and patients,” said McGeehan. “So I take a moment and just enjoy

m SUMMIT Healing Healthcare Join the world’s leading mindfulness and neuroscience experts to explore how mindfulness practices can support cultures of care and equity within healthcare institutions. mindful.org/ healthcare

waking up and being in bed, and acknowledge being present in that moment.”

Our moral resilience also grows by nurturing workplace relationships of vulnerability and honesty.

Caitlin Florin, a registered nurse in the cardiovascular surgical ICU at Johns Hopkins, brings her resilience training to her unit’s culture, gathering with other nurses to pause and breathe together, and encouraging conversations about difficult emotions.

“To be resilient is to stay strong and true to your values in the face of challenge, keeping that harmony in yourself while there’s a hurricane going on around you,” she says.

Through moral resilhttps://mail.google.com/mail/u/3/#search/aspc+logo/FMfcgzGkZGfRBsqMsrtCcVPpkdQqqxWS?projector=1&messagePartId=0.2 ience, and its emphasis on mindfulness, Dr. Rushton invites frontline nurses—and anyone who Certified Professional Coach Credential will listen—to learn tools https://mail.google.com/mail/u/3/#search/aspc+logo/FMfcgzGkZGfRBsqMsrtCcVPpkdQqqxWS?projector=1&messagePartId=0.2 1/1 to ultimately answer the MA in Positive Psychology & Coaching questions: Who are you, really? Why does your work in collaboration with The University of matter? What do you stand Buckingham, England for? And how do you find your voice, to speak about what is right for you? Looking to this research from healthcare communities “Coaching is about helpcan help us cultivate moral ing others find their own resilience in everyday life. best solutions through “Using mindful awareness transformational listento notice when you are acting, powerful coaching ing in alignment with your questions, designing an values, what you are feeling action plan, and providin your body, the emotions, ing accountability. It is the quality of mind, that not about giving advice.” there’s not too much stress in that moment, that’s home Dr. Elliott B. Rosenbaum, base,” said Rushton. “Then Founder, ASPC to notice when you’re out of alignment, when the nervous system is wonky, you can apply attention and then the skills to bring you back into alignment.” ● For more information, visit

Find Your Calling:

Become a Life Coach

We are now offering:

February 2022 mindful 25

thecoachschool.org

inner wisdom

Mindful meditation might overwhelm you some days, and underwhelm you others.

With a little practice, you can stay curious and engaged, when you might otherwise run.

Finding a Way to

KEEP YOUR SEAT

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

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAT WHELEN / UNSPLASH

By Elaine Smookler

inner wisdom

THREE ANCHORS FOR YOUR ATTENTION Although mindfulness is often linked to paying attention to your breath, there are many ways that you can anchor in the present moment and practice meditation.

As the roller coaster accelerated up the impossibly steep incline, I remembered, with very poor timing, that I am terrified of both speed and heights, and that a rather flimsy seatbelt was the only thing keeping me from flying off into a messy death. Even worse, I had talked my poor, dear old mother into coming along—for fun. As I heard my own whimpering screams begging for a swift end to this trip through hell, I could also hear my mother’s voice squealing with joyous abandon, “Wheeeee, this is so fun. Let’s go again!”

We all want to feel good; we all want to feel safe. And if we could, we’d probably all love to have as much fun as my mom. The challenge is that what makes you feel safe and joyful might make me feel petrified and shaking.

You might love the adrenaline rush of a roller coaster, I might need a calming lavender-scented pillow and a clear path to the door. And it’s all OK. Mindfulness can help us unfrizz our frazzled nervous systems. It can help us train our attention. It can help us feel connected to ourselves and each other. But that doesn’t mean it’s always going to feel peaceful. And there might be times when it feels downright intolerable to continue. It’s not “one size fits all.”

1. LISTEN Let yourself be the center of a living soundscape. Without trying to figure out what you’re hearing, can you allow yourself to just listen and be curious as you follow sounds in the room, your body, and the world around you?

When you’re bringing your fullest attention to sound, what do you notice?

2. LOOK Find something you can explore visually: a chair, a light, a rock, even your own hand. Let yourself be absorbed by the details. Is the surface smooth or rough? Are there many colors or just one? Are there patterns or textures to investigate? Let your curiosity guide you as you discover everything you can about what you see. When you’re bringing your fullest attention to sight, what do you notice?

3. FOCUS Intentionally choose to focus on the breath, but be precise. You might choose to notice the flow of air in and out of the left nostril, or the action of the rib cage as it expands and contracts. Stay extremely close to the ever-changing sensations that you might notice in that one little spot. What do you notice when you focus so precisely?

One person might find that mindful practices help them feel really relaxed and focused. But you might find (at times) that paying close attention to your breath or tuning in to your body makes you want to run for the hills.

Here’s the thing: Everybody is different, and our experience changes all the time. What might feel like no big deal for one practitioner, might feel impossible for you—today.

You might be in the middle of a body scan and suddenly find that focusing on a particular body part is triggering thoughts, emotions, or body sensations that are more than you can tolerate. Good noticing. At the end of the day, mindfulness is awareness. We are so much more

able to stay present when we’re not just trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get back to meditating. What we are training, among other things, is the ability to notice when overwhelm has flooded our system with the old culprits that include adrenaline and cortisol, whose presence makes receiving, processing, or integrating information almost impossible.

Mindfulness can invite us to notice what we need to be well. Then when life drops us onto roller coasters, we can maintain our seat. We can make space for what we need, while also offering ourselves myriad ways to stay open and present to the grand adventure of every moment. ●

February 2022 mindful 27

brain science

28 mindful February 2022

brain science

THE SCIENCE

of Curiosity

By Dr. Judson Brewer • Illustrations by Edmon de Haro

The thrill of curiosity can motivate us to learn—or it can send us hurtling into rabbit holes and habit loops. Dr. Judson Brewer breaks down what this inner drive has to do with shifting our most ingrained habits.

Curiosity—our drive for information—can induce a pleasant state or an aversive state. In 2006, the psychologists Jordan Litman and Paul Silvia identified the two main “flavors” of curiosity: I‑curiosity and D‑curiosity. The I in I‑curiosity stands for interest, the pleasurable aspects of the hunger for knowledge, while the D in D‑curiosity stands for deprivation, the idea that if we have a gap in information, we go into a restless, unpleasant, need‑to‑know state.

Deprivation curiosity is driven by a lack of information, often a specific piece of information. For example, if you are in a meeting or out to dinner, and you feel or hear a text come into your phone, you might notice that suddenly it is really hard to pay attention because not knowing what the text says makes you restless, causing your body temperature to rise. It’s as though your phone starts burning a hole in your purse

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. His most recent book is Unwinding Anxiety (Avery Publishing, 2021).

or your pocket. That fire of uncertainty is put out when you check your phone to see who texted you or read what the message says. The relief of the negative state, the itching of the scratch, is in itself rewarding. That’s why TV shows have cliffhangers—to drive deprivation curiosity. We have to know what happens, so we binge-watch!

Interest curiosity is piqued when we become interested in learning more about something.

Usually this isn’t a specific piece of information (like who texted you), but a broader category. For example, did you know that there are animals who keep growing in size until they die? They are called indeterminate growers, and include sharks, lobsters, and even kangaroos. In fact, based on its size, one 20-pound lobster was believed to be 140 years old. That’s one big old lobster! Isn’t that fascinating?

Interest curiosity is like diving into an internet search and realizing hours later that you’ve learned a whole bunch of stuff and your thirst for knowledge has been quenched. It feels good to learn something new. This is different from filling a deficit, simply because there wasn’t a deficit there in the first place (that is, you didn’t know you didn’t know about big lobsters, but when you found out about them, you were intrigued and delighted). Unlike D‑curiosity— which is about destinations—the I‑curiosity is more about the journey. →

February 2022 mindful 29

So why do we have curiosity in the first place?

It turns out curiosity builds on reward-based learning.

How Wondering Primes Your Brain Reward-based learning relies on positive and negative reinforcement—you want to do more of the things that feel good and fewer of the things that feel bad. This might also be the case with curiosity. The idea that curiosity aligns with reward-based learning has been supported by a growing body of research.

One study by Matthias Gruber and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis, had students review a list of trivia questions and rate their curiosity level in learning the answer.

At peak curiosity, dopamine pathways in the brain fired with increased intensity, and there was a stronger connection between reward centers and the hippocampus, a brain area associated with memory. Peak curiosity primed students to remember more information—not just the answers to their trivia questions.

Another study by Tommy Blanchard and his colleagues at the University of Rochester and

30 mindful February 2022

m AUDIO Work with Curiosity Explore three strategies to help you shift your focus. mindful.org/ curious

brain science

We can add information to the list with food and water when it comes to survival.

Columbia University looked at how curiosity related to getting information is coded in the orbitofrontal cortex. (The orbitofrontal cortex is associated with reward value and assigns value to different things—think broccoli vs. cake). In fact, in studies of primates, Blanchard’s team found that primates were willing to give up rewards such as getting a drink of water when they were thirsty for information.

Together, these studies suggest that the expression “thirst for knowledge” really is more than metaphorical. The acquisition of information follows the same basic behavioral pathways as reward-based learning and even has a literal reward value in the brain. We can add information to the list with food and water when it comes to survival. Old brain (find food, avoid danger) pairs up with new brain (get information to plan and predict the future) to help us thrive today. But when it comes to curiosity, is there such a thing as too much information?

Each curiosity “flavor” has different “tastes.”

They fall into different categories in terms of how they feel in our bodies: Deprivation feels closed, interest open. So what about their reward structures drives these behaviors? With deprivation curiosity, getting the answer is rewarding, but with interest curiosity, the process of being curious feels good.

This is critical for two reasons. First, with interest curiosity, you don’t need something outside of yourself to get a reward—the curiosity is rewarding in and of itself—and second, because of its inherent nature, it doesn’t run out. Interest curiosity also feels better (i.e., is more rewarding) when compared to the scratchy, closeddown itch of deprivation.

Using Curiosity for Habit Change and Learning Most of us approach ourselves and the world with D‑curiosity, like a problem to be solved. But we’re all actually in the perfect place to build →

HOW TO

Practice Curiosity First, find a quiet, comfortable place where you won’t be distracted.

You can be sitting, lying down, or even standing up.

Recall your most recent run‑in with a habitual pattern. See if you can remember the scene and focus in on the habitual behavior itself. What did you feel when you were about to act it out?

What did that urge to go ahead and “do it” feel like?

