EMBRACE CHANGE • MOVE FORWARD WHEN YOU FEEL STUCK BUILD THE HABITS THAT NOURISH YOU NAVIGATE CONFLICTS WITH EASE • UNLOCK YOUR INHERENT WISDOM
10 GUIDED MEDITATIONS
Awaken well-being and give your inner critic a rest
When you share mindfulness with people around you—not as an expert, but simply as a fellow traveler—you discover how to deepen your own practice, writes Jaime Ledesma. Explore our guide to crafting your own mindful mini-retreat at home.
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My youngest baby was born with frown lines between her eyes. She came out angry, like she knew she was going to be one of those kids who struggles with life and wasn’t ready to meet the day. I held her in my arms for the first time, whispered “Hello,” and watched in awe as her frown lines disappeared and calm, peaceful recognition spread across her face at the sound of my voice. It’s a moment of connection I will cherish forever.
To this day, my little one resists waking up. Every day, I whisper “Good morning ” and then wait by her bed holding up a blanket that I wrap around her like a cape once she finally stands up. Then I follow her downstairs holding the blanket’s train in a morning procession fit for a queen. Yes, it’s a bit much. But she’s a sensitive kiddo and needs a lot of loving care in order to feel full.
As we enter our third pandemic spring, I imagine the whole world could use a little bit of this kind of opulent attention right now—boundless care flowing from as many of us as possible. Love in action pouring into our communities in order to fill our cups so we can meet the challenges of the day. But it’s hard to lavish your attention when it’s being regularly hijacked by social media, or depleted by burnout and stress.
Which is why, for this April issue, our team at Mindful created a resilience guide for extraordinary times. Managing editor Stephanie Domet shares how practicing curiosity helped her shift her perception of a difficult situation (page 18). Physician and mindfulness teacher Dr. Christiane Wolf explores how the hard work of forgiveness can temper rage and soften bitterness (page 24). Dr. Wolf also teamed up with us to create a course on navigating physical pain (see ad to the right). Journalist Robert Huber reports on how mindfulness is helping to heal one of our most tender communities: survivors of gun violence (page 32). Veteran teachers Tovi Scruggs-Hussein, Mark Bertin, and Shalini Bahl-Milne offer a DIY at-home mindfulness retreat so you can share your practice with your friends and loved ones (page 54).
As the late visionary writer bell hooks said: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” May you surround yourself with loving communities of care. May your practice fill your communities with an abundance of love. And in those moments when kindness feels scarce, may you remember to return to your breath, and to the light of your own heart.
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guiding
caring relationships,
Mindful readers share what sparks curiosity and awe.
My kids.
theonlyportia72
The night sky. Always. The dark, inky, borderless sky. All those stars. How you can't see it all at once, can't take it all in at once. Looking up at the night sky requires pausing and breathing deeply—and lying down so you can look as long as you want without hurting your neck (mindfully pragmatic).
jewellofawriter
The magical relationship I have with my sister. Recovery from anorexia—deciding to live outside the cage.
Jo L.Observing children play and learn new skills. Also any creative movement.
vbutler733
I've been really wanting to get back to my Polish roots and learn more about healthy Polish cooking. I'm working on a couple of cookbooks and would like to fuse millennial taste with non-traditional Polish food.
kissmywellness
Nature.
terparluv
Nature intrigues me to no end. I’m blessed to live in such a beautiful world.
Kristi B.
or unfamiliar?
Personally, with challenging health ailments, I focus internally on relaxing each area.
KerstinWilkey
Noticing the felt experiences in my body along with the running narrative in my mind. And considering which one feels more regulating for my nervous system in those mindful moments.
dannette_adams
Watching my thoughts come and go. Some linger, some are fleeting, some random, some not so random.
MDCamp2
↑
@elinalim.co stays open to learning and reflects on the ways that growth comes from acknowledging that we don't know everything.
↓
@bound.works reminds us that when we take care of our heart, we can make healthier decisions.
EXCITED: 22%
CURIOUS: 47%
UNCOMFORTABLE: 39%
The feeling of learning something new and the feeling of helping someone learn something new!
UpasnaGautam
Send an email to yourwords@mindful.org and let us know your answer to this question. Your response could appear on these pages.
→ @tinycampsedona looks forward to new adventures. They write, "When nothing is certain, everything is possible."
At Senders Pediatrics in Cleveland, Ohio, knowing how to be kind is considered part of a child’s overall well-being. Often,
children leave the doctor’s office with colorful cards detailing ways to practice kindness.
Helmed by their parent coach and educator Joan Morgenstern, the
Senders Kindness Initiative aims to help kids cultivate social intelligence, happiness, agency, and purpose.
Backed by a Parenting Initiative Grant in 2020 from the Greater Good Science Center, Senders launched the Family Kindness Festival where kids display
how they practice kindness. Morgenstern is working on this year’s festival, which will happen May 1. “My goal is to shift kindness from a moment into a movement and from an action into a habit,” she says.
The relationship between African Americans and the land has been and continues to be tumultuous, with many having no sense (or
maintain,” Dazmonique Carr, one of the program’s beneficiaries, told the outlet Grist She hopes to pass her farm down to her son.
documentation) of ownership over land they’ve tended for generations. The Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund aims to fix that.
The coalition of three Detroit urban farming organizations aims to address the disparity in land ownership that has plagued Black farmers for generations.
“It definitely feels autonomous. Feeling like you can secure and protect the things that you’ve been working hard to
What creates human flourishing? The Global Flourishing Study, launched October 2021, is seeking answers. Over five years, social and biomedical scientists at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Baylor University will collect data from 240,000 participants in 22 countries, using six “domains” of flourishing: happiness and life satisfaction; mental and physical health; meaning and purpose; character and virtue; close social relationships; and material and political stability. This data will be available for anyone to use, which Dave Mellor, Director of Policy at the Center for Open Science (a project partner), says will “increase the equity with which discoveries, findings, and data will become available, and help accelerate
Keepthe process of discovery.”
We may live in The Information Age, but for Adama Sanneh, there was one thing he couldn’t get information on. “Wikipedia suffers from a paucity of information about Africa. There’s more information about the country of France than the entire continent of Africa,” Sanneh told the website Reasons to be Cheerful. Sanneh, through his Moleskine Foundation, is hoping to fill this gap with the WikiAfrica Education Initiative by creating content for Wikipedia in
English and various African languages with the hope that young people will have resources to learn about their culture, from those who know it best.
As a member of the Oglala Lakota Oyate, part of the Great Sioux Nation, Sean Sherman took part in many celebrations that included contemporary and traditional dishes. “My ancestors used all parts of the animals and plants with respect, viewing themselves as part of our environment, not above it. Nothing was wasted,” Sherman wrote in an essay in the New
York Times. Now, through his nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, Sherman—who calls himself the Sioux Chef—is hoping to identify, share, and educate people on the authentic Indigenous foods of North America, using ingredients like wild manzanita berries and acorns.
“My team and I are working toward the day we will be able to drive across this continent in any direction, stopping at Indigenous restaurants and experiencing all the richness of the varied original American cultures,” Sherman wrote.
Pawpaw fruit and trees have been used as food, medicine, fiber, and fuel by First Nations people on the East Coast.
When Lori Irby brought her foster kittens into work at The Meridian, a senior living community in California, her office became a popular place with residents. The joy the kittens brought inspired a weekly kitten therapy event that improves mental health and reduces loneliness for residents while helping to socialize the kittens.
men who had fallen into the pool at the bottom of a waterfall and couldn’t pull themselves to safety. With no cell reception to call for help, the group of Sikh friends improvised, tying their turbans together to make a rope, and pulled the men up to the trail.
Five friends were hiking in British Columbia when they found two
A Louisiana high school with a fighting problem toned down when a group of 40 dads formed Dads on Duty and began taking shifts at their children’s school. They hang out in the hallways and greet kids as they head to class, giving “the look” to troublemakers and setting a lighthearted tone with—what else— punny dad jokes.
Mark Coleman + Martin Aylward
SF BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA
September 2022 - July 2023
Train to teach the practice you love, deepen your meditation skill, and support others to discover meditation and mindfulness. Learn to lead mindfulness courses with confidence and clarity, studying with world-renowned teachers Mark Coleman and Martin Aylward. Mark and Martin have taught meditation worldwide for over 20 years. Through their Mindfulness Training Institute, they have created profound yet intimate mindfulness teacher trainings in Europe and America, training over 300 teachers who teach in 25 countries.
Our training is both transformative and supportive as you join a select group of committed practitioners personally taught by two teachers deeply respected in their field.
Free Webinar Visit our website to sign up for a free webinar with Mark and Martin
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Mindfulness may be a useful tool for dealing with stress associated with autism. Researchers at Arizona State University randomly assigned 56 adults with autism spectrum disorder to either a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention, or relaxation training. Although members of both groups reported enhanced mental health-related quality of life at the end of their programs, those in the MBSR group showed greater improvements in both physical and
mental health disability-related quality of life compared to those in the relaxation group. Women experienced greater overall healthrelated quality of life improvements than men regardless of which intervention they received.
Scientists from Germany and the UK recently found that 3 to 6 months of daily mindfulnessbased training may buffer against long-term physiological and psychological stress. They randomly assigned 277 healthy adults with no meditation experience to either a 3- or a 9-month mindfulness group, or a control group.
Both mindfulness groups were then divided into smaller training subgroups.
Participants in the 3-month group received 13 weeks of exercises focusing on compassion, loving-kindness, and gratitude. Those in the 9-month group attended 3 consecutive sessions of 13 weeks each, divided into 3 content areas: attention and body awareness; perspectivetaking and paying attention to thoughts; and compassion, gratitude, and loving-kindness.