Now check in with your body. What sensation can you feel most strongly right now? Pick only one from this list, the one you feel most strongly: • Tightness • Pressure • Contraction • Restlessness • Shallow breath • Burning • Tension • Clenching • Heat • Pit in stomach • Buzzing/vibration Is it more on the right side or the left? In the front, middle, or back of your body? Where do you feel it most strongly?

Now, let out the sound “hmmm” like when you’re curious about something—is that hmm on the right side or the left? In the middle, front, or back of your body? Don’t worry about what area you picked. They are all perfect.

Was there anything you noticed about being curious about whatever part of your body you felt the sensation in? Did being a little curious help with getting closer to this sensation?

See if you can get curious and notice what else is there. Are there other sensations? What happens when you get curious about them? Do they change?

Follow them over the next thirty seconds, not trying to do anything to or about them, but simply observing them. Do they change at all when you observe them with an attitude of curiosity?

Whenever an urge to repeat a habitual behavior comes up—or even while you’re in the middle of the behavior—see if you can practice dropping into curiosity.

February 2022 mindful 31

HEALING HEALTHCARE

Healing Healthcare A GLOBAL MINDFULNESS SUMMIT FEBRUARY 8-10, 2022

FREE ONLINE EVENT

Experience the synergy between mindfulness and healthcare as we hold skillful space for healing. Featuring conversations, meditations, and panel discussions with 40+ experts in this free online event.

WITH KEYNOTE SPEAKERS DR. RICHARD DAVIDSON, SHARON SALZBERG, AND RHONDA MAGEE

JOIN US FOR FREE!

mindful.org/healthcare SPONSORED BY

brain science

Curiosity allows you to step back and see your habit loops for what they are: thoughts and emotions.

and sustain curiosity by playing deprivation and interest curiosity off each other. And you can leverage this interplay between the two to help you break old habits and build new ones.

Of all of our human capacities, curiosity is at the top of my list of most essential. From helping us learn to survive in the world to bringing the joy of discovery and wonder, curiosity really is a superpower.

Whether you’re feeling frustrated or stuck, curiosity can help you explore what that feels like in your body and mind (instead of trying to fix or change it). If you get caught in a habit loop (a mostly unthinking pattern of behavior, based on our frequent responses getting hardwired in the brain) of worry or self-judgment, curiosity can help you step out of the loop instead of having your mind spinning out of control and feeding more habitual self-judgment. Curiosity allows you to step back and see your habit loops for what they are: thoughts and emotions.

Curiosity can help you stay present in a nonjudgmental way to whatever your experience is.

It’s actually stronger than any type of force or willpower you might (habitually) use, and can also bring a playful, even joyful attitude to any situation. ●

SPRING + SUMMER 2022 MINDFULNESS RETREATS for teens + young adults

Come connect with others, express yourself, and learn tools to compassionately navigate through life’s challenges. ibme.com/mindful Retreat locations across the United States.

No teen ever turned away for lack of funds.

Visit our website for more details.

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.

February 2022 mindful 33

@ibmeretreats

gratitude

34 mindful February 2022

EXPLORE THE

POWER OF GRATITUDE Science writer Misty Pratt dives into the research showing how our experience can transform when we give gratitude an intentional place in our lives. Plus, three practices from leading mindfulness teachers to inspire you on your gratitude path.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY GERALDINE SY

gratitude

Gratitude helps you see the bigger picture and become more resilient in the face of adversity.

G

ratitude offers us a way of embracing all that makes our lives what they are. More than just a happy feeling for the parts of our lives currently going our way, gratitude encompasses the willingness to expand our attention so that we perceive more of the goodness we are always receiving.

In the past two decades, a growing body of evidence in the field of social science has found that gratitude has measurable benefits for just about every area of our lives. Gratitude appears to contribute substantially to individual wellbeing and physical health. So much so that the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley—a leader in research on the science of social and emotional well-being— describes gratitude as the “social glue” key to building and nurturing strong relationships.

Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and one of the world’s leading experts on the science of gratitude, defines gratitude as having two parts.

The first is an affirmation of goodness: People can learn to wake up to the good around them and notice the gifts they have received. The second part of gratitude is recognizing that the source of this goodness rests outside of oneself— that we receive these gifts from other people, and sometimes from a higher power, fate, or the natural world. In other words, gratitude helps people realize that they wouldn’t be where they are without the help of others.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Misty Pratt has been a health researcher for over 10 years and works as a Research Coordinator with the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. She is also a freelance writer and voice for the Ottawa blog Kids in the Capital. Misty’s research interests include mental well-being and maternal health. She is a frequent contributor to Mindful.

A Brain Built on Gratitude Gratitude is more than just a momentary good feeling. Scientists who have studied written gratitude interventions, such as gratitude letters or journals, have found benefits for an individual’s mental health and well-being. Gratitude practices also appear to help you feel more satisfied in life and can boost your self-esteem, according to peer-reviewed research.

THE SCIENCE

PHOTO-NUKE / ADOBE STOCK

Feel Happier In one study involving nearly 300 adults seeking counseling services at a university, one randomized group wrote a gratitude letter each week for three weeks. The gratitude group reported significantly better mental health (compared to the control group) at follow-up, 12 weeks after the last writing exercise. Another type of written gratitude practice is counting blessings, or “Three Good Things.”

A study of this practice found that people who wrote down three things

that had gone well in their day and identified the causes of those good things were significantly happier and less depressed, even six months after the study ended.

HOW IT WORKS

Strengthen Positive Recall How exactly do these practices work to improve our mental well-being?

In general, people are more cognitively aware of their “headwinds” (or barriers they face) than “tailwinds” (benefits they receive). By paying more attention to our tailwinds, studies have shown that we can accentuate feelings of happiness, optimism, and positive emotion.

“Strengthening your positive recall bias makes it easier to see the good things around you even when times are dark,” says Nancy Davis Kho, author of the book The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. Nancy set a lofty goal of writing 50 thank-you letters to people in her life and found that the practice improved her ability to weather some of life’s bigger challenges.

At first, Nancy found it difficult to come up with a list of 50 people. After she got started on the letters, the practice naturally boosted positive emotion and she was able to extend her gratitude well beyond her family and friends. Nancy encourages those writing gratitude letters to find “the creative people whose work carries you beyond yourself, whose vision helps you clarify your own, whose talent and hard work have combined to create a body of work that brings you simple joy.”

WHY PRACTICE

Deepen Resilience Enduring gratitude is not just about happiness and positivity; it doesn’t require you to ignore or stifle negative emotions. In the book The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good, Robert Emmons writes that “practicing gratitude magnifies positive feelings more than it reduces negative feelings.” Gratitude helps you see the bigger picture and become more resilient in the face of adversity. →

February 2022 mindful 37

PRACTICE

A Practice to Welcome Gratitude Counteract your brain’s negativity bias by using this practice to open a doorway in your heart for receiving gratitude and happiness.

by SHARON SALZBERG

Sit or lie down on the floor in a relaxed, comfortable posture.

Your eyes can be open or closed.

Now bring to mind a pleasurable experience you had recently, one that carries a positive emotion such as happiness, joy, comfort, contentment, or gratitude.

If you can’t think of a positive experience, be aware of giving yourself the gift of time to do this practice now.

Be present to what arises.

Mindfulness does not depend on what is happening, but is about how we relate to what is happening. That’s why we say that mindfulness and gratitude can go anywhere. While focusing your attention on this pleasant memory, allow yourself to be present with all the related thoughts and emotions that might bubble up, whether enjoyable or not. All of this complexity—this, too, is a jumpingoff point for our gratitude practice.

Take a moment to cherish whatever image comes to mind with the recollection of the pleasurable experience. See what it feels like to sit with this recollection. Where in your body do you feel sensations arising? What are they? How do they change? Focus your attention on the part of your body where those sensations are the strongest. Stay with the awareness of your bodily sensations and your relationship to them, opening up to them and accepting them.

Now, notice what emotions come up. You may feel moments of excitement, moments of hope, moments of fear, moments of wanting more. Just watch these emotions rise and pass away. All of these states are changing and shifting.

Perhaps you feel some uneasiness about letting yourself feel too good, because you fear bad luck might follow. Perhaps you feel some guilt about not deserving to feel this happiness. In such moments, practice inviting in the feelings of joy or delight, and allowing yourself to make space for them. Acknowledge and fully experience such emotions.

Notice what thoughts may be present as you bring to mind the positive. Do you have a sense of being less confined or less stuck in habits?

Or perhaps you find yourself falling back into thoughts about what went wrong in your day, what disappointed you—these thoughts can be more comfortable because they are so familiar. If so, take note of this. Do you tell yourself, I don’t deserve this pleasure until I give up my bad habits, or I must find a way to make this last forever? Try to become aware of such add-on thoughts and see if you can let them go and simply be with the feeling of the moment.

End the meditation by simply sitting and being with the breath.

Be with the breath gently, as though you were cradling it. Then when you’re ready, you can open your eyes.

m AUDIO Connect With LovingKindness Sharon Salzberg guides us to connect with loving awareness. mindful.org/ loving awareness

gratitude

Nourish a Grateful Body When digging into the science of gratitude, we begin to see there are more dimensions to this emotion than meet the eye. In the scientific literature, gratitude is studied in several different ways: • Trait gratitude, which refers to whether people have a naturally grateful personality.

• Gratitude as a mood, which tracks daily fluctuations in gratitude.

• Gratitude as an emotion, which describes a passing feeling of gratitude (when receiving a thank-you letter, for example).

The “practice” of gratitude and the interventions that scientists use in their studies are activities designed to boost gratitude as a mood or emotion.

THE SCIENCE

Boost Immunity and Heart Health

ANATARTAN / ADOBE STOCK

Research published in the last decade has shown that grateful people (those who have “trait gratitude”) have fewer common health complaints, such as headaches, digestion issues, respiratory infections, runny noses, dizziness, and sleep problems. It appears that practicing gratitude could also help to alleviate those pesky health problems. In one study, a group of college students who wrote about things they were grateful for once per week for 10 weeks reported fewer physical symptoms (such as headaches, shortness of breath, sore muscles, and nausea) compared to two other control groups.

HOW IT WORKS

Calm the Nervous System “Physiological changes associated with gratitude are typically a reduction in blood pressure and increase in vagal tone, which is taken as an index of increased parasympathetic influence on the peripheral nervous system,” says Dr. Emiliana SimonThomas, Science Director at the Greater Good Science Center. The parasympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system that allows our body to “rest and digest”) can help you conserve energy by slowing the heart rate, stimulating digestion, and contributing to overall relaxation.

This soothing of the nervous system may be one mechanism by which gratitude works to calm the body. A study of heart-failure patients who were randomly assigned to either an eight-week gratitude-journaling group or a treatment-as-usual group found that patients in the gratitude group showed more parasympathetic heart-rate variability, which is a sign of better heart health.

WHY PRACTICE

Make Healthier Choices Strange as it may seem, gratitude can also encourage us to fuel our bodies with nourishing foods. Research shows grateful people report better physical health because they tend to engage in healthy activities such as focusing on nutrition. “We have found that getting people to express gratitude could help them work toward healthier eating behaviors, like more fruits and vegetables and less junk food,” says Lisa Walsh, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in social/personality psychology at University of California, Los Angeles, whose graduate studies included research with Sonja Lyubomirsky’s Positive Activities and Well-Being (PAW) Laboratory at the University of California, Riverside. In one of →

EMBRACE A LIFE OF GRATITUDE with The Gratitude Journal The Gratitude Journal offers a rich journey into the heart of gratitude. Rooted in science, featuring writing prompts by Jane Anne Staw and practices from leading mindfulness teachers, The Gratitude Journal

by Mindful helps you bring the practice of gratitude into every area of your life.

mindful.org/ gratitude-journal

February 2022 mindful 39

gratitude

Thankful to Those We Love In addition to giving individual benefits, gratitude may also help to strengthen ties with friends, loved ones, and those in our wider communities. The find-remind-bind theory, first proposed by psychologist Sara Algoe—an associate professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—suggests that gratitude can help people identify good candidates for

40 mindful February 2022

a new relationship (find), appreciate existing relationships (remind), and motivate people to maintain or invest in these relationships (bind). As Sara writes in a 2012 paper on her theory, “Gratitude starts inside one individual and its effects spread to a dyadic relationship and perhaps throughout a social network.”

Find-remind-bind theory suggests that expressing gratitude may prompt individuals to pay back the kindness they have received, and can also motivate a person to make decisions that will strengthen their relationships. Gratitude may increase a person’s desire to spend more time with someone, and it encourages prosocial behaviors.

THE SCIENCE

Stronger Connections “Social connection is likely key to well-being,” says Lisa Walsh. She explains that gratitude might not be an emotion that just makes people feel good; it appears to have social implications by motivating individuals to improve themselves. In an upcoming study from the PAW Laboratory at UC-Riverside, high school students who expressed gratitude had a mixed experience—they felt “elevated” (a positive emotion) and indebted.

Immediately after writing their gratitude letters, the students also felt motivated to improve themselves.

HOW IT WORKS

Better Communication Gratitude also plays an important role in maintaining romantic relationships, acting as a “booster shot” to remind us why our partners are valuable and worth holding onto. By practicing gratitude, couples can initiate a cycle of generosity—one partner’s gratitude inspires the other to act in a way that reaffirms their commitment. One study found that receiving a thoughtful gesture from a partner was followed by increased feelings of gratitude and indebtedness. →

FANDORINA LIZA / ADOBE STOCK

the PAW lab’s studies, high school students preselected a healthy eating goal and were asked to either write weekly gratitude letters or list their daily activities. Teens who expressed gratitude reported healthier eating behavior over time compared to those who just listed their activities. Other studies of people’s physical health outcomes have found that gratitude journaling can lead to better-quality sleep and lowered blood pressure.

PRACTICE

Restore Your Heart by Resting Your Body Take a restorative moment to release tension and feel a deep sense of gratitude for your hardworking body, in all of its beauty and mystery.

by RASHID HUGHES

Starting off, find a posture that feels comfortable for you in this moment.

Begin to notice and feel your body here and present—not trying to fix or change anything about the body, inviting your body to just rest naturally.

Take a few moments to feel what it means to be alive in your body right now.

Allow this aliveness to be what you sense into in this moment. This is my body and I’m grateful for my body.

Now, allow your attention to lightly rest on the sensations associated with the body touching whatever is supporting it. Feel the aliveness of the body touching and being supported by whatever is under you. This is my body resting, supported, and I’m grateful for this body and for this support and this moment to rest.

Let the support, the stability, and the comfort of having something holding you really infuse your body and your awareness.

Invite your body to rest in the feeling of the space around the body.

With each exhale, let your attention begin to relax and expand beyond the skin, just going out a few inches around the skin, resting in this space.

the aliveness, and just allowing the front of the body to be held and to rest. And lastly, arrive at the other side of the body, sensing the skin of the body, then letting your attention relax into the space around that side of the body.

Start with your back, inviting the back to rest.

Shifting to one side of the body, feel that side, feel the skin, and then invite that side of the body to just let go and relax. And then go to the front of the body: feeling the skin, the body sensations, and

Breathing in, feeling the body held in our awareness.

Breathing out, we’re grateful for the space around the body. It allows the body to relax.

As you close this practice, place a hand on your heart, feeling a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the body, the space around the body, and this moment of resting.

m AUDIO Explore Deep Rest Relax and appreciate your body with this practice from Rashid Hughes. mindful.org/ rest-practice

PRACTICE

Cultivate Embodied Gratitude This practice infuses the body with gratitude, which can then overflow as appreciation for the people in your life—while always returning to the appreciation you have for yourself.

by SHELLY TYGIELSKI

Let your body relax and soften.

Close your eyes or soften your gaze.

Taking a long, slow, deep inhale, remind yourself of your body’s inherent awareness, ease, and vitality.

Begin by directing your attention to the top of your head, and as thoughts arise, just let them be.

Be aware of any tension in your scalp, and on your next inhalation, pause and breathe out gratitude.

Place the palms of your hands over your eyes gently.

As you breathe

in, see if you can soften your eyes.

As you breathe out, let go of all the tightness around your eyes.

On your next inhalation, bring your awareness to the place in your nostrils where you can feel the air entering and going out. Let your concentration deepen.

Continue moving down the body, inhaling, accepting any tension, and exhaling as you soften and relax, all the way down to your feet.

Then, reverse it: Slowly bring your awareness from your feet all the way back up the body. At the top of your head, return awareness to your breath.

Now bring to your mind’s eye somebody you love. Notice how this feels in your heart: warmth, openness, tenderness. Let this individual know how grateful you are for what they mean to you, completing the sentence: I am grateful for your presence in my life, and this is why… And just

take a moment to list the reasons.

Allow this person to embrace you, and feel the joy in your own heart as they accept your gratitude.

Next, bring your attention to a person you barely know at all. Let them know, I am grateful for your presence in my life, and this is why… And take a moment to list the reasons, embracing them, feeling the joy in your heart as if they’ve accepted your gratitude.

Finally, envision yourself standing in front of yourself. Let yourself know: I am grateful for who I am and for this life, and this is why…

Wish yourself safety and joy and happiness, feeling that your heart is filled with compassion and gratitude and that you’re looking forward to what’s to come. As you close this practice, feel free to sit in this space for a while. You are free to just be.

m AUDIO Share Your Gratitude Extend good wishes to those you love (and yourself) with Shelly Tygielski. mindful.org/ embodygratitude

gratitude

Experiencing gratitude from these acts of kindness led both partners to feel more connected and satisfied with their relationship the next day.

While many studies have examined the effects of writing gratitude, all the ways we communicate—letters, conversation, and social media—are avenues for expressing gratitude.

Gratitude may also open the door to healthier communication styles within a relationship. Since the practice leads to more positive perceptions of our partners, friends, or family (and likely, greater trust), we may feel more comfortable talking through disagreements. In one study, participants who expressed gratitude toward a romantic partner or close friend reported greater ease when voicing relationship concerns in the future.

WHY PRACTICE

PHOTO-NUKE / ADOBE STOCK

It’s Better Together “Gratitude has made our family closer,” says Randi Joy, a chiropractor and life coach living in Ottawa. She’s been practicing gratitude with her family for about five years. “When we talk about our gratefulness and what we’re grateful for…we have a better connection,” she says. Whether it’s a gratitude walk where they discuss what they’re grateful for, or a list of their “gratefuls” at the dinner table, Randi’s family takes every opportunity to practice together.

Whether you hope to boost your mood and mental health, protect your physical health, or improve your personal relationships, a rich body of research in the field of social sciences has found that gratitude offers significant benefits. The takeaway: Cultivating gratitude can open the door to a different perspective—one that values the goodness in our lives.

With practice, we can learn to see the bigger picture and navigate adversity with greater resilience. ●

Gratitude practices also appear to help you feel more satisfied in life and can boost your selfesteem, according to peer-reviewed research.

February 2022 mindful 43

44 mindful February 2022

wisdom

When Frank Ostaseski suffered a series of strokes, his years of mindfulness practice supported him in a very deep way when everything else was falling apart.

PHOTOGRAPH BYFOAD ROSHAN / UNSPLASH

LEAN IN TO LOVE

PHOTOGRAPH BY NICOLE POLLOK / UNSPLASH

wisdom

wisdom

Frank Ostaseski is a well-known and much-loved teacher of meditation, mindfulness, and compassionate service.

The author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, Ostaseski cofounded the Zen Hospice Project, and has helped more than a thousand people on their way to dying.

In July 2019 a serious stroke affected his brain’s capacity. In the ensuing two months he had four more strokes, and as many aspects of daily life became more difficult, Ostaseski found strength and refuge in love, compassion, and curiosity. He also found his practice still very much alive through the whole experience—and his ability to communicate the nuance of what we discover when we welcome everything remains intact.

Here, he shares some of what he learned and leaned on with his longtime friend, Mindful’s founding editor Barry Boyce.

BARRY BOYCE: Frank, can you describe what the experience of your strokes and seizures has been like for you?

FRANK OSTASESKI: The first stroke woke me with severe pain that felt like someone was taking a welder's torch across my skull. My wife, Vanda, was amazingly calm and resourceful.

She called the hospital and they said she should get me in right away. So, the first stroke was the most serious, but in the next two months I had another four strokes, which varied in symptoms and severity.

Even though my brain was going through this calamity, my awareness was conscious. Awareness could watch my brain go offline, watch my inability to tell night from day, to track time, my inability to find my way back from the toilet to our bedroom. “Frank” was frightened; but awareness wasn't. So, there was Frank, the personality that observes and reacts. But, anyone who’s done even a little mindfulness practice is conscious that a more expansive quality of awareness is available. It has no need to exclude anything, so it can include and welcome everything.

That's what was in play at that moment.

Now, without getting too technical here, we can be aware and not know. I was aware, even though I didn't understand that it was a stroke. I was aware of losing my sense of time. I was aware of losing any sense of direction.

Can you say more about that distinction between being aware without knowing and being aware with the quality of knowing?

Frank Ostaseski is a meditation teacher. In 2004, he went on to create the Metta Institute to provide innovative educational programs and professional training to foster compassionate, mindfulness-based care. (For a podcast interviewing Frank, see page 68.)

Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful magazine. An avid meditator for over 40 years, he is also author of The Mindfulness Revolution, an anthology of applied mindfulness instructions from leading teachers and experts.

Knowing requires an ability to correlate what we're experiencing to something in our databanks. There can be awareness without naming or differentiation. Infants see color and shape and patterns but cannot name or differentiate patterns.

Perception is the process by which we make the indefinite, definite. My perception coalesced very slowly. →

February 2022 mindful 47

wisdom

Your houseboat has two floors, right?

Yes, an upstairs and downstairs. One morning, standing at the top of the stairs, I realized I could easily fall. And

48 mindful February 2022

if I fell, that would cause a great deal of suffering for my family. I had an image of my grown son at the bottom of the staircase. I imagined how much pain my falling would cause him. I felt a welling up of love for my son. The love was so supportive and strong. It was as stable for me as the handrail. And so any time I went down the stairs, I would invoke an image of my son and my love for him. It was a stable support for me to navigate the world that had become very difficult to navigate. It wasn't just an emotional state; the love had the quality of inner support.

And you would say you instinctually stumbled into that discovery?

I stumbled into the discovery through the experience of empathy. If I hurt myself, it would hurt them too, right? Empathy became a doorway to compassion. I wanted to relieve that possibility of suffering. That is compassionate action. So, I had to make a vow to myself that I would be very careful. And the driving force for that vow was love.

You had to rely on a bigger sphere, in a sense, than the more immediate, ego-oriented sphere of “I need to control things in order not to hurt me.”

Exactly. When we train ourselves in mindfulness, we can become more conscious of our inner and outer worlds and what motivates our actions.

I've spent most of my adult life in service, cultivating the quality of compassion. So, it’s very stable in me. And I think it surfaced as a kind of guidance.

How did that experience strengthen your confidence in that ongoing continuity of awareness we talked about earlier, in the face of the loss of so many reference points?

My confidence in what we might call our “natural awareness” was a well established practice in my life.

However, in the past, if I forgot about

PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCESCO BONINO / ADOBESTOCK

I would see something rectangular and yellow and black. Then slowly, it would coalesce into a school bus. It wasn't that I didn't know the words “school bus,” but perception was altered, the pattern of color and shape wasn’t recognizable. Now, if hindered perception makes it difficult to recognize a school bus, it makes it similarly difficult to recognize the conventional sense of self. A recognition of Frank would also coalesce slowly. My normal identity, what I thought of as me, wasn’t coming into a recognizable form.

For many people this is a frightening state. There are no reference points, no familiar self. However, due to my practice I was familiar with “non-conceptual awareness,” an awareness that isn't filled with concepts or knowing. A pure openness.

My strokes affected the visual processing area of the brain—my eyes are fine, but my occipital lobe was injured, and my brain doesn't translate the images coming in through the retina.

I’ve lost over 50% of my vision. Yet this experience has provided insight into how we normally see and this has inspired a more expansive vision of how our superficial and limited ways of seeing lead to misperception and ultimately a sense of separation.

The strokes also altered my sense of time and space. I often don't know what day it is. When someone says, I'll be back in a minute, I don't know how long that is. In our current conversation, I don’t know if we have been talking for five minutes or an hour.

The strokes also reduced impulse control. When I came home from the hospital after the first stroke, the healthcare people were very concerned, because my houseboat is unstable and my balance was off, so they were very worried that I would act impulsively and fall down the stairs.

wisdom

“I don't think we can be free if we are rejecting any part of ourselves; including the parts that are not so functional sometimes or damaged in some way.”

FRANK OSTASESKI

natural awareness, I would slip into functioning only from Frank’s personality. But now, the functionality of Frank’s personality was not reliable. My trust in natural awareness became more stable and served as my primary guidance.

I've known you for decades. And I've seen a lot of different Franks, and you’re another Frank now, clearly.

There is both change and continuity.

I don't think our mindfulness practice is about having some kind of transcendent experience or arriving at some plateau from which we never fall. The experience with my strokes was humbling. It reminded me that our practice doesn’t protect us from bad things. It gives us the capacity to work with them when they arise.

Practice can shift how we see ourselves, who we understand ourselves to be. We are more than the small separate self we have taken ourselves to be. We are awareness, pure openness.

Could you say something about what you experienced last February?

I was sitting at my desk and suddenly I was aware of the impermanence of things; everything, even the solid walls, appeared pixelated. At first it was interesting. And then I thought, “Oh, you could be having another stroke, Frank.”

Vanda called the emergency services. She told me that they'd arrive shortly with a gurney and wheel me down to the dock; which is about a four-minute walk to the parking lot.

I said, “No, I want to walk.” Maybe it was stubbornness but I wanted to feel my feet. When I stepped on the dock, my whole being was infused with love—as if every cell in my body filled with love. It wasn't something I was trying to evoke or promote; it simply was there, as a kind of guidance.

It wasn't only emotional love, it was stable, supportive, and in a way impersonal but very real. Like my experience on the staircase. I could lean into it. →

February 2022 mindful 49

m

Frank Ostaseski leads a 4-part mini course in fearless open-hearted awareness. mindful.org/ fearless

PHOTOGRAPH BY ULLISION / ADOBESTOCK

ONLINE COURSE Embracing Impermanence

wisdom

As I walked, I was unstable on my feet, and I had to hold on to Vanda's arm. But internally, I was very stable.

About halfway down the dock, I stopped to look over the railing at the water. And then something changed.

The supportive quality of love subsided and a new quality started to emerge. I would call it “dissolving love.” Love was dissolving everything, any sense of Frank, any sense of me being separate from anything else.

And as it dissolved, I experienced something which, without getting fancy, I would just call absence.

Absolute absence of any boundaries or familiar references. It felt real and true, and in a way ordinary. There was awareness and pure openness. No me, but there was consciousness of the experience.

As we got to the parking lot, I saw an ambulance drive up. As the paramedics got out, I began to have a grand mal seizure. They caught me as I fell. It must have been very frightening for Vanda—my body going rigid and shaking.

Had you had seizures before with other strokes?

Never.

Oh, this is new territory…

Completely new territory. They put me in the ambulance. They gave me medication, I went unconscious and they took me to the hospital. No awareness at all. Very different from the absolute absence. I was unconscious when they wheeled me into the emergency room. After a while, I vaguely heard voices. I learned later that it was Vanda and the doctor confirming my end-of-life wishes, including no CPR. The doctor questioned this and Vanda said she was uncertain. Apparently, I raised my arm, and I said clearly and unmistakably, “No CPR!” I don't know where that came from. It was as if I was emerging from a dark well, but I said it.

And you were aware that you were saying that?

No, but then I started to become conscious again. The medications I was given can be mood altering. I had just gone through a very traumatic experience. These and other factors combined to make me quite delusional and paranoid. I couldn't find a way for my mind to work with the delusion. The techniques we use in mindfulness—sensing the body, calming the mind—were not helpful.

But awareness was there. I have deep trust in the truth of impermanence and so I began to repeat a very simple phrase: “Right now, it's like this.”

That's about all I could manage. The paranoia lasted for almost 48 hours. It was a hell realm.

Ouch.

I asked my teacher about this experience. I said, “Suppose this was the moment of my dying, and I first felt this angelic and supportive love and then this paranoia?” He said, “Oh, it would be all right.” I asked, “What do you mean, it would be all right? I might die in utter confusion!”

He continued, “Well, it doesn't surprise me that you experienced that love. You've been cultivating loving awareness most of your life. It would naturally be there to support you. And when you died, your brain would stop and the paranoia—which is a function of your brain—would also stop, and awareness would return.”

So that was a very deep teaching and very useful for me. We are more than our illnesses, more than our history, more than our limiting ideas of self. Our mindfulness practice has to be creative and fluid. It's not sufficient to simply calmly observe. We need insight.

Isn't calmly observing a conventional gateway to that possibility of seeing?

I’m just going to watch this movie of life so I can be calm about it.

If you want to be calm, I've got some tea that I can give you—but that doesn't necessarily provide any insight into your life or the nature of our suffering in our world. We need understanding, we need clear comprehension.

There have been many attempts to measure the quality of meditation practice and almost all of them seem to rely on measuring some state of calm. But in the experience of insight, you may be completely rocked by something, but it's the remaining or returning to some connection to greater awareness that truly counts, so calm is not a measure of insight or wisdom.

Yes. Calmness, concentration, and tranquility can allow us to see more deeply into our situation, which can give rise to wisdom. But it doesn’t always work that way. I couldn't calm myself in the paranoia. Sensing my body, watching my breath, were not sufficient to work with this difficult state of mind. However, my practice gave me the energy to persevere, to remain mindful, to temporarily find ease, and call on the wisdom that has been cultivated through practice.

That is what led me to say, “Right now, it's like this.”

One of the significant things about “Right now, it's like this,” is that it's very direct and non-discursive. You know, it's not a little pep talk. It's not a narrative.

Yes, and it's also not a fix, it’s just a statement of truth.

You often say the part of you that is aware you're in pain isn't in pain, and in this case, the part of you that was able to say, “Right now, it's like this” is aware there is more to you than your paranoia. But it may get overtaken again. It's not like for 48 hours you can just say once, “Hey, I'm cool.” →

February 2022 mindful 51

FRANK OSTASESKI

No. And it wasn't skillful to just keep sensing my body and watching my mind. I needed to place my mind on something that was stabilizing. The phrase stabilized my mind, heart, and body.

One of the classical metaphors for skillful means is some kind of a weapon, such as a sword. It's something that needs to be available to be wielded. Your training gave you that weapon, as it were.

Exactly. And if I had only trained in calming the mind, heart, and body that wouldn't have been enough. The phrase was a skillful means to cut through delusion—the sword of discriminating awareness that helps us discern the truth of the moment.

The simple metaphor of the ocean and the wave describes a sense of oneness or interdependence we have with all things, the lack of separation.

But another way to understand it is: At the surface, wind and other conditions are creating waves. A wave isn't innately different from the ocean, it's still wet and salty. But conditions are making it into a wave. It's just the ocean taking that shape. But any scuba diver will tell you that if you drop down deep in the sea, you'll find calmness. That is also true of our minds. The surface of our mind—the ordinary, everyday mind—is constantly being windswept by conditions, history, trauma, etc. However, there is a dimension of mind that is always calm and will not abandon us.

We can rely on it. It doesn't require being somebody special or becoming enlightened. It is naturally occurring.

Mostly, we're so preoccupied with what's at the surface that we don't always recognize the deeper dimensions of mind. Training is required in order to know it. We shouldn’t underestimate the need for good training. If you want to scuba dive, it's a good idea to take a few lessons before you dive 40 or 50 meters below the surface of the ocean.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NAZRIN B-VA / UNSPLASH

“Empathy became a doorway to compassion.