Participants in both mindfulness groups were asked to engage in 30 minutes of mental practice 6 days per week for the duration of their program.
Cortisol and cortisone levels,
Research gathered from Providence College, Arizona State University, and others.biological markers of long-term stress, were collected at baseline and 4-month intervals from all groups, using
stabilize regardless of practice type, even for healthy individuals. Changes in perceived stress were unrelated to
or adopted fake feelings at work (called “surface acting”), and how much they felt their self-control was depleted. Findings showed that workers with greater mindfulness were less likely to engage in surface acting. However, those who did surface act reported more depleted self-control.
hair samples. Perceived stress levels were assessed using a standard survey at similar time points.
Participants in both mindfulness groups showed a steady decrease— averaging 25%—in the concentration of stress biomarkers during the first 3 and 6 months of practice, regardless of training length or type.
Stress hormone levels in the control group remained relatively stable over a 9-month period. This suggests that consistent mindfulness-based practice may reduce physiological stress over 6 months, then
changes in stress biomarkers, however. That is, perceptions of stress may persist despite physiological changes.
The benefits of mindfulness at work may be mixed, according to two new studies from Providence College. In the first, employees were asked about their levels of trait mindfulness, whether they hid their emotions
In the second study, employees and their supervisors responded to the same survey questions at three different time points spaced six weeks apart. As in the first study, mindful employees reported less surface acting, but felt more depleted when they did hide their feelings.
Overall, these studies suggest that mindful employees who are aware of the disconnect between their feelings and actions are more likely to suffer from exhaustion and diminished work performance.
Consistent mindfulnessbased practice may reduce physiological stress over 6 months, then stabilize regardless of practice type.
I want to take my mindfulness practice outside, but I live in an urban area and I’m kind of a wimp about bad weather—so I just end up staying inside, and I feel like I’m missing out.
A 12 mindful April 2022
Even in cities we cannot ignore how nature is always teaching us about interconnection, selflessness, and impermanence. We are never far from the changing seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, or starry nights reminding us of a vast universe. Our houses are made from forests; our clothing is made from wool; and even this magazine was once a tree with roots deep in the earth.
spring grass. Nature reminds us that this moment is always precious, alive, and abundant. It invites us to wake up, to be here for this fleeting, magnificent display, to appreciate, love, and protect, and then to let go as blossoms fade and grasses wither, and trust in the vast cycles of life that are constantly revealing themselves—whatever the weather.
Q ILLUSTRATION BY HURCA! / ADOBESTOCK
I’ve witnessed in myself and others how contact with the natural world brings a sense of peace, greater perspective, profound joy and wonder, and a deeper connection with life in all its forms. Still, being in nature is not necessarily a bed of roses. Being outdoors in less than comfortable conditions asks us to dig a little deeper into our resources and our equanimity, and to cut through the delusions of the mind with compassion and humor.
Mark Coleman is the author of Make Peace with Your Mind and Awake in the Wild. He is the founder of the Mindfulness Institute and has an MA in Clinical Psychology.When Dr. Reena Kotecha found herself having a panic attack in the cereal aisle of a supermarket, she knew something was wrong. As a doctor, she was used to diagnosing and treating others, but when it came to herself, she found that she had “a personal blind spot.”
“As a healthcare professional you hold this identity of: I am the caregiver, not the care-taker. I’m meant to be the ‘strong one’—the one who’s got it all figured out,” she says.
By chance, she met a woman who became her meditation teacher, and from there everything began to shift. “When I first sat down with her, I just cried for the first 20 minutes,” she recounts. “And while most people would ask, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ she just said, ‘Shall we take a few breaths?’ And, you know, in those moments, I felt a little lighter.”
In medical school, Dr. Kotecha learned about the human body, but she wasn’t taught an important lesson: how to listen to it.
“I was trained in anatomy and physiology and pharmacology and looking after others. But no one ever trained me, or suggested that it would be important, to look after myself in the process,” Dr. Kotecha says. So, with the belief that “health care starts with selfcare,” Dr. Kotecha started Mindful Medics, a training program that promotes health and well-being, and professional productivity and engagement through mindfulness, compassion, emotional intelligence, medicine, and neuroscience.
“I know what it’s like to feel so lonely and so isolated and so dejected—caring for others while feeling like you are running out of capacity—which has been exacerbated by the pandemic,” Dr. Kotecha says. “The support that healthcare professionals need is not just physical PPE, but mental and emotional support as well. Mindful Medics helps provide skillful space for healthcare professionals to share and reflect on what they’ve seen throughout the day and have someone just listen or guide them through a practice to find some calm. This is what drives me—supporting healthcare professionals so that they’re able to not just do their best work, but show up with optimal mental and emotional health.”
PEOPLE TO WATCH • DR. REENA KOTECHA
“
This is what drives me—supporting healthcare professionals.PHOTOGRAPH BY PIXELROBOT / ADOBESTOCK
Based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness meditation, Sanvello offers personalized strategies to help you find relief from anxiety, stress, and depression
You can track your mood and choose exercises tailored to your result—including meditations, videos, articles, and prompts. Users can also connect with a coach or therapist via message, and with other users through discussion boards and chat groups.
Unwinding Anxiety offers short practices and lessons based on mindfulness training to help you “change the ‘habit loop’ that leads to anxiety.” Over the course of the program designed by neuroscientist Judson Brewer, you’ll map out behaviors of fear and anxiety and work to replace habitual patterns of worry. As you go through the modules, you can journal within the app to track your anxiety triggers and progress, and join weekly live calls with Brewer and other experts.
When you’re having a panic attack, Rootd offers a literal “big red button” to press when you need help facing anxiety or finding comfort. When you press the button, the app offers prompts to help return you to a sense of calm. These are audio reminders about what a panic attack is, how long one may last, and how capable your body is of handling what you’re feel ing. You can also follow the short- and long-term lessons on anxiety at your own pace— which include deep breath ing instruction, mindfulness meditation, and other mindful tools like journaling.
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.
All pups deserve a fetch-worthy stick. When good sticks were lacking at his local park, a dad in Kaiapoi, New Zealand, started a “stick library,” a homemade box filled with quality sticks for the “borrowing”—an idea since taken up by other parks around the world.
Our take on who’s paying attention and who’s not
by AMBER TUCKERA hiker in Colorado got lost and spent all night searching for the trail, only realizing later that a Search and Rescue team was searching for them. The hiker ignored repeated calls and texts from SAR… because they didn’t recognize the number. Sometimes, help is just a “spam call” away.
In 1957, the tidal Thames (a 95-mile-long estuary, part of the UK river) was declared biologically dead: so polluted that it could not support life. Now, conservation efforts have allowed species of seals, birds, and even sharks to thrive again as the habitat recovers.
“People are more than their jobs” is the basis for Ontario’s new Working for Workers Act. The Act encourages policies to help employees disconnect from their jobs outside work hours, and addresses other barriers to career success and well-being that workers may face.
A Danish museum loaned artist Jens Haaning 534,000 kroner ($84,000 USD) in cash, expecting him to affix it to a canvas—a new artwork he would have to spend his own money to create. To point out the hypocrisy, Haaning instead delivered two blank canvases, titled “Take the Money and Run.”
Farewell to a wayward wizard? Christchurch, New Zealand, recently removed one from payroll. Ian Brackenbury Channell held the title of Wizard of New Zealand for 31 years. His job? To “provide acts of wizardry and other wizard-like services” as tourism promotion. He’d also made not-so-charming comments about women. ●
Caring for people with serious or life-threatening illness can be an intense, intimate, and deeply alive experience. In this special course, meditation teacher Frank Ostaseski and the Metta Institute faculty lead us through teachings that will help us care for others with greater empathy, patience, and joy using three key elements: self-awareness, compassion, and skillful action.
We don’t always think about curiosity as a part of mindfulness, but this powerful quality is what allows our everyday experiences—even the ones we really don’t want to be having—to get some breathing room, and maybe even to shift in unexpected ways.
By Stephanie Domet
One night last fall I was lying on the couch, scrolling through my social media feeds on my phone, when suddenly the room started spinning. As the old-fashioned rosette on my living room ceiling swirled around and around, I struggled to find equilibrium. Unable to situate myself with stability, I eventually called for my spouse, who brought me a bowl, into which I promptly threw up.
This sudden dizziness and nausea—food poisoning, I thought— arrived in the midst of a prolonged period of physical dismay. Months earlier, I’d become suddenly intimate with infirmity thanks to a stubborn and seemingly irresolvable pain in my knee. A sprain, my physiotherapist thought. One I got by sitting at my desk for too long and with not enough attention to my body, over the course of too many pandemic days made sedentary by circumstances and dread. And now, to add to the physical pain, reduced mobility, and difficult emotions that arose in me along with the sprained knee, came destabilizing dizziness that just wouldn’t quit. I’d begun exploring the idea of bringing curiosity to my experience of being unwell, to help navigate it all, but as I struggled through the days, off-balance and gritting my teeth at the pain in my knee, the only question on my mind was: Why me?
I’ve been curious as a professional orientation for decades. As a writer, editor, and journalist, curiosity is a skill I’ve trained myself in, and one I hone regularly. But in my work, too, my curiosity often gets snagged on
why—and from there, my imagination builds a story around character motivation, cause and effect, incidents and outcomes. It’s a short stroll from why to a full-blown narrative explanation, in my writing. But why hasn’t proven to be particularly helpful in mindfulness training. Instead, a more generative place to start is what.
Kimberly Brown is a meditation teacher in New York City. And, full disclosure, she is my meditation teacher. She reminds me that curiosity is part of the deal when it comes to mindfulness.
“Curiosity is a willingness to experience without looking away, ignoring, or denying,” she says. “Curiosity is using our attention to have an experience as it is directly.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephanie Domet is the managing editor of Mindful. She is a writer and editor who lives in Halifax and is forever trying to keep her narratives where they belong: on the page.
Asking why can be useful, Brown says, but it can also lead to narratives and stories about our experience, and that can prevent us from actually having a direct experience, and seeing it for what it is, which is a necessary first step for working with what arises. “When you can see what’s happening for real, then you can
take compassionate and wise action to address it in the best way,” she says. “And if you don’t want to see it clearly, if you are unwilling to see the what, then you might employ unskillful ways of trying to meet whatever difficulty is arising.”
I think of the ways a certain kind of curiosity has driven me, from early days of Why is the sky blue? to teen angst years wondering, Why doesn’t that person like me?! to my overarching quest, as a writer and person, to answer my enduring question: Why am I like this?
Mindful curiosity, though, invites me to shift some attention away from the “I” so as to explore the “this” in that last question.
“Curiosity asks us to challenge a lot of stories we might have,” says Brown. “Curiosity is being able to look at my story to see that it’s true, but it may not be exactly real. Events happened. There’s a truth to my experience. And yet the reality is that there are many ways to tell a story generally and there are many views to this story.”
Brown says curiosity helps us see those stories in the first place—and that approaching my stories with mindfulness means I don’t have to jump in to fix anything. “You don’t have to figure →
As I struggled through the days, off-balance and gritting my teeth at the pain in my knee, the only question on my mind was: Why me?
it out. You can allow yourself to be here with interest in what you’re seeing and what’s arising in you.”
And seeing what’s arising can allow us the space to choose what happens next. Imagine, Brown says, a parent whose child is crying. That parent might be feeling frustration or guilt, and may act out of that—offering treats, say—to get their kid to settle down. Mindfulness practice makes space for curiosity. A parent can recognize when they’re about to act out of a moment of reactivity, and choose something different instead. “If you have an intention to not harm and to be of benefit, you can use curiosity to allow whatever action is most beneficial to arise,” Brown explains. “Without curiosity, you may allow a non-skillful action to arise because you’re not seeing what it’s coming out of.”
At the same time, though, our curiosity has to include a certain softness. We can bring a lightness, and what Brown calls a “joyful enthusiasm,” to our inquiries. And because there’s nothing to solve, we don’t have to be punitive with our curiosity. If we get overwhelmed, we can back off, or return to our practice when we feel more supported. “You can’t take wisdom out of compassion or love out of joy. Curiosity is a certain way of looking with an interest, with enthusiasm, and at the same time, it can’t be just done by itself. It’s done with compassion. It’s done with wisdom. It’s done with patience.”
These insights clicked into place for me during a recent medical appointment, after my dizziness turned out to be due to benign positional vertigo. When the physiotherapist who helped ease the vertigo noticed me limping, he asked what was going on with my knee. “It’s sprained,” I told him.
“Right,” he said. “But why are you limping?”
I wrinkled my brow in frustration. “Because it’s sprained! It hurts!”
He nodded. “Right. But why are you limping?”
“I…don’t know,” I said at last. “Why am I limping?” I walked a few paces and paid close attention to my knee: What did it feel like to limp? What happened if I didn’t lock up my whole leg, and instead walked without overly favoring the sprained side? My experiments revealed that returning to something closer to my natural gait hurt less, and allowed me to walk further without tiring. I’d become committed to a story about myself—my knee is sprained, I limp now—and had stopped checking it against reality. In doing so, I’d been prolonging my own physical pain— and mental anguish, too.
I still live with pain in my knee, and if I lie down too quickly I feel a brief flash of vertigo. But when I move past the knee-jerk of Why me? a space opens where I can meet my experience with clear eyes and a more generative and compassionate line of questioning: How am I, right now? How is my experience changing? What is this moment asking of me? What would be wise and compassionate action? Then, I can adjust my favored brisk walking pace to something more allowing of limitation. I can even relate to “limitation” through a lens of “Right now, it’s like this,” which allows me to see that it won’t always be this way. Dizziness ebbs and recedes. Knee pain throbs and resolves. I can make space to truly care for myself when I employ curiosity, instead of brutally toughing it out. Why me becomes Why not me, and lets me extend kindness to myself as I would to an injured friend. I don’t have to get stuck in my stories about what’s happening. Instead, with the help of compassionate curiosity, I can get beyond those, to what’s really happening. ●
“Curiosity is a willingness to experience without looking away, ignoring, or denying. It’s using our attention to have an experience as it is directly.”
KIMBERLY BROWN, MEDITATION TEACHER
Our curiosity practice can start with the simplest tools we have at hand—our breath, our body, and our awareness. And we can deepen into it with loving-kindness.
Find an easy seat and make a commitment for these next few minutes to just be here, not moving around, not deciding you’re going to check an email, not talking to anyone. Take time right now to take a special moment for yourself.
Start to notice what’s happening in your body by paying attention to sensation. The light entering through your eyelids. Taste, smell, the weight of your body in your seat. The feeling of your clothing on your skin. Allow sounds to enter your ears. You don’t have to change anything or fix anything. You’re just allowing, letting everything be. Notice, welcome, and appreciate your intention to cultivate curiosity. This is an expression of your natural wisdom arising.
Bring yourself to this moment, with a sense of wonder and allowing. Relax your shoulder blades, the back of your head, your forehead, your cheeks, your jaw. Experience what it’s like to be you in this very moment. Notice that you’re breathing—the rise and fall of your belly, your chest, your shoulder blades, cool air and warm air as you inhale and exhale on the tip of your nose. You might feel bored.
You might feel a desire to move or get up. You could feel like you don’t like these annoying thoughts that are buzzing around your head. And right now you don’t have to do anything about that. Your curiosity is making space simply for you to have this experience.
Make a connection with a dear friend, someone with whom you have an easy, loving relationship. Imagine they’re with you right now, and offer them this beautiful intention: may you welcome what arises in you. Repeat this phrase for a minute, as though you’re giving a gift to this dear friend. Now make a connection with yourself and offer yourself the same intention: May I welcome what’s arising in me. And now take a moment to recognize all beings everywhere. All of us struggling, wanting things to be different, judging, critical. May we welcome what’s arising in us.
Recognize that spending time developing your heart and your mind benefits you and all you encounter. So take a moment to appreciate that and thank yourself. Then you can stretch or move however you like as you conclude your practice.
What do you do when people have the shocking audacity to think differently than you do? Do you choose to stay open and curious? Do you become rigid and defensive? Here’s how to find common ground, even when you are certain that they are wrong and you’re so very, very right.
Gender identity. The environment. Politics, guns, and gluten.
These breezy topics are great for family dinners, watercooler chit chat, and neighborly how-dee-doos. Yes, they’re perfect conversation starters if you want to discover how differently other people see the world. And not just those other guys down the road there, but also your near and dear ones. You know, people you love, cherish, admire—the ones you thought for sure were seeing things your way.
For instance, few things have brought us into greater unexpected conflict with those we love than the question of vaccination status. We live in a time that privileges individual freedom of thought, action, and choice. Great! Until Aunt Jiji and Uncle JoJo tell you, just as you are biting down on a buttery piece of bbq they’ve handed you, that they’ve made different choices than you have about being vaccinated. At that moment, as many thoughts and feelings arise, what are you to do?
Each of us believes the way we see the world is the way the Big Bopper intended. When we uncover someone’s belief that we should all wear clown costumes to work or only eat zucchini muffins we may wonder, what’s going on? When someone operates differently than we think they should, we may feel alienated. If it is someone close to us, who we were sure we knew, it may feel like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment. When we pause, we can be reminded of the reality that we all have our own views and opinions on how to best live our lives, and how other people should
live theirs—and we can find space to see that we have a choice about how to navigate inevitable conflicts of view, so that we might still all find a way to respect even what we cannot abide.
The Art of War suggests that if you are really interested in working with conflict, you have to allow yourself to tolerate a range of unfamiliar or uncomfortable sensations, from music you don’t like, at a volume that’s lower or higher than you think it should be, to opinions you think are dead wrong.
Allowing for unfamiliar feelings doesn’t mean caving in to another’s view. It means noticing that your back has gone up, and still deciding to stick around a while and see what’s what.
Reducing the confusion and harm that can come from conflict makes life easier and more enjoyable. You diminish conflict when you can find anything at all to align with: “You care about kids—me too!” “You care about freedom of choice—so do I!”
Maybe you both like monster truck rallies, scrapbooking, or a night at the opera. Finding common ground can take you beyond suspicion and hostility and increase emotional engagement.
If it rankles you to contemplate giving space to someone you have deemed a kook or a radical, be courageous and ask yourself what evidence you are using to shun or disrespect this other person. Nature points to the value of biodiversity to keep things thriving. By allowing the biodiversity of what you are opposed to to have a voice, you can offer space for what you might not agree with and still advance the greater good.
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.
When we feel fired up, passionate, and right, it can be hard to understand why we would hold space for contrary views. That’s when you need to ask yourself what matters most. If it matters to you to live in a less hostile and divisive environment, you have to be open to what you might not understand and never agree with. You can always be kind and friendly even when you’d rather not. ●
Open to whatever shows up, including different opinions.
Pause to hear and feel.
Engage awareness by being curious about any of your body sensations, emotions, and thoughts.