I had to make a vow to myself that I would be very careful.

And the driving force for that vow was love.”

CONTEMPLATION

But loving awareness isn’t the sole domain of enlightened beings, it's available to everyone. Just like it takes practice to learn to scuba dive, we can all learn to have confidence in deep mind and become skillful in navigating difficult states of mind, body, and heart.

It seems at times we're drawn to the notion that we could live down there at the bottom of the ocean, and we set up this dichotomy that the surface is a problem we need to escape from.

But we always need to navigate the surface, right? Even though we have that depth available.

Early in our life, we tend to split off or bifurcate the personality from the deeper dimensions of our being. It is essential that in our practice we realize that the windswept surface of mind is not separate from or something other than deep mind.

I want to touch on something that you talked to me about not long after your first stroke, about sequencing.

So, the part of my brain that was damaged relates to time, space, direction, and sequencing. So, when we would say, “Let's go to the supermarket, and on the way we'll stop for a coffee and maybe on the way back we'll get a bite to eat.” Those are things that my brain cannot track so well. It’s difficult for me to put tasks or activities in order. Putting things in order is part of how we make sense of things. It's part of how perception functions. We see color, shape and then there's that almost seemingly automatic recognition of school bus. It is actually a process of sequencing. If that capacity isn't there, then our ability to recognize patterns and perceive the world as we perceived it before is dramatically altered.

Now, how is it that you didn't just crumble in the face of the lack of such basic reference points? →

As we shift from a goal of recovery to one of discovery, our wisdom tells us we’ll need love and compassion for the journey. Frank Ostaseski offers two short contemplations that call on both.

COMPASSION FOR SUFFERING AN EVENING CONTEMPLATION At night when I'm scared or I'm confused, or worried that I won't recover, I lie in bed and I think about all of the people who might be alone, frightened, or suffering. And this evokes in me a certain kind of compassion, a deep wish to relieve their suffering. I'm not very good at self-compassion.

I've never been good at it. But when I invoke my compassion for others it spills over to me because I can't have it for others and not include myself.

People often say you have to be compassionate toward yourself before you can be compassionate to others. I don't agree. When I awaken my compassion for others, it has to include me. Even if I wanted to hold myself out on the margins, I can't because it doesn't fly. So that's my practice in the evening. I go to bed, I lie there, and I try to

evoke compassion for those people who are suffering. It's not wishy washy. It's genuine.

I can feel it because I feel my own suffering. I haven't yet felt my own compassion, but I feel my own suffering.

SERVING WITH LOVE A MORNING CONTEMPLATION In the morning when I wake, I lie in bed—before I meditate—and I again try to think of people in the world, and I ask myself: “Love, what would you have me do today?” It's a motivation for my day and it's a way of orienting myself toward serving in the world, but also serving in the world with kindness and clear intention. And it comes back to love becoming my support for the day. It's not just, “Oh, I'm a really good guy and I'm thinking about everybody else.” When I evoke that love, it infuses me with a certain kind of support.

February 2022 mindful 53

PRACTICE

Frank Ostaseski offers six steps to open up to the present moment— whatever it may bring.

To welcome something doesn't mean we have to like it, and it doesn't mean we have to agree with it; it just means we have to be willing to meet it. We temporarily suspend our rush to judgment and are simply open to what's occurring.

With welcoming comes the ability to work with what is present and what is unpleasant. To be open means to embrace paradox and contradiction; it’s about keeping our minds and hearts available to new information, letting ourselves be informed by life.

At the deepest level, this is an invitation to fearless receptivity. To welcome everything and push away nothing can’t be done as an act of will. This is an act of love.

Mostly, we think of mindfulness as bringing a very precise attention to what’s happening, as it’s happening.

In this way, we bring an almost laserlike attention to our practice. We bring a careful moment-to-moment attention to sensation, to thoughts, to emotions. But sometimes this kind of precise attention can create a sort of struggle in the mind.

This is when it’s more useful to try a practice that cultivates an open, boundless awareness. To allow pleasant and unpleasant experiences to appear and disappear without struggle, resistance, or harm.

54 mindful February 2022

So, let’s try this practice for welcoming everything and pushing away nothing.

in your feet or the floor? Let your awareness extend to the area behind your body, so it fills the whole room.

Settle back into your seat, relax, and come into the breath and body.

Maybe let your eyes close if that feels comfortable for you. Let your breathing be very natural.

Let your awareness be aware of what’s in front of the body, extending out as far as it possibly can, so that there’s this sense of openness, of boundless space; and all of the activities of body, heart, and mind are appearing and disappearing in that open, welcoming space.

Begin by being aware of the various sensations in your body: pressure, movement, tingling, the feel of the air on your hands and face. Just feel the waves of sensation.

Now, let go of the idea of arms and legs and a body.

Become aware of the area above your head. How far does that space extend?

Let your awareness sense what’s to the left of you. What’s to the right of you?

Let your awareness come into the area below your body. Is there any vibration

Allow all experience to arise without any interference—no inside, no outside.

Relax your ownership of thoughts.

Look and see the difference between being lost in thought and being mindful of thought.

It’s like when a sound occurs in the room, or a bird flies by, you just notice the sound of the bird; you don’t think it’s you. Let it be that way with

your thoughts and sensations, everything coming, everything going in a vast, open space.

It can be helpful to think about what happens when you walk into a room: Most people see the chairs or tables or the objects in the room and fail to see the space.

Let yourself be aware of the space surrounding all the activity, all the coming and going.

Remember, whatever we can give space to can move.

Keep allowing all the thoughts, all the sensations, all the feelings to rise and disappear in the vast spaciousness, like clouds in the sky.

Finally, let your attention come to the awareness itself, vast, transparent, clear, not disturbed by anything that’s coming and going. Welcome everything, push away nothing.

Well, I did crumble often. I'm nobody special. I just kept learning from the experience and sometimes I would just take to my bed, curl up in a fetal position and weep. And sometimes that's how it is, right?

And so, we have to recognize that that's not the only way it is, but it is that way now.

I don't think we can be free if we are rejecting any part of ourselves, including the parts that are not so functional or damaged in some way.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LOGA25 / ADOBESTOCK

As you're talking about the need to include all the parts of yourself, it reminds me of how we often talk about othering and compassion. If everybody isn't included, no one is included, in a sense. So, you're saying that also happens in the realm of all the different parts of one's own being.

It begins there.

It happens on the micro and macro levels. This human life is at times fragile and vulnerable. That is a way reality takes shape. And whenever I argue with reality, I lose. Impermanence isn’t the cause of our suffering.

We rely on change, on impermanence.

The cold you have today won’t last forever. Pandemics are resolved, presidential terms end. It’s funny, we all pretty much agree that life is in constant flux. Seasons come and go, trends peak. Yet we cling to the illusion that we are solid things moving through a changing world— everything is changing except me. But we are mistaken. When we embrace impermanence, a certain grace enters our lives. We are free to savor life, to touch the texture of each passing moment whether the moment is one of sadness or joy.

It helps me to recognize that challenging experiences like illness are not adversaries, but rather something that may have some value for me.

Now, I can't see the value if I'm helter-skelter, but if I'm stable and mindfully engaged in open-ended inquiry I may learn something unexpected.

After the first strokes, my doctors often spoke about recovery. The limitations I might face and the benefits of neuroplasticity, which we speak about in mindfulness circles all the time. I came to realize that I was more interested in discovery than recovery. I may never recover the capacities I lost but I am interested in seeing what this experience of stroke and its aftermath might show me about myself and life. This is my path now, to keep discovering. Curiosity promotes a quality of resilience which is very helpful. It doesn't require hope that I will one day recover everything I've lost. It requires only that I trust and continue to be open and be willing to not know.

Well, that's a meta-metaphor, if you will. Because, when we think of COVID and the narrative that we're going to get back to normal…

I think going back to normal is a lack of imagination. I don’t think we go back. We include and go forward. In my case, if I only hold out for recovery I am surely going to suffer.

Yeah, this isn't just a kind of trite, birthday-card slogan: “discovery over recovery.” You needed that.

Absolutely. It requires a willingness to live into the unknown. So often we trade truth for comfort. It’s a bad deal.

We need mature hope—not just the flipside of fear. Mature hope requires both a clear intention and a simultaneous letting go. This hope is not dependent upon outcome. In fact, hope is tied to uncertainty because we never know what is going to happen next.

Most of us don’t grow in our comfort zones. We grow when we realize we are no longer able to control all the conditions of our lives, and are therefore challenged to change ourselves.

When we release our clinging to what used to be and our craving for what we think should be, we are free to embrace the truth of what is in this moment. ●

meditation

a user’s guide to

a journey called mindfulness

56 mindful February 2022

Mindfulness meditation is not a one-time thing. You do it again and again. As you keep doing it, a variety of challenges emerge. Here’s some advice for traveling the path of meditation.

It’s a paradox that never goes away. You start meditating because you want to get somewhere, to find some improvement, gain some benefits. But if you reach for benefits, as longtime meditator Jessica Morey says, “you can become striving-oriented, obsessed with trying to get somewhere, to gain experiences.” And yet, meditation, like life, can feel like a journey. It may not be clear where you’re going or whether you have a destination at all, and yet you keep going.

It’s not a path from A to Z. It meanders, cycles, and circles back on itself. Fortunately, there are fellow travelers.

As we at Mindful know from speaking with a lot of people, different questions can pop up at different stages of their journey, whether they are dipping their toes in the water of meditation for the first time, starting to make it a bigger part of their life, or have been doing it for many years. And no matter where you are, it always helps to have the attitude of a beginner, humbled by the power of the mind.

Mindful contributor Jonathan Roberts talked to six of our favorite meditation teachers (see below) to gain their insights about the kinds of challenges that people have in adding meditation to their lives. Each of them in their own way emphasized that it can be a trap to keep

thinking that you’re trying to get somewhere (see paradox above). As Will Kabat-Zinn put it, “Practice is really all about helping people step out of this kind of linear thinking. Part of what is so refreshing and liberating is stepping out of that mental framework.”

Life is a little bit like walking one of those slacklines that people tie between trees in parks.

We’re always balancing things: work, play, health, sickness, our friendships, our families, our love life (or lack thereof). It’s a little (and sometimes more than a little) stressful. As soon as we tense up, the line starts to shake, and we’re more easily thrown off. It gives immediate feedback. Meditation can help us make use of the feedback.

While we’re the first to acknowledge that there is no single predefined meditation highway to travel on—everyone’s experience and circumstances will differ—we’ve explored the kinds of questions we hear from people in different phases and stages in their relationship with meditation practice.