This practice can help you stay open to things that challenge you. O P E N
Notice the benefits of exploring a wider view.
by Christiane Wolf
Rage and bitterness toward those we see as causing our pain can tear us apart. It takes time, writes Christiane Wolf, but the brave and gentle practice of forgiveness can help you turn toward the future instead of resenting the past.
For a year, Sabrina received the wrong diagnosis and treatment for her chronic progressive illness, which left her with permanent damage to her body and ongoing pain. She used to be extremely angry about it and thought a lot about revenge.
At some point, that changed.
Sabrina said, “I realized that the revenge I was holding on to wouldn’t give me back my health, but that I kept torturing myself with it and it kept me up at night. The pain was bad enough in itself. I didn’t want to keep carrying this hatred in my heart around with me anymore.”
Forgiveness is a practice of freeing your own heart from the prison of pain and resentment. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you have to condone what happened or agree with it. You don’t even have to like it—not at all. It’s a realization that holding on to what happened is in itself painful.
Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield likes to say, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christiane Wolf is a physician turned mindfulness and compassion teacher and teacher trainer. She leads meditation classes and retreats worldwide. She is the co-author of A Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness and author of Outsmart Your Pain: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion to Help You Leave Chronic Pain Behind
Angrily holding on to what happened is painful and can easily turn into bitterness. That’s not a place where we want to live our life.
We practice forgiveness with the understanding that we have all betrayed or harmed someone—out of our pain, fear, anger, or confusion—whether we know it or not, just as we have been betrayed and harmed by others. For example, we make a wrong assumption about why somebody did or said something and then we lash out. Or in a moment of acting or speaking we don’t think about what our actions might mean to the other person. Not to be glib about it, but it’s simply part of the human condition. Nobody is spared.
Do you feel that you’re holding anger or resentment against somebody, related to your pain? It might be the person who caused your accident; it might be the surgeon who did the first operation on your back—or the second or third; it might be your sister-in-law, who always treats you like you’re just pretending you’re in pain so that you can sit and rest while everybody else is helping around the house.
Maybe—and this is usually the hardest part—you feel like you can’t forgive yourself for something, like seeking medical help so late, or trusting in your doctor’s/mother’s/friend’s advice, or smoking, or eating too much of one thing or too little of another.
Whatever the cause or the content, not being able to forgive hurts. Sure, anger can feel good at times. In the beginning, it can give us energy to speak up or to make a change, but then what? What does it feel like to be caught up in anger that is way past its best-by date?
We can use our mindfulness practice to turn toward these feelings and notice: What does it feel like to keep holding on? What emotions come up in that moment? Does this influence your pain levels in any way? Jack Kornfield asks us to “sense the suffering that comes with the inability to forgive.”
Forgiveness takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. We cannot simply decide to forgive and think that will take care of it. For most of us, forgiveness is a slow process that takes place gradually, often over years. So please be patient with yourself! The first step is to realize that to forgive might be a good idea—at least theoretically—even if it feels like you could never do it.
Forgiveness is traditionally taught in three iterations:
1. We ask for forgiveness from the people we have harmed or hurt.
2. We practice forgiveness for the people who have harmed or hurt us. →
3. We practice forgiveness for ourselves for having harmed or hurt ourselves.
Start by setting the intention to learn to forgive. You can practice the following meditation regularly or use the steps or words as needed throughout the day. Some people use prayer, some use journaling, and some talk to friends or a therapist to help them gain more clarity about where and how they are stuck. No matter what your approach is, sustained intention over time, put into practice in small steps, will result in change. ●
Excerpt from Outsmart Your Pain: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion to Help You Leave Chronic Pain Behind by Christiane Wolf and Daniel J. Siegel © 2021 by Christiane Wolf, MD, PhD. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The Experiment, LLC. Available everywhere books are sold. experimentpublishing.com
BY CHRISTIANE WOLF
Settle into your practice by finding a supportive posture, closing the eyes or taking a few long, deep breaths.
Acknowledge what is present. Remember that we are not trying to make ourselves feel anything. We are simply inclining the mind and heart toward forgiveness. Go at your own pace.
Let yourself feel the barriers you are holding by not forgiving others, not forgiving yourself. Is an intention arising to learn to forgive?
Begin asking for forgiveness from those you have hurt or harmed. You might say to yourself: “There are many ways I have harmed or hurt another, knowingly or unknowingly, through my own pain, anger, fear, and confusion.” Pause, and let yourself remember the many ways. Let yourself open to the pain, sorrow, and regret. You might feel your readiness to finally let go and to ask for forgiveness. Say: “I ask for your forgiveness. Please forgive me.” Release by taking a few long breaths. Pause.
Acknowledge those who have hurt or harmed you. Say to yourself: “There are many ways I have been harmed or hurt by another, knowingly or unknowingly,
through their pain, anger, fear, and confusion.” Pause. Let yourself remember the many ways. Feel the ways you have been hurt as well as the pain of still holding this pain and resentment. Feel the potential release of forgiving.
To the extent that you are ready, offer forgiveness: “I forgive you. I release you.” Or “I am setting the intention to forgive you or to learn to forgive you.” Pause. Take a few deep breaths to release this part of the meditation.
Now turn toward the last part, forgiving yourself: “There are many ways I have harmed or hurt myself, knowingly or unknowingly, through my pain, anger, fear, and confusion.” Pause. Feel the sorrow and regret, the preciousness of your body and mind. Remember that you have grown and changed. You didn’t know what you know now, or you knew but couldn’t quite practice it yet. Feel the release that might come from forgiving yourself. Pause.
To the extent that you are ready, offer yourself forgiveness: “I forgive myself. I release the pain of not forgiving myself.”
When you are ready, come back to your breath. Take your time to end this meditation.
The refugee crisis is displacing millions of people globally, fueling an epidemic of traumatic stress. In one refugee community, a pioneering mindfulness and compassion program shows promise in helping people cultivate moments of peace.
Mara Gulens launched her journalism career at the Medical Post, but an injury sustained many years later brought her to mindfulness. A seasoned writer and editor, her stories have appeared in publications such as Advertising Age, Chatelaine, and The Globe and Mail. Mara lives and works in Toronto.
Dr. Amit Bernstein’s interest in refugee mental health was piqued just over a decade ago, when forcibly displaced people—not only men and women, but young people and unaccompanied minors—started flowing into Israel from Eritrea and Sudan.
“They looked so resilient,” recalls Bernstein, a professor of clinical psychology with the School of
Psychology, University of Haifa, in Israel. However, study after study showed that there was, Bernstein says, “a real public health crisis of mental health that we didn’t know about.” The refugees came from “extraordinarily, shockingly high rates of traumatic stress experiences”: torture, imprisonment, starvation, combat. Following the trauma and stress
of forced migration, the refugees also struggled with post-displacement issues, including separation, grief, isolation, loneliness, fear, conflict, and no access to education or work.
A representative sample found that two-thirds of the population was struggling with PTSD, depression, and anxiety. In addition, up to onethird were struggling with suicidality (up from the 3-19% for migrants who aren’t forcibly displaced).
“It’s very shocking. It’s a real crisis,” says Bernstein. “I had never seen numbers in any community with this kind of prevalence or severity of trauma and mental-health problems.”
The plight faced by refugees globally has not lessened in the intervening years. By 2050, the Institute for Economics and Peace reports, climate change and conflict could raise the number of refugees to as high as one billion. A person is forcibly displaced from their home approximately every two seconds, according to Oxfam.
Or, as Bernstein puts it, “Every two seconds, some organization or person has another forcibly displaced person to care for.”
Refugees experience inordinately high rates of traumatic stress, leading to a wide range of mental-health issues. “The generational and intergenerational implications are not just frightening and destructive for the forcibly displaced communities, but also the host nations,” says Bernstein.
These intersecting crises led Bernstein’s team at Observing Minds Lab, founded by Bernstein, to explore mindfulness as a possible way to help promote trauma recovery and buffer the effects of post-displacement stress. “We came to understand how potentially transformative mindfulness was, which is something we couldn’t have predicted,” says Bernstein.
Treating refugee mental health is a complicated endeavor—the many
geographic, linguistic, and sociocultural factors at play present daunting logistical challenges. “Nothing that I’ve done in the past 20 years compares to the complexity of doing this work responsibly and well,” says Bernstein. A growing body of evidence (from Israel as well as other countries around the world) led his team to the idea that mindfulness and compassion training, if tailored to the needs of forcibly displaced people, might be an important, new focus for scientific study and intervention development.
“If you had asked when we started, ‘Hey, do you think mindfulness is a good idea here?’ we probably would have laughed,” says Bernstein. “We would have thought, ‘That’s crazy.’”
But more and more research documented the psychological and biological stress-buffering effects of mindfulness training. In addition, mindfulness training can be delivered in groups, is low cost, and could theoretically be delivered in diverse settings. This kind of therapy could be scalable even in complex contexts.
“Studies show that mindfulness targets processes that transcend language and culture,” says Bernstein. “That’s a very powerful capacity for this purpose.” Could mindfulness bridge the gap between refugees worldwide, who, as he says, come from extraordinarily diverse social, cultural, linguistic, and geographical backgrounds?
“Mental health and the right to recovery following forced displacement is a human right,” said Bernstein in a keynote at the 4th International Conference on Mindfulness in July 2021. “It’s our ethical obligation to
bring the most rigorous and compassionate science available to try to care for forcibly displaced persons in need.”
Bernstein’s team at Observing Minds Lab developed Mindfulness-Based Trauma Recovery for Refugees (MBTR-R), a socioculturally adapted, trauma-sensitive, mindfulness- and compassion-based intervention for diverse, forcibly displaced people.
MBTR-R consists of nine 2.5-hour group sessions and at-home practice supported by guided meditations on YouTube. Psychoeducation focuses on the effects of stress and trauma, and loving-kindness practices are taught to cultivate compassion for the self and others. The program includes a host of trauma-sensitive adaptations to help ensure the safety of the meditation practices, and sessions are socioculturally adapted and delivered within and by the community—refugees make up 50% of the team delivering the program, as well as providing childcare and preparing meals for participants.
Initially, the team’s aspirations were relatively modest: “We wanted to see if we could use this intervention to help asylum seekers have moments of refuge in their own bodies and minds,” says Bernstein. Secretly, the team hoped that if you give people space in their consciousness and teach them different ways to relate to their stress, memories, and fears, maybe a process of healing could begin. →
“We wanted to see if we could use this intervention to help asylum seekers have moments of refuge in their own bodies and minds.”
DR. AMIT BERNSTEIN, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA
A randomized controlled trial tested the efficacy and safety of MBTR-R among a community sample of 158 Eritrean asylum seekers in Israel with a severe history of trauma and chronic post-migration stress. The study was supported by a Peace Grant from the US’s Mind & Life Institute.
Quickly, the researchers realized they’d hit on something valuable. They found that MBTR-R significantly reduced rates and symptom severity of PTSD, depression, and anxiety, immediately after the study’s end and at follow-up five weeks later. These therapeutic effects were not dependent on key demographics such as gender, age, trauma history severity, or post-migration living difficulties, indicating that mindfulness was broadly effective within the pool of participants. Furthermore, the positive effects researchers were monitoring didn’t appear to fade over time.
TThe brief intervention format, group-based delivery, and few people leaving the study indicate MBTR-R might be a feasible, acceptable, and scalable mental-health intervention for refugees and asylum seekers. “The findings were far better than we had imagined they could be,” admits Bernstein.
Clinicians around the world are trying to use mindfulness with forcibly displaced persons. But Bernstein says he’s not aware of any other standardized, trauma-sensitive, sociocultural intervention adapted or studied through some a randomized control design.
The MBTR-R study was published in early 2020, and Observing Minds was eager to kick-start the Moments of Refuge Project: a global, multisite study that would help researchers understand more about the power of MBTR-R.
Could it be effective and safe for multiple other asylum seekers of different origins, language groups, and contexts? Could MBTR-R impact not only mental health, but also physical health, for forcibly displaced persons? “We don’t know, and it’s really important to test,” says Bernstein.
Then COVID-19 hit.
Bernstein started receiving dozens of texts and calls from asylum-seeker communities and NGOs: The pandemic had spawned an acute humanitarian crisis. Despite significant health risks, the Observing Minds team surreptitiously carried out a study in a Tel Aviv NGO during one of Israel’s lockdowns to understand whether COVID-19 was exacerbating the mental-health crisis.
“The findings were haunting,” says Bernstein. All the existing stressors for refugees, of insecure residential status, housing, income, food, and healthcare access, were exacerbated by the pandemic, increasing their risk of contracting and transmitting COVID19. Asylum seekers were struggling with elevated depression, anxiety, and PTSD levels. Suicidality in the community sample of women, primarily mothers, was between 50% and 60%.
Read more about Amit Bernstein in an extended profile on mindful.org. mindful.org/ read-more
Bernstein’s team pivoted and launched Mindfulness-SOS, a shorter, online version of Moments of Refuge, available in Arabic, English, and Tigrinya (the mother tongue of many Eritreans), focused on mitigating acute stress and related mental-health symptoms. Mindfulness-SOS offers eight audio lessons, each with guided practices teaching skills such as cultivating inner safety and peace, working with difficult thoughts and emotions, and self-compassion. Since the program was delivered online, it respected physical distancing policies while providing rigorous data, and the number of sessions and practices— known as doses—was quantifiable.
“We had quite robust results,” says Bernstein. Initial findings haven’t yet been published, but show that mindfulness and compassion trainings have protective dose-response effects. In addition, there was surprisingly high adherence (the extent to which the participants’ behavior coincided with researchers’ instructions) and engagement (extent of participants’ active involvement and feedback to the research team), as well as high rates of completion of mindfulness exercises.
With two programs on the go, Bernstein is seeking funding to re-launch the Moments of Refuge project. “At this point, we don’t even know if it will work like it did here in Israel,” says Bernstein. “Maybe it’ll work better. We don’t know.” Eventually, he hopes, this ongoing work will pave the way to “make Moments of Refuge a new reality” for forcibly displaced people around the world. ●
“Studies show that mindfulness targets processes that transcend language and culture. That’s a very powerful capacity for this purpose.”
DR. AMIT BERNSTEIN, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN
The winding path of grief can be complicated by trauma. For survivors of gun violence, mindfulness can help people navigate their pain and support post-traumatic growth, one breath at a time.
On February 14, 2018, Annika and Mitch Dworet were waiting to pick up their two sons at their high school in Parkland, Florida, when they got a call from Alex, 15: He told his mother he was in the back of an ambulance—he had been shot.
Annika took off for the hospital where Alex was taken, with the immediate hope that since he had been able to call her, he wasn’t in dire straits; it turned out that a bullet had grazed his head. But as a crowd of parents quickly gathered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, with word spreading that a number of students had been killed, Mitch, still at the high school, repeatedly called his older son: Nick wasn’t answering his cell. Where was he?
The Dworets wouldn’t get the news until 3 a.m., the last family taken into a private office by the FBI: Nick, captain of the swim team, with an athletic scholarship secured to the University of Indianapolis, who was so in love with his girlfriend he had exchanged homemade hearts with her on this Valentine’s Day—he was dead. Sixteen other students had also been murdered by a 19-year-old former Stoneman student in one of the worst mass shootings ever at a school in the United States.
In the days after Nick’s murder, the Dworets’ house was full of family, friends, and neighbors bringing them food. “Without that, I probably wouldn’t have gotten out of bed or taken a shower,” Mitch, 62, says.
Mitch was a longtime restaurant manager and a realtor; Annika, 52, a pediatric ER nurse. They had shared with both sons a passion for sports— running and biking—and Nick found a calling in swimming; he dreamed
Robert Huber is a longtime journalist who has written for Esquire, GQ, Philadelphia, and many other magazines. He is currently completing a comic novel about the strange and changing demands of office culture. Huber lives near the Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey.
of representing Sweden, his mother’s native country, in the Olympics one day. It had been a close, active family, fractured in a way that was not only sudden but incomprehensible. And the trauma of their loss threatened to swallow them.
The Dworets needed to be alone, too, though being alone was possibly worse.
The family’s pain sometimes isolated them from each other. Mitch remembers, especially right after Nick’s death, “thinking about something and I’d just cry. And Annika’s not in the same place at that moment or vice versa. And it took us about three months to realize, wow, we have our son Alex in the other room who is in just as much trauma as we are.” Or more—Alex had been wounded, had lost his brother, and witnessed terrible violence happening to others.
The family soon got into therapy, which helped some, but for the better part of two years they had no real way of coping, and the level of trauma they were feeling was a dangerous place to be. Annika, describing the state of exhaustion, depression, and anxiety she was in, cuts to the chase: “To stay in that would be destructive, and I had to find something to get out of →
Sandy Phillips was having trouble sleeping. Her daughter, Jessi, had been one of the victims of a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012. “I couldn't wrap my heart or my brain around what had happened to Jessi in that theater. In my dreams and really throughout the day, I would reenact the shooting, which was very unhealthy, of course, and very traumatizing,” she says. Working with a trauma therapist helped. “Part of her trauma therapy with me was to get me to actually breathe properly and to be able to calm my mind and take myself out of the theater where Jessi was killed.”
The day after their daughter’s murder, Sandy and her husband, Lonnie, dedicated themselves to helping other families grieve in the wake of gun violence. They sold their house in Texas, bought a motorhome, and now, almost 10 years after losing Jessi, they travel wherever they are needed to mentor survivors of gun violence.
One of the most potent tools they have is mindfulness. What began for Sandy
in her therapist’s office was solidified when she met meditation teacher and Pandemic of Love founder Shelly Tygielski after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “She said, ‘I love the work you're doing. Let's bring mindfulness to those who are suffering.’” Together, they planned a retreat in Massachusetts.
“We brought in 40 survivors from all over the country,” Sandy says. “Some were from mass shootings— Parkland, Tree of Life. Some were individual shootings from Chicago and other places. And to see them go through that process of being able to let go through mindfulness practices—you could just see them become lighter people. I don't think anybody left there unchanged.”
With Tygielski’s help, Survivors Empowered connected with Fadel Zeidan at the University of California San Diego’s Center for Mindfulness. Survivors from across the country learned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, via Zoom, as part of a study. “The hope is to have these folks become certified, and be able to go back
Survivors Empowered was born out of one family’s response to tragic loss. After the shooting death of their daughter, Sandy and Lonnie Phillips devoted themselves to mentoring other survivors of gun violence in carrying on, mindfully.
to their communities and be violence interrupters and violence healers,” says Sandy. “We really feel this is going to change how survivors respond to their grief.”
UCSD is developing a mindfulness program for survivors of gun violence, with 100 new participants to start training in February 2022. “The fact that they're working with us to help survivors all across the country—that's a legacy that Jessi would be incredibly proud of. Just to know that these people will be going back into their own communities and offering the same thing to others, right there in their cities and their towns. That's going to change a lot of people's lives.”
For Sandy and Lonnie, helping other survivors is vitally important. “Because we've seen people who do not receive trauma therapy or do not embrace mindfulness spiral out of control,” Sandy says. “We know that trauma can often become rage and anger. And that's not good for them. It's not good for society. So we just push as hard as we can, as gently as we can, and we've seen the
difference.” Sandy says people she’s known through the group for years, people whose grief is a decade or more old, are able to find some release through mindfulness. “To see them able to put together a healthier life and embrace mindfulness—it’s a beautiful thing to witness.”