The advice on the following pages is from Mindful, sprinkled with some thoughts from the teachers we talked with. Enjoy.

Barry Boyce, Founding Editor

TEACHERS WE CONSULTED judson brewer

tara healey

will kabat-zinn

Neuroscientist, psychiatrist, author.

Associate Professor, Director of Research and Innovation, Mindfulness Center at Brown University.

Founder and director of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care’s Mind the Moment mindfulness program.

Member of the Spirit Rock Center teacher’s council and Board of Directors and teaches meditation retreats nationally and internationally.

jessica morey Meditation teacher and coach focused on ways to bring our meditation practice off the cushion into our relationships and our work.

caverly morgan

sebene selassie

Founder of Presence Collective, Peace in Schools, and author of A Kid’s Book About Mindfulness.

Brooklyn-based teacher and author who guides people to remember and trust their belonging.

She leads classes, workshops, retreats.

February 2022 mindful 57

meditation

the start All of us who have started practicing meditation usually begin for one (or both) of two reasons: we’re in pain or experiencing difficulty, or we want to perform better. The poster-child image of the meditator we see so often—trim and tanned, well coiffed and made up, sitting in perfect posture with a self-satisfied grin on their face—would give you the idea that meditation is like a cookie mold that makes everyone come out the same. That could not be further from the truth.

Part of the beauty of meditation is that it puts you in touch with what’s going on in your mind, and that starts to help you to be yourself. Starting to discover that it’s OK to be who you are, and actually finding a little bit of relief from the harsh critic in your head, is usually what keeps us going in the beginning. After you’ve started meditating, you are still walking that slackline of life—nothing takes that away—but you might have a slightly more confident smile on your face and a bigger laugh when you inevitably fall off.

GET GOOD INSTRUCTION

There are many types of meditation and many ways of teaching meditation.

Getting sound instruction in the beginning will help you develop good habits.

Take care: You’re choosing a healthcare provider for your mind. If you use an app or other digital tool, make sure the teacher behind it has demonstrated experience.

Find out why they meditate and see if it resonates with you. If you meet them in person, see if they take an interest in who you are, not just what they have to say to you.

A good meditation teacher is a very caring person.

LOOK AT THE LANDSCAPE

Mindfulness is not religious per se. You can practice it in a nonreligious context, a context with a little bit of religion, or in a religious context. As you look at the different types of teachers and places to learn from, over time you can find one, or a mix of several, that suits who you are and where you are in your life.

Mindfulness includes finding space in your mind to make your own informed choices.

“What is the path of meditation? Your presentmoment experience. What is your curriculum? Your life, as it is.

Not somebody else’s life, not your ideal life—your life.”

WILL KABAT-ZINN

58 mindful February 2022

PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BODY

One of the early experiences in meditation tends to be noticing a torrent of thoughts, a waterfall of this, that, and the other thing tumbling through your mind. It’s easy to think your job is to manage it all.

That’s where the body comes in handy. You’re breathing, you have senses, your body is always touching some surface somewhere. These sensations help you notice that you are where you are.

BE KIND TO YOURSELF

“Looking down the road thinking you’re going to get somewhere often causes suffering. When we stop striving for that excitement, we open to the joy of being curious as we explore the journey itself, not reaching into the future, but exploring what is happening right now.”

For whatever reason, most of us tend to rip into ourselves when we get some time alone with our thoughts: Why didn’t I? Why don’t I? What’s the matter with me? Meditation puts you in touch with this undercurrent of self-blame and gives you a chance to come back to your breath and to where you are. Notice the subtle sensations in your body that these thoughts can create. At that moment, you can cut yourself a break for being a human being.

JUDSON BREWER

NO BIG DEAL DON’T TRY TOO HARD Since meditation includes instructions to follow, however simple, it’s easy to try so hard to do it “right” that you just give up. Yet it’s the positive experiences—like noticing some peace of mind has quietly crept in—that really keep you going. Just let them happen. Surprise!

One of the most enjoyable aspects of starting to practice meditation is that in those moments when we finally stop trying to be good at it, we get a chance to laugh at ourselves over how hard we try to just be here. Just put one foot in front of the other.

February 2022 mindful 59

meditation

the middle When you start something—learning to play an instrument, a sport, a game like chess—it’s usually a little hard at the outset, but if you decide to stick with it, it gets a little better. A few positive experiences motivate you, and quite possibly they uplift you.

As with any new undertaking, you may enter a honeymoon phase: The early stages can be sweet like honey, but they will fade like the waning moon. Everything changes.

If you decide to keep going, inevitably you’ll face the challenges that come with settling down, as in any relationship. If beginning meditation puts you in touch with your mind and helps you start to get to know yourself better, keeping going is about spending serious time with yourself. You may encounter boredom, emotional upheavals, long-term problems you don’t solve—like the pain of a dysfunctional family member, or the fact that money is tight—all the stuff of life.

You’re still walking on that slackline, but you might smile about it more.

FIND FRIENDS AND COMMUNITY

ENJOY SILENCE

“Mindfulness is self-correcting. When we inevitably go off course, practice helps us see this and adjust. Regular practice brings calm and clarity. We reap the benefits and those we engage with do as well. Over time we see our motivations and intentions and are able to better align with our deepest values.”

TARA HEALEY

60 mindful February 2022

We can often get the benefit of teachers by listening to guided instruction. At a certain point, it’s helpful to also have plenty of time for silence.

It’s what the guided meditation is guiding you toward: having some time when you don’t rely on any extra stimulation. If you’ve already been meditating in silence, try to see if longer sessions, or a retreat, works for you. You might be surprised.

When you can share space and time with others who are merging meditation with life in the same way, it helps to relieve the burden of meditation being a big personal struggle. If your area has many groups, try them out and see what resonates with you. Maybe something’s happening at your workplace.

That’s more common these days, as is finding community online. You can also make friends with people you’ve attended meditation trainings with. Strong bonds can be formed there.

BOREDOM IS FINE

It’s OK to just let one moment unfold into the next without something special happening. In fact, boredom in meditation can be a signal that you’re letting go of the craving for constant entertainment. It contains an element of relief.

“Challenges are an opportunity to deepen meditation practice.

Instead of panicking, we can understand the wisdom of not personalizing everything and look at the larger human picture.

Instead of having a why me attitude, we can say, Well, why not me?”

BE CURIOUS ABOUT YOUR PAIN

The more you meditate— the more time you spend just being with yourself without a big project or focus—the more aware you become of what lies beneath the surface of your busy mind. You may start to notice fear, anxiety, or other emotions bubbling up more­—and your vantage point allows you to peer into them with interest: What are these all about?

SEBENE SELASSIE

SEEK THE HELP OF TEACHERS AND GUIDES

As meditation becomes a deeper part of your life, it can help to find someone, or perhaps several people, who are experienced in this practice.

Meditation is intimate. It’s not about an idealized, abstract experience. Talking things over with an experienced guide can help you loosen the stuck places.

APPRECIATE RESILIENCE

You’re going to fall off that slackline many times and end up with some scrapes and bruises. But the beauty of meditation is that no matter how many times you get distracted or lost—even if you stop doing it altogether—you can always just come back.

February 2022 mindful 61

meditation

more and more middle At some point, you may look up and notice you’ve been practicing meditation for quite a while, even years or decades. Maybe your early, wildly exuberant self might have thought that after decades of meditating, you would be, as Will Kabat-Zinn says, “this version of myself where I’m mindful all the time, I speak skillfully to people. I feel happy….”

As this kind of self-improvement mentality gradually falls away, a shift can take place, Caverly Morgan says, from bringing “mindfulness practice into your life to bringing your life into mindfulness practice.”

When life and mindfulness are not seen as so separate, it’s as if we are looking off into the distance to a long and winding road that goes up and down and sideways off into the horizon. Or to put it another way, that slackline we’re on doesn’t appear to be tied to another tree. It just keeps going.

THINK OF OTHERS

If meditation has given you anything to appreciate—if you still have anxiety and all the other struggles, but your relationship to them is not so fixated—you almost automatically want to share that with others. You don’t necessarily need to go out and teach them meditation (for one thing, that’s a challenging job that carries a lot of responsibility), but the very fact that you may be more comfortable in your own skin can help make others more comfortable in theirs, and that kind of benefit can be infectious.

“Once you’ve tasted the fruit of some spaciousness and resilience in your own mind—so that your issues are not so acute and your reactivity and stress are lessened—and you find a groove of direct, personal peace, you’re in a better position to help other people.”

JESSICA MOREY

62 mindful February 2022

FIND WAYS TO BE HELPFUL

You may be inclined to give people lots of advice, because you feel you see the predicament they’re in so clearly (you’ve been there yourself), but if you’re not careful, you skip over the part where you listen to them, get to know them and where they are.

If you skip that, you tend to impose solutions, and that rarely works. If you can be a facilitator, a midwife, maybe you can help someone to discover their own way forward. They may teach you something as well. No one’s an expert where the human mind is concerned: It’s too big a field of study.

“A turn can happen, when you are freed to become more inquisitive about the nature of things. You recognize you can take mindfulness to a deeper level—focusing less on trying to fix yourself, instead being more curious about who this you is.”

CAVERLY MORGAN

DON’T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY

It’s possible that your years of practice and going on retreats has helped give you some more equanimity. Maybe you do have something to offer others.

But we’re all still human, no matter how much we’ve meditated, and one thing humans like to do from time to time is make a big deal out of who they are and what they’ve done. Watch out for that.

APPRECIATE NOT KNOWING

It’s a cliché that the older you get the less you know, but like all clichés, it’s got some real truth to it. Mindfulness meditation is driven forward by insight and curiosity. As you become more and more curious, you continually venture into the unknown. When you feel you know everything, you’re never surprised or awestruck.

When you let things emerge and don’t pigeonhole them too quickly, the world is a little fresher and you’re more open to whatever comes next. You’re like a glass that’s always a little bit empty.

There’s always room for more life to be poured into it.

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAY

At some point, ideas and words matter less. Your way of being and your actions can speak for themselves. You can let meditation techniques fall away and natural mindfulness emerge. ●

February 2022 mindful 63

BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

by AMBER TUCKER, AVA WHITNEY-COULTER, BARRY BOYCE, KYLEE ROSS, OYINDA LAGUNJU, and STEPHANIE DOMET

MANAGING UNCERTAINTY IN MENTAL HEALTH CARE Jose Silveira, MD, and Patricia Rockman, MD • Oxford University Press

This is an extraordinarily honest book about one of the hardest challenges we face: assessing and treating mental health problems and addictions.