Sandy believes the good that arises from mindfulness training can ripple outward. “The idea is to change community by community, because violence interruption and violence healing is really the key to the trauma that this country is suffering from gun violence.”
Sandy sleeps easier now. “I could focus on how horrible Jessi’s death was and continues to be,” she says. “But I choose to focus on how we've been able to lessen others’ pain. So it's a good life. And that's what we want survivors to understand: As horrible as life is without your loved one, it can still be a good life. There'll always be a hole in your heart and there'll always be a chair empty at the table. But it can be a good life and you can find joy and peace again.”
that, or I could stay in it forever. And that would be really bad.”
“You go down the rabbit hole of grief, and it’s very lonely,” says Mitch, who had gone into a vortex of his own scattered thinking after Nick’s murder: “It’s a feeling of desperation—I’m desperate to see my son again. I’m desperate to get back to moments of happiness that I used to have, but I can’t get it back because I can’t get Nick back. And then it goes in different avenues: Oh my God, what happened to Nick? The violence—the violence of what he went through. And I miss him and I…I won’t be able to ever hear his voice or see him again, and I won’t be able to experience a future. And I start thinking about what would have been, or what he would look like. He was just going to be 18.”
Mitch unraveled, again and again, into a place of deep despair. There seemed to be no way out.
In Chicago, Brenda Mitchell had been traveling a similar path of unremittent pain for more than a decade.
Brenda, 66, can speak calmly now about losing her son Kenneth, who was gunned down outside a bar in suburban Chicago in 2005. He was 31. “Never in a million years would I imagine Kenneth would be the one to die from an act of gun violence,” she
wrote in an online piece for Moms Demand Action, which describes itself as “a grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures that can protect people from gun violence.”
Kenneth was the first grandchild in a close African-American family, a role model for his cousins and siblings. Kenneth had two young sons and a third on the way, and he was the family member, Brenda says, who would organize a barbecue if they had not gathered for some time. Kenneth was manager of a golf center in University Park, a Chicago suburb, and the weekend he was killed he was about to host a Super Bowl party. Kenneth had gone out the night before to a sports bar to play darts with friends.
As he was leaving the bar, an argument broke out between two men; he tried to intervene as a peacemaker, Brenda says. But a friend of one of the men went to his van, got a gun, and opened fire, killing Kenneth.
“A week earlier he had taken his brother to the airport for his third tour of duty in a conflict in the Middle East,” Brenda says. “And this tour was his last tour in Afghanistan, only to lose Kenneth a week later in a free country.”
The trauma of gun violence disproportionally impacts people of color, especially African-Americans, in the United States; homicide is the leading cause of death for Black males up to 44 years old. According to a CDC analysis, Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 accounted for 37% of gun homicides in 2019 in the United States, though that age group comprises just 2% of the country’s population.
For a long time after Kenneth’s murder, Brenda tried to carry on, denying her pain. Last spring, she spoke at a Zoom conference on how mindfulness can help people who have lost a loved one to gun violence. “I was in a doctor’s office and she was recommending that I don’t go back to work,” Brenda said, remembering how she felt a full decade after her son’s killing, “and I actually had on a new outfit to →
When the pull of the trauma threatens to take over, Mitch breathes. He listens. He stays with himself. He notices.
go to a new job. I had to realize that I was broken and I was fragile. And I stopped in that moment to realize that I no longer saw myself—I couldn’t see me anymore. Everybody talked about a new norm, but I didn’t know how to get there.”
I no longer saw myself—those are chilling words; Brenda had lost not just her son but something even more basic: who she was. She had raised her two young grandsons and was working a demanding job in human resources in health care while also serving as a pastor of her church. Her own health was at dire risk; Brenda’s blood pressure soared to 250 over 110. She took her doctor’s advice, going on disability instead of starting the new job.
But Brenda was still a long way from reclaiming her life—or herself.
Trauma is a psychological, emotional response to a deeply disturbing or distressing experience or event. People who experience trauma may feel unsafe, with a reduced capacity for regulating their emotions and navigating relationships. Trauma can shake our sense of self and cause lasting harm to our ability to live a full life.
The good news is, healing from trauma is possible.
Fadel Zeidan is an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of California San Diego and the executive director of the university’s Center for Mindfulness. He wanted to better understand the efficacy of trauma-informed mindfulness— specifically, how mindfulness might relate to the trauma of losing a loved one to gun violence. In early 2021 he had an opportunity to conduct a study of gun violence victims as they went through an intensive eight-week
course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training. Those taking part in the study would also become trainers themselves and the new trainers could then teach others to become trainers too. The reasearch was ambitious and far-reaching.
Zeidan has been studying mindfulness for more than two decades; he wrote his undergraduate honors thesis at UNC Charlotte on how one 20-minute session of mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety. But back then, he didn’t see how it could be studied objectively or empirically, and Zeidan was advised by many professors not to go down that path. “The study of mindfulness was considered woo-woo at the time,” he says. “As scientists we were very aware of what happened with the Transcendental Meditation movement in the ’70s and how it’s important to not bias data based on one’s own subjective experience.”
Despite the academic risk, Zeidan was hooked. He published research on mindfulness in graduate school, and then brain imaging began bringing science into the field in a new way, or at least the possibility of it. Zeidan didn’t hesitate: His postdoc fellowship zeroed in on brain imaging and mindfulness, and he would publish the first paper on the meditating brain, in the Journal of Neuroscience.
A Palestinian refugee, Zeidan is passionate about examining the horror of gun violence in America and the role he thinks mindfulness could play in helping those who have lost loved ones. While many studies (besides Zeidan’s) on how mindfulness impacts the brain have been published in the past decade, no researcher has drilled down into →
John Taylor guides a practice to connect with a sense of peace and freedom.
how mindfulness might affect the life-altering state Mitch and Annika Dworet and Brenda Mitchell found themselves in, the trauma of loss on that level. The most relevant data we have, according to the University of Utah’s Eric Garland, who has published more papers on mindfulness than any other researcher, are studies on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In Zeidan’s new study, 22 participants from Survivors Empowered, a national organization serving as a resource for those who have suffered loss through gun violence, were trained for eight weeks in MBSR via Zoom (Brenda Mitchell was one of the 22). They experienced changes quickly at a scale that Zeidan found impressive: 37% reported reduced symptoms of trauma; 52% a reduction in symptoms of PTSD (“a 52% reduction in post-traumatic stress symptoms on the scale that we used is really profound and incredibly encouraging,” he says); 52% were less depressed; sleep disturbance was reduced by 26%; and overall life satisfaction improved by 16%. “Some participants were able to close their eyes and not see their kids or their lost loved ones,” Zeidan says. “That was really striking to me.”
At the same time, he cautions restraint. The results are preliminary,
and it’s a very small, self-reporting study. Full-scale studies with control groups need to be done; changes to the physiology of mindfulness practitioners will be the home run of scientific corroboration. Still, Zeidan’s study has teased the possibilities; the Hemera Foundation granted $100,000 in fall 2021 for Zeidan’s laboratory to continue his work on how survivors of gun violence might benefit from mindfulness. And larger studies could measure what’s happening with the body, to find out whether the dramatic preliminary evidence of significant changes is confirmed.
One of the organizers of Zeidan's study, Beth Mulligan, who is a longtime teacher of mindfulness, lays out how MBSR, the most widely taught mindfulness program in the world, can give direct help to people in the throes of trauma.
MBSR training starts, she says, by teaching the body scan. It’s not a relaxation technique, but a way to get tuned in to the sensations of one’s body, especially increased heart and respiratory rates, all the different ways we feel stress. “And we build on that resource of knowing the body,” Mulligan says, “so that when the fight or flight response hits, you recognize it much, much sooner.”
Triggers can come from anywhere: a car backfiring, or a shooting in another city on the news, or simply out of nowhere when one is sitting quietly on the couch and a flashback pops up—what Mitch Dworet calls going down the rabbit hole of reliving the trauma of Nick’s murder—and that’s when the practice of mindfulness can come into play.
“Because every time you relive what happened, your body responds like it’s happening now,” Mulligan says. “But you start to see that you have choices over what happens next.” She describes a quick route back to the present moment: Feel the sensations of breath, the rhythm of your chest going up and down, feel your feet on the ground, where your hands
are, perhaps you look around the room and notice that the room is safe, that you have a roof over your head. Simplicity is the point here, in coming back from what’s threatening to overcome your mind. “And that calms down the whole nervous system.”
Seeing where the mind goes and coming back to the present moment, seeing where the mind goes and coming back—practicing that skill endlessly can make it possible to live with life-changing trauma.
A little less than two years after Nick was killed, Mitch Dworet went to an event for the local community, an introduction to mindfulness conducted by two meditation teachers, Shelly Tygielski and Sharon Salzberg, in late November 2019; Jon KabatZinn, the founder of MBSR, was also a teacher there.
Just being in public after the murder of Nick was hard—Mitch often found being around other people frightening, as if trouble loomed everywhere. And he had no idea if mindfulness could help. But something clicked there for him during a loving-kindness meditation: He felt calm. He felt safe, even in a roomful of people. Then Mitch went to one of Shelly’s Sunday morning meditations on the beach in nearby Hollywood; →
“I had to create a new narrative for myself and choose to live. Mindfulness helped me to see me again.” BRENDA MITCHELL
MBSR teacher John Taylor offers a five-step meditation for finding a greater sense of peace and freedom after trauma.