We’d like them reduced to a checklist of symptoms, diseases, and treatments. Hard enough with bones, organs, and blood vessels, but the mind is so intangible and perplexingly varied, determining what needs to be treated and how is a challenge of the highest order of complexity.

Silveira and Rockman evince compassion from the first page, writing of patients “drowning in their distress…who sometimes draw others down with them.” They stress that clinicians treat not diagnoses but individuals, each of whom “experiences a unique journey that shapes their brain and mind into one of a kind” that “deviates from the script written from population studies.”

In other words, a clinician facing an individual may have to admit what they do not know— not what the world expects of “experts.” The authors liken the work to meteorology, where professionals’ conclusions emerge from wrestling with nature’s chaos. Like meteorologists, mental health clinicians try to impose order on disorder, and often create “narratives that are incomplete or wrong.”

Given this sober assessment, what do the authors suggest? For one thing, they counsel the field to start with a little more humbleness, being honest about the fact that human beings have an overconfidence bias that causes us to overlook errors. If we admit to ourselves that we are going to make mistakes, the very admission will make us more mindful in our assessments. With this groundwork of realism laid, Silveira and Rockman go on to present a variety of ways errors and risks can be mitigated, leading ultimately to the greatest benefit and least harm for patients. –BB

64 mindful February 2022

PRIZEWORTHY How to Meaningfully Connect, Build Character, and Unlock the Potential of Every Child Mitch Abblett, PhD • Shambhala Publications This practical guide offers relatable insight and mindfulness practices to move toward a “mutually beneficial way of relating to children and teens” and to honor emotional pain and potential in children.

Each section is aptly titled: On Your Mark, Get Set, and Go! as if readers are track athletes “running toward the prize in our kids.” Between actionable journal prompts to build “your

mindfulness muscle,” and help kids develop compassion and courage, we’re treated to real stories from Abblett’s practice as a clinical psychologist and from his experience as a father. Each glimpse into moments of joy or struggle serves as a reminder that parenting is difficult—and the odd F-bomb might just slip when it comes time to put a toddler in a winter coat. –KR

SELF-COMPASSION FOR EDUCATORS Mindful Practices to Awaken Your Well-Being and Grow Resilience Lisa Baylis • PESI Publishing

Compassion is not built into the education system—a point Baylis highlights repeatedly when explaining the necessity of self-kindness in teachers’ daily routines. She’s a high school counselor, longtime educator, and Mindful Self-Compassion teacher, and all three professional facets shine in these pages. Baylis understands the juggling act of managing an overfull

classroom and keeping kids engaged in the curriculum, all while navigating a pandemic and maintaining a life outside of work. Part personal story, part research, and part workbook, this is an engaging and heartfelt guide to embodying self-compassion, helping teachers reconnect to a sense of purpose and authenticity that serves both themselves and their students. –AWC

read, listen, stream

BURNOUT The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA • Ballantine Books

Emily and Amelia Nagoski examine the many ways burnout can show up—specifically for women—by following the lives of Julie, a teacher whose body retaliates under stress, and Sophie, an engineer who decides she is “not here for the patriarchy.” Their joyful “self-help”-type book explores how to complete the stress cycle and avoid burnout. Their advice isn’t prescriptive and doesn’t include cure-alls. Instead

we’re presented with à la carte strategies and encouraged to try what feels best.

Maybe that’s turning to the “Big Ol’ Cry” or to one of the book’s worksheets (like the Smashin’-Some-Patriarchy Worksheet). It may even be referring to the sections labeled tl;dr (too long didn’t read), packed with “ideas you can share with your best friend when she calls you in tears” and reminders that we’re not alone. –KR

SHINE Ignite Your Inner Game to Lead Consciously at Work and in the World Carley Hauck • Sounds True

Carley Hauck is a Stanford business professor, mindfulness teacher, and founder/ Chief Love Officer of consulting firm Leading from Wholeness—so when she talks about mindful leadership, we listen. In Shine she skillfully illustrates that business can be a platform for positive global change, when leaders (that is, anyone inspired to create change, regardless of title) power up their inner game: “The inner game is your internal operating system—a set of

skills that steadies you and strengthens your mind, body, and heart. A strong inner game supports the flow and release of your emotions and keeps you open, curious, and resilient,” asserts Hauck.

First, readers are guided to hone self-awareness, emotional intelligence, resilience, love, well-being, and authenticity; Part 2 explores conscious communication, finally re-envisioning what our organizations can achieve by prioritizing not only profits, but people and planet. –AT

February 2022 mindful 65

read, listen, stream

Did you know Mindful offers a customizable, scalable mindfulness training program for the workplace?

MEET LIFEXT — AND POWER UP YOUR TEAM! • Support well-being and resilience • Combat stress and burnout • Based on real human relationships • Best-in-class engagement

LEARN MORE

lifecrosstraining.com

“We listen for our instincts, our hunches, our guidance— and perhaps we wish we could hear them more clearly and more often.”

THE LISTENING PATH The Creative Art of Attention Julia Cameron • St. Martin’s Press

If you’ve enjoyed Julia Cameron’s motivational works—written for those keen to tap into creativity with consistency—The Listening Path offers a comfortable place to continue your journey. Here, Cameron reprises the main tenets of her hugely popular handbook The Artist’s Way, which offers three mainstays of a daily creative practice: morning pages, artist dates, and solo walking. To this backbone, she adds essays, personal stories, quotes, and exercises to help readers develop a practice of deep and active listening—a solid foundation for any artistic undertaking, and really, any interpersonal undertaking.

Organized as a six-week course in listening, the book steps readers through a listening practice that begins with simply tuning in to the sounds that surround us, and works through listening to others, to our inner knowledge, and to silence, among other exercises. Parts of Cameron’s thinking may prove a bridge too far for some—there’s a week devoted to “Listening Beyond The Veil” in which readers are invited to connect with a deceased loved one by asking “May I hear from X?” and writing down what follows. Cameron sometimes leans slightly magical, and her occasional mentions of God may not work for every reader. Skeptical readers can choose to take what works, and leave the rest. With a plethora of prompts and exercises, there’s plenty in this guide for anyone who’s curious about the ways in which listening more and listening more deeply might yield benefits not only in creative pursuits, but in our lives and society. –SD

66 mindful February 2022

read, listen, stream

TUNE IN TO

mindful WHY MINDFULNESS IS NOT ENOUGH Unlocking Compassion with Equanimity Joey Weber, PhD • Equanamee

With this book, rooted in his PhD studies, Weber proposes equanimity is a distinct ingredient within a well-rounded mindfulness practice. “Equanimity brings a heightened sense of awareness towards our own biases and, in doing so, makes unconscious bias conscious,” he explains. In other words, when we’re not always getting waylaid in reactivity or self-centeredness, our perceptiveness and wisdom have room to grow. Weber

also views equanimity as a bridge from present-moment awareness to the potency of compassion, even for the people you can’t stand.

“Mindfulness is ethical by nature, and with equanimity it really enables people to work with themselves,” writes Weber. “This is a political act and an act of love.” Case studies and practical tips point our way to developing a more equanimous mindset, one of spaciousness, acceptance, and kindness. –AT

Visit mindful.org for featured meditations from Rashid Hughes, Elaine Smookler, and Steve Hickman

3 MINDFUL PRACTICES TO HELP YOU LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE 1

Previously published as The Transformation in 2019, Dr. James Gordon’s handbook for recognizing and working with trauma has been recast for the COVID era. In a new preface to the book, Gordon writes that the notion that “trauma—injury to our mind, body, or spirit—comes sooner or later to everyone.”

The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic brought that home in an undeniable way. Here, Gordon pitches that healing

our trauma ultimately makes us more resilient and boosts our immunity. I can tell you that just reading the warm and welcoming table of contents made my shoulders relax away from my ears. Gordon writes from a deeply knowledgeable, deeply compassionate place, sharing case studies, offering practices, and making and holding space for readers to encounter, examine, and gain the tools to begin to heal their own trauma. –SD

with Rashid Hughes

Since we’re usually on the go and constantly checking things off our to-do list, we sometimes find it difficult to pause and pay attention to how our body is feeling. Taking a moment to pause and rest can bring about a greater sense of awareness and allow us to see what we have to be grateful for. Join Rashid Hughes in a guided meditation to help you slow down and smell the roses.

2

TRANSFORMING TRAUMA The Path to Hope and Healing James Gordon, MD • Harper One

Rest Your Body in Gratitude

Savor the Moment

with Elaine Smookler

Gratitude doesn’t shield us from challenges, but it does help us expand our perspective to notice that life is so much more than those dark moments.

Realizing that joy can lie in something as simple as your morning cup of coffee can help remind you that there’s so much to be appreciative of. Elaine Smookler leads a guided practice to awaken your senses and open your heart to welcoming every moment with gratitude.

3

Cultivate Gratitude for Small Things with Steve Hickman

It’s easy to focus on what we want but don’t have, which can make us feel like we’re always lacking something—but if we took the time to focus on what is right here, right now, we begin to find sources of abundance in unexpected places. In this guided meditation, Steve Hickman reminds us that the grass just might be greener exactly where you are. –OL

February 2022 mindful 67

ESSENTIAL NEW TITLES

read, listen, stream

PODCAST

reviews TURNING POINTS: NAVIGATING MENTAL HEALTH Episode: “Turning Toward Mindfulness”

ON NONVIOLENT SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF TWO GLOBAL PEACE ICONS

Brothers in the Beloved Community

Love in Action

MARC ANDRUS

“These are the writings of a contemporary saint.”

“This book breaks new ground and in so doing is a real testament of hope. Andrus has pulled back a curtain from the pages of history and given us a glimpse into the remarkable and yet not well known friendship between Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” —THE MOST REV. MICHAEL B. CURRY, Presiding

Bishop of The Episcopal Church and author of Love is the Way

THICH NHAT HANH

—INQUIRING MIND

“In calm but forceful prose, Thich Nhat Hanh articulates the central teaching that violence originates in each person … and that with the practice of meditation and mindfulness it can be overcome.”

—THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“I can fall apart, I can feel everything fully, and I will be okay.” That’s how Deborah Johnson describes the deeply personal lesson she learned from her mindfulness practice. Host Frantzces Lys speaks to Johnson about healing from trauma and explores how mindfulness teachers can safely use trauma-informed practices

with their students. Lys enlists the help of neuroscientist Jud Brewer and meditation teacher Tara Healey in this intimate conversation about mindfulness and mental health. Mindfulness “helps us relate to and engage with all of our lives,” Healey says. “It really gives us a way to work with our resistance to what is happening.” –KR

YOU’RE GOING TO DIE: THE PODCAST Episode: “Our Tears Water a Heart That’s Been Too Dry” In this candid conversation, mindfulness teacher and leader in the field of end-of-life care Frank Ostaseski (interviewed on page 44) alongside host Ned Buskirk explore grief, dying, and forgiveness. Ostaseski takes us back to some heartrending yet beautiful moments in his career, moments when words couldn’t permeate the grief people felt, so he didn’t speak at all. Sometimes what’s needed, he says, is

simply presence and compassion. “When we see ourselves in each other, everything changes,” he says: a kind of empathy he wishes was normalized in healthcare professionals’ training, for the sake of caretakers and patients alike. This topic hits close to home for Ostaseski who recently experienced a series of strokes, which he speaks about publicly for the first time in this episode. –AWC

THE ANXIOUS ACHIEVER Episode: “Understanding Our Roots to Find the Path Forward” As the child of immigrant parents, Anu Gupta always felt a little different...and a little anxious. Host Morra AaronsMele sits down with the CEO of BE MORE to discuss how sharing his story made him realize we’re all a little more alike than we realize. The pair discuss Gupta’s experience—

68 mindful February 2022

from various educational institutions to living in NYC after 9/11—of feeling isolated not only from others, but from himself. They talk about the healing nature of therapy, and Gupta gets personal as he shares how he came to discover the fullness of who he is and celebrate that. –OL

read, listen, stream

COMPASSIONATE LEADERSHIP How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter • Harvard Business Review Press

A global pandemic left many of us lost and in a state of confusion, and for many leaders, guiding people through that time of confusion has been an unprecedented challenge.

The solution, according to co-authors Rasmus Hougaard (founder and CEO of Potential Project) and Jacqueline Carter (senior partner at the same), lies in compassionate leadership.

In their new book, the duo offer insight into how you can lead by creating the perfect

balance between compassion and wisdom. Through a series of examples and scientific research, Hougaard and Carter make a convincing argument for compassionate leadership that rivals the tough-love paradigm we’ve become accustomed to seeing. Whether you’re a manager or an employee, this book will help you bring humanity to the workplace, as well as helping you go out into the world with a little more kindness. –OL

Find hundreds of mindfulness teachers and events—virtually or near you!

THE HIGH 5 HABIT Take Control of Your Life With One Simple Habit Mel Robbins • Hay House

Robbins sets the tone right away with a serious reality check. She asks, “How frequently do you cheer for yourself?” If your answer is “Not very often,” expect any reason for slacking on the self-support front to be thoroughly debunked in the following pages with an easy-to-read mix of science and personal anecdotes that keep the advice grounded in real life and, oftentimes,

humor. From there, she follows up with hand-y tools (pun intended) to help the reader gain a sense of authentic self-compassion and encouragement. The whole “high five” thing? It’s not just metaphorical. Listen, just try to high-five yourself in the bathroom mirror without smiling and feeling a little bit encouraged. It feels awkward, goofy, joyful, and is the first step of a High 5 Habit. –AWC

February 2022 mindful 69

Discover meaningful opportunities to DEEPEN YOUR PRACTICE with the guidance of experts and online events. Browse hundreds of teachers and events in one convenient location.

Learn more at

mindfuldirectory.org

read, listen, stream

T IM E L E S S • AU T HE N T I C • T R A NSF OR M AT I ONA L

52 cards with simple, inthe-moment mindfulness and embodiment practices to increase your sense of well-being, self-confidence, and connection to others in your daily life from transpersonal psychologist and licensed clinical social worker Ann Saffi Biasetti.

Drawing on decades of experience as a therapist and meditation teacher, Radhule Weininger, MD, PhD, helps you recognize reoccurring patterns, understand the trauma behind them, and offers twelve simple steps to work toward healing.

This warm, powerful guide by yoga teacher and activist Octavia Raheem offers short teachings, reflections, and three simple restorative yoga poses to motivate and guide you through times of ending, beginning, and transition.

SHAMBHALA.COM

FIERCE SELFCOMPASSION How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive Kristin Neff • Harper Wave

If the term “self-compassion” brings to mind a sort of soft, solo wellness journey for increased self-kindness, expect this image to be vastly expanded upon finishing the first page of this book. Kristin Neff skillfully conveys just how powerful self-compassion can be, painting the picture of a movement that begins with each of us, is guided by awareness and empathy, and leads to liberation. But Neff doesn’t just tell us how it could be, she guides us there with research, mindfulness practices, and opportunities to reflect.

Neff is a professor of educational psychology, cofounder of the Mindfulness-Based SelfCompassion program, and author previously of Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. Now, self-compassion is certainly for everyone, but this book is all about women. Neff presents self-compassion as a framework for women’s collective liberation from the limiting societal pressure to be always soft, nurturing, and tender. This is where fierceness comes in.

“Compassion is aimed at alleviating suffering— it’s the impulse to help, an active feeling of concern, the palpable instinct to care for those who are struggling,” she writes, and it has two sides: tender and fierce. The former harnesses that widely-accepted sense of nurturing while fierce compassion is all about action. When we practice both and turn them inward, these compassionate impulses can help us “protect ourselves, meet our needs, motivate change, and engage in the work of justice,” she writes. Neff guides us in an exploration of the full range of our experiences, paying special attention to anger and how we can learn to welcome it with kindness, mindfulness, and a sense of our shared humanity.

This book lands on shelves in the midst of a global pandemic that has disproportionately forced women out of jobs and into household labor, while our world faces crises like systemic racism, climate change, and struggling healthcare systems. Fierce Self-Compassion meets the moment by bridging the individual and the interconnected. The book offers us a rich journey of inward investigation and acceptance, while laying the groundwork for meaningful empowerment. –AWC ●

70 mindful February 2022

marketplace Cloud Meditation Bench Set

MINDFULLY RECONNECT WITH YOUR BODY

mindful marketplace

Welcome to Mindful Marketplace, our catalog of unique products and services for people who want to live with more awareness and authenticity. Marketplace also provides an affordable and elegant way for advertisers to reach and engage our highly committed readers.

To advertise in Mindful’s Marketplace, please contact us today!

Chelsea Arsenault 888-203-8076 ex. 207 chelsea@mindful.org

Meditation Bench supports a cross-legged posture.

• More grounded than chair meditation • Includes 2" Cloud Bench Cushion and Zabuton Mat • Easy assembly, 7 lbs.

Use the code CLOUDMKT at checkout to Save 5% on the Cloud Meditation Bench Set.

From award-winning researcher and psychologist Dr. Hillary L. McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body helps you experience wise, mindful, and embodied living.

HillaryLMcBride.com

Available wherever books and ebooks are sold!

1.800.331.7751 SamadhiCushions.com Vermont-Made Meditation Solutions Since 1975

V an Now you c

join us in

re Being Awa ind & Being K

here! from anyw

ited You're inv

to our

online ! cOmmunity Online courses & workshops cultivating personal growth, connection with nature, conscious relationships, and spiritual activism

montereybaymeditation.com

February 2022 mindful 71

point of view

WHAT WE BRING TO THE TABLE

by BARRY BOYCE, FOUNDING EDITOR

m

72 mindful February 2022

After our move to Pennsylvania, we ended up in a huge brick farmhouse in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The baby boom had engulfed the surrounding farms and replaced them with a grid of tree-lined streets. Our own baby boom—seven children covering a span of 15 years— readily filled the house.

Farmhouse kitchens are big. Ours accommodated a round table that could seat, with the aid of a leaf, all nine of us. We had a similarly expandable

how it was developed not through abstract, placeless conversations and meetings. It was developed in people’s homes, at their tables, or in nearby establishments, indoors and al fresco. We spent hours convening at countless kitchen tables, dining room tables, patio tables, cafe tables, tables covered in starched white linen, benches, booths, bars, and banquettes.

We laughed lots. We listened lots. We learned lots. All to the rhythm that’s introduced by a meal or a leisurely

Every time we sit together at a table, it’s an opportunity to peel away a little layer of the onion and be real.

And find the kindness and conviviality at our core. dining room table for special dinners.

There was a picnic table in the backyard. All in all, there was a lot of gathering at tables to take in food. Uber Eats was in the distant future.

The family table imprinted on me an appreciation for how people bond over these tables and the meals shared there, how intimate they are, and at times charged with contention.

Breaking bread at these tables can be a secular sacrament, a kind of simple sacred ritual that confers grace on the participants. The sensory pull and power of food and drink can ground us in the now, keep us present.

It’s also true, of course, that toxic dysfunction can spread at the dinner table, and that is so sad, because every time we sit together at a table, it’s an opportunity to peel away a little layer of the onion and be real. And find the kindness and conviviality at our core.

One of the aspects of building Mindful I have most appreciated is

cup of coffee or tea. What could have simply been convenient business relationships became friendships, and a big source of that was the setting.

After 18 months of lockdown and video gatherings, I was able to venture out for a little while and realized again how precious it is to spend time across a table from someone, how as relaxation sets in, we reveal ourselves, and time suspends for a while. I hadn’t known how much I had missed it, so I hope as our world becomes more digitally woven together, we can still find ways to be in each other’s intimate nondigital presence, gathered around tables, feasting not just on food, but on human goodness and good cheer. ● ABOUT THE AUTHOR Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org and author of The Mindfulness Revolution. He has been an avid mindfulness practitioner for over 40 years.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL

When a change in my father’s employment necessitated a move from the outskirts of New York City to a small town in rural Pennsylvania, my whole family became fish out of water. We adapted over time—some of us better than others—but moving from a huge ethnic mosaic to a small, pretty homogenous place left me with an enduring sense of how many-faceted this huge place called America is, and how many different types of humans it houses. There are layers to the human onion: the surface presented to the world, the layer just below for friends and family, and the deeper parts we rarely talk about. To find those deeper parts, it helps to sit at a table with someone, for a while.

Otherwise, they’ll likely remain the stereotype you project onto them.

Admittedly, it can be hard to end up at a table with someone really different from yourself—or, in pandemic times, with anyone at all. But we need to aspire, to stumble into unique interactions.

PODCAST The tables we Real Mindful start out at, of course, tend to Barry Boyce be in our own and managing homes, where, if editor Stephanie we’re fortunate, Domet dive we make a deeper. connection to family that mindful.org/ can sustain us real-mindful throughout our lives. If not, we may have to seek belonging at other tables.

COME AS YOU ARE A 7-DAY DIY M I N D F U LN ESS R ET R E AT

A week of recorded guided sessions Daily supportive email practices An array of bonus materials and meditations Plus live meditations with Barry!

NEW COURSE!

WITH MINDFUL FOUNDING EDITOR BARRY BOYCE

JOIN TODAY FOR JUST $59!

mindful.org/come-as-you-are