Find a comfortable, supported position and take a deep breath in. Let your breath move entirely through your body. As you inhale, pause for a moment at the top of your breath and then exhale, letting your outbreath extend just a bit longer than your inhale. Noticing and knowing that when you're under stress, it may be difficult to take deep breaths, but simply do what you can in this moment.
Know that we have potential for healing, for positive change, for a greater sense of inner peace and even freedom. All of this and more lies within each of us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1Stop. Here, simply notice any reactions you're having in this moment. You might notice a particular sensation or stressor. Simply notice. This gentle act of noticing allows us to create some space for our automatic reactions. When we notice, we allow ourselves to choose to respond with intention. 2
Take a breath. Allow yourself to breathe as deeply as is comfortable for you. Breathing deeply can bring us to a state of equilibrium—to a place of support, and maybe even a little peace. 3
Observe. With this greater sense of ease that you're cultivating, you can continue to observe what is arising for you in this moment. Between stimulus and response, there is space. 4
Imagine. Now, let's imagine together. First, imagine a door and an invitation to
open the door. Imagine walking through and inside the space feels quiet and peaceful. Pause there. Now, bring to mind a memory that brings feelings of joy, and peace, and even a little excitement. Feel the energy of this moment. Pause there. Next, bring to mind a moment when you felt awe. Maybe a beautiful scenic view at the end of a long hike. Imagine the work it took to get you there. And now feel the satisfaction of arriving at this spot. Feel the joy. Pause there. Finally, imagine a kind, loving figure, maybe a grandmother figure. Feel them sharing their warmth and love with you. Reminding you that you are loved. Rest in that peace and love for a moment. Know that this kind, loving space is available to you at any time. 5
Proceed. When you're ready, bring your attention back to your breath, wiggle your fingers and toes. Know that you can carry this feeling of spaciousness, joy, trust, and ease into your day with you.
about 50 people were there, but, again, Mitch felt safe. He sat in the sand and let himself be guided in meditation, focusing on his breath. He listened to the ocean rolling in. “And I was very comfortable with that,” Mitch says. He had begun to discover a new tool.
Mitch mentions how Shelly “showed up for me”—he means it literally, in her warmth and friendship, but it’s also a sort of metaphor for connection to the moment, what mindfulness, with a great deal of practice, began to give Mitch: A way to be present, a way to show up to the here and now instead of going down the rabbit hole of past trauma.
It gave Mitch a way to begin changing his relationship with his pain—not to overcome it, but to begin to live with it.
Annika—who, like her husband, possesses an openness borne of deep sensitivy—started joining Mitch in the group meditation sessions at the beach, but the process was slower for her. “Every time I closed my eyes and went to that still place, I had such horrible, horrible thoughts in my mind that I had to stop,” she says. “It was
much too overwhelming.” Mindfulness can take a great deal of practice— no matter where you’re starting from. Slowly, in small increments, it became useful for Annika too.
She would learn to bring mindfulness into ordinary life, to practice mindful eating, mindful walking, even taking mindful showers. She learned to stay within the moment, and within herself. Now she often goes to sleep with a guided meditation playing in her headphones. It’s mindfulness as a way of life: Out of the trauma the Dworets have suffered, the value of what the practice offers has emerged.
It would be absurd to think that they’ve found a way out of grief. The grief is permanent. They lost their son. Alex, now 18, lost his brother. The loss of Nick is part of who they are now. As Mitch puts it, “There’s not an end to this.”
Alex, Annika says, is doing OK, as he continues to see a trauma therapist. The practice of mindfulness, he’s decided, is not for him. Last fall he started training to become a mechanic.
Learning to be present in the moment, through mindfulness, has
helped Mitch as a father, he says: “I wanted to show up for Alex and be a better listener instead of thinking forward or back.” It happens in small, typical family moments, he says, just hanging out on the couch, talking about, say, cars—Alex’s passion. Mitch has learned to slow himself down and listen rather than telling Alex what to do or how to think. Instead, he tries to hear what his son is saying.
It’s a day-by-day practice.
One morning late last summer, Mitch Dworet got up early, as the sun was just rising, before it was hot in Parkland, and went out into his yard. He sat and meditated, resting his attention on his breath, on the sounds of birds beginning to sing in the dawn light. As he sometimes does now, Mitch placed his attention on an intention for the day: That day, it was patience. He sometimes feels angry over how long it has taken to bring Nick’s killer to justice. But he doesn’t want to go down that rabbit hole, to live in that rage, to go back to the chaotic emotional hell he had so much trouble coping with in the aftermath of his son’s murder.
Instead, when the pull of the trauma threatens to take over, Mitch breathes. He listens. He stays with himself. He notices. And with patience. With breath. He knows he’ll keep tapping into that simple way back to the moment, and to himself, at vulnerable times throughout the day, and during every day to come.
For Brenda Mitchell, mindfulness meditation opened the door she had closed on herself after her son Kenneth’s murder.
In 2019, Brenda would go to a big mindfulness retreat near Boston, organized by Shelly Tygielski and Sharon Salzberg, that included survivors and family members of victims from shootings in ten cities. “Let me just tell you,
it was five days with no outside contact, no phone, no TV, no nothing,” Brenda remembers, laughing now at the sacrifice she thought she was making. “The only person I could listen to was me.”
What she learned at the retreat was both simple and profound. When she feels vulnerable, or, as she describes it, “when I find myself in a position, I pause and I breathe. I take a vacation with myself, for three minutes, whatever it takes me to just bring myself back and center myself. Mentally, I’m focused on absolutely nothing. I let my head go back and it just takes me to a place.”
After confronting her pain in therapy, Brenda says meditation allows her to remain with herself when grief threatens to derail her. It can seem, on first blush, to be a contradiction: The recognition of her pain over Kenneth’s murder, finally feeling her pain, led to her healing; the denial of it was literally killing her.
As she says, “I kept trying to get back to normal and there’s no such thing as normal for me. And so what I learned in the process is that I had to create a new narrative for myself and choose to live."
Mindfulness allowed Brenda to heal "from the inside out as opposed to the outside in" she says. "Mindfulness helped me see me again. It told me that my brain belonged to me. ●
A mindful guide to crafting your own meditation retreat at home to deepen your mindfulness practice and share it with those around you.
Introduction by Jaime Ledesma
There comes an important moment in your mindfulness journey when you’re called to share your practice with others. You might be asked to share a mindfulness exercise in a meeting, asked by your partner to help soothe a mid-meltdown child, asked by a grieving friend how you managed through loss in your own life. It’s a small yet monumental call to take something deeply personal and offer it back to the world. And you don’t have to be a mindfulness teacher to meet the moment.
In 2016, I started a weekly mindfulness group at work with two colleagues. We pitched the idea, secured a nominal budget, and brought in a certified teacher from a local meditation center. We sat in a conference room, partially cross-legged in restrictive business casual, and felt genuine joy when close to 20 of our coworkers practiced within the walls of our corporate office without a trace of insincerity.
We also soon realized that we didn’t have an endless budget to bring in teachers every week. We could run these sessions a few times a year but had to fill the weeks between with our own content. As the yoga teacher of the group, I was asked to share a mindfulness exercise in the next meeting. And my immediate reaction was, “Am I really qualified to do this?”
I wasn’t a certified mindfulness or meditation teacher at the time. I admired and respected my own teachers who studied, practiced, embodied, and taught mindfulness over many decades. Teachers play an essential role in preserving and deepening collective wisdom. A good teacher not only guides through their expertise, but they know that the true teachings are found within each one
of us and, after a lifetime of trying, erring, and persevering, they know how to create kind space for wisdom to arise.
I didn’t have deep expertise. Mostly, I had “trying and erring.” And that made me very similar to my conference-room peers. I couldn’t teach mindfulness, but I could share my own experience—just a few years down the road of perseverance.
Here's how I describe the difference between sharing your practice and teaching the practice:
Teaching is like gifting someone your secret recipe (most often through example) and knowing that the best meals are made together. A great teacher makes it possible for you to find your own way around the kitchen, too. They not only guide and connect you to your inner knowing, they learn from you as well. Teachers give us recipes for wisdom that last a lifetime.
Sharing is like bringing a salad to a dinner party. You're taking some simple ingredients from your practice that resonate with you, arranging them as best you can, and offering it to someone else in case they’d like to try it, too. Sharing is saying, “I’m right here next to you, trying the same things you are.” Sharing takes your own big, insightful ideas and breaks them down into understandable, easily communicated bites. It’s not a substitute for a teacher’s expertise; it’s an offering to share your own experience.
We’ve gathered some guidelines and practices as an invitation to begin crafting your own retreat experiences at home, maybe with friends or family members. Sharing your practice with others isn’t a call to replace the expertise of teachers; it’s an invitation to bring a thoughtful relatability to moments of reflection. Here’s a list of questions for exploring the stories, benefits, and tips you might want to consider sharing about your practice.
How has meditation changed your behavior or reactions? How would your partner or someone close to you describe its impact on you? Look for objective, tangible stories about how it helps.
Jaime Ledesma is a yoga and meditation teacher and well-being specialist at Deloitte. She helps organizations see beyond traditional wellness programs and design a culture of well-being that includes physical and mental health, empathy, connection, and a sense of purpose. She has spoken at national conferences, written articles for media outlets including Thrive Global, and facilitated wellbeing classes for thousands of professionals.
When are you motivated to practice? When do you lose motivation, and how do you overcome it? Connect with your own reason for continuing to practice.
When has life gotten in the way of your practice, and what did you do with that challenge? Share the silly, real stories—like the challenges of meditating in a home with young children.
What do you know about meditation from experience, and what do you know because someone taught you? Acknowledge honestly where you are and articulate the limits of what you know.
What you share about your practice will hopefully benefit someone else, but it will certainly serve you. We learn a subject more intimately when we put it into our own words and explain it to someone else. We deepen our awareness, share our presence with others, and enrich our understanding of the practice. Follow these two meditations to cultivate your full attention and in turn encourage others to settle in the present moment with you.
mindful.org/shareyourpractice
Each time we sit for a few minutes, there’s an opportunity to let go of wherever we’ve gotten caught up in, come back, and realign ourselves with our best intentions and efforts. It might be a sense of bringing full awareness and attention to our experience, to the people around us, to a conversation with our children. It might be a sense of letting go of reactivity and coming back to resolve with more patience and clarity. All of that can be cultivated, sustained, and developed through any amount of time we spend in our mindfulness practice.
3
1
Settle into a comfortable posture. You can lower your gaze or shut your eyes.
2 Check in with your intention. What is it you’d like to bring to the practice today?
Bring that sense of intention and awareness to your practice today. One way to do that can be within each inbreath, developing a sense of open awareness.
4
With each outbreath, come up with a word that captures your intentions for yourself. Breathe in with awareness. Breathe out with your intentions for this moment.
5
If your attention wanders, re-engage with your intention for the practice. If your mind gets caught up in distraction or reactivity or some sense of discomfort, that’s normal. Gently bring your attention back with awareness.
6
Pause for a moment. Gently move on with your day, bringing the gifts of this practice with you.
This meditation trains your attention so you can learn how to choose what you’d like to focus on rather than letting your mind wander around unattended. A wandering mind is a potentially dangerous thing. The more you can notice when your mind has wandered, the more chances you have to bring yourself back to the present moment. Please, proceed with kindness for your naturally-wandering mind.
1
Find a comfortable posture. If you're sitting in a chair, place your feet on the ground and lift your back up off the chair so you're sitting upright and alert. 2
Drop your gaze. If you're comfortable, and you'd like to, you can shut your eyes. You might notice that even as you start, your mind may already be off somewhere else.
3
As best as you're able to, bring your awareness back to your body. Notice how it moves with each breath you take. If you like, you might label the sensations as "breathing in" and "breathing out." There’s nothing to do. Nothing to fix. Nothing to change.
4
As many times as your mind wanders off somewhere else, come back to the next breath again. When you're ready, open your eyes and lift your gaze.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
We’re all being called to tap into deeper wells of courage and resilience. For those of us leading in this way, self-care is critical, not optional. It's a lifestyle commitment. Because our culture does not support resting as a way of being, resting is an act of courage. Resting is about restoration. To restore is about doing differently, so that we are being differently. It's about doing something good for you, but it's also about not doing. What can you not do in order to restore?
mindful.org/shareyourpractice
Research shows that resilience is cultivated by supporting emotional balance. One way to balance our emotions is to name what is unbalanced within. We do this in order to connect and lead from a place of wholeness and in order to be skillful in our interactions with those we serve and love.
1
Lower your gaze or close your eyes. Take three deep breaths at a natural pace. With each breath, anchor into the present moment with full curiosity, non-judgment, and deep selfcompassion.
4
2
Settle into breathing, finding the rhythm for your in- and outbreath. And bring your awareness to the present moment.
3 Breathe into this truth: When I heal, the system I serve heals, ultimately creating conditions that we no longer need to heal from.
Place your hand over your heart and breathe into the truth and the beauty of knowing that our own healing creates compassionate conditions for those we love. Honor this moment by staying connected to your breath, acknowledging what arises without any judgment. Whatever arises, know that you have the courage to meet it.
1
Lower your gaze or close your eyes. Take three deep breaths at a natural pace, signaling to your body and mind that you're about to practice. As you settle in, gently remind yourself to stay open in this moment with full curiosity, nonjudgment, and a deep sense of self-compassion.
2
Invite in rest with each inhale. Invite in deeper rest with each exhale, without any effort. Just breathe in and out. 3 Notice where you are breathing from—simply notice, with no judgment. Are you breathing from your throat, your chest? Or are you breathing from your abdomen?
6
Resting is not self-indulgent; it's not selfish; and it's also not just anything that feels good. I created an acronym for rest in my work: restoratively embracing self today. We all give and do so much, and rest is a key responsibility to ourselves. This means that we honor ourselves by resting and we model this for others by example. By resting, we give others permission to also rest. 4
Bring your breathing into your abdomen. If you’re breathing from your abdomen, bring your breathing deeper into your belly. Notice what it feels like to breathe more deeply. 5
Bring your attention back to the breath, returning to the rhythm of your breath with each in-breath and outbreath, increasing your awareness, becoming more present, allowing for the spaciousness of rest in your presence and in your body. 7
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tovi Scruggs-Hussein is an award-winning urban educator with almost 30 years of courageous leadership and transformation experience. She is a recognized leader in emotional intelligence, equity and inclusion, and resilience.
Support yourself by breathing at a pace that feels good to you. As you breathe deeply from your abdomen, you massage your nervous systems with each in-breath and outbreath. Breathe freely and rest.
When you’re ready, open your eyes and return, fully present.
When sharing with others, we immediately see how their needs, experiences, and interpretations differ from ours. It helps us loosen our ideas of how mindfulness has to work, and focus on how it could work. Show up every day with openness and curiosity by engaging in these two practices to connect with what’s most important to you—and what’s most important to those around you.
If we draw from a pool of resources without replenishing them, we can begin to feel depleted—our brain gets sluggish, and we don't make good decisions. By resting our attention on our senses, we are taking a moment to reconnect with ourselves and feel fully present.
3
1
Find a supported posture. You can do this practice while walking or sitting. You can also take this practice outside if you have access to a quiet space. Lower your gaze or close your eyes—if you're not walking.
2
Start with the sense of touch. Feel any sensations of touch in your feet and the contact they make with the floor. Can you feel the touch of any footwear, or if you're barefoot, the touch of air on your skin? Where else in your body can you feel the air touching your skin?
Now shift your attention to sound. Notice the sounds in your environment or within you. Note how some sounds may feel pleasant, some are unpleasant, and some are neutral. You may discover that your mind has wandered, and that's natural. As soon as you notice that, return to your sense of sound and receive the sounds with kindness. You can choose to stay with your sense of touch or sound, or you can shift your attention now to smell.
4 Notice the scents around you. If you're outdoors, you may discover very different scents than what you find inside your house or office.
With spaciousness in your mind and body, receive any scents or absence of scents. As we refine our ability to smell, staying here open and receptive, we may start to uncover newer scents that we had not noticed earlier. Stay here for a few more moments. You can choose to stay here with the sense of smell or return to your sense of touch or sound.
5
Open your eyes and look at an object in front of you with fresh eyes. Without getting lost in labels or judgments, see the object as if you’re looking at it for the first time. Note the textures, colors, lightness, darkness. Make a note of how it feels to give your full attention to your senses.
We feel most energized when we find purpose and meaning in what we are doing. But, on the other hand, we can feel depleted when we don't take time to do activities that are inspiring or important to us. Create some space and time to reconnect with yourself and ask, “What's most important to me?”
5
1
Find a comfortable posture. Lower your gaze or close your eyes. Then, take a moment to return to yourself, to your breath.
2
Let go of any ideas of “shoulds” and “I must” and “this is right or wrong.” Allow yourself to be fully present, with no agendas, and nothing to fix. Take this time to meet yourself, just the way you are.
3
If you find your mind is busy, try placing your hand over your heart. Feel the warmth of your hand and the connection with your body. Let your breath move naturally in and out of your body. Give your full care and attention to the natural rhythm of your breath, rising and falling within your body.
4
With each inhale, create a little more space in your mind, chest, abdomen, and whole body. With each exhale, let go of what you don't need to hold on to for the time being.
When you feel present, relaxed, and alert, invite the question, “What is most important to me in my life?” There’s no need to search or strive. Stay with the question, “What is most important to me?” and allow thoughts to naturally surface and emerge. Maybe it's just a silent whisper, “What is important to me?” Listen in. Stopping to make this space, to meet yourself, is enough. So even if you don't find any deep insights, being with your breath, your body, yourself in silence, is enough.
6
If this practice feels awkward, that's OK. Note it with kindness, realizing that being in silence can sometimes be hard. If it's easier, you can open your eyes and try some journaling. When you ask the question, “What is most important to me?” allow yourself to write whatever comes up. Write honestly, since it’s just for you and no one else.
Mindfulness practice can help us change for the better. It can also allow us to sit with the things we can’t change and help us work with the inevitable changes life brings. As Barry Boyce writes, our practice teaches us a kind of recipe for navigating change: time + kindness + curiosity + not knowing.
Even if we’re hard-pressed to say precisely what personalities are, we know them. Some people are laid back, others stubborn, some happy-go-lucky, others a little gloomy. Some folks we know are sharp-tongued while others talk smooth. Some are rugged individualists; others conform. Archetypes capturing these human variations abound. In Southeast Asia, since ancient times, shadow puppets have depicted stock characters dancing, laughing, fighting, fleeing. The troupes of stereotypes in the Italian commedia dell’arte allowed audiences to laugh at themselves and each other. In modern times, we’ve created the Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the DISC Assessment, and countless other schemas to suss out and navigate the type of person we are.
Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org. He is also author of The Mindfulness Revolution. He has been an avid mindfulness practitioner for over 40 years.
Not only that, thinkers from Sun Tzu and Socrates to Maya Angelou and bell hooks have urged us to get to know who we are, the better to thrive in the world. If getting to know who we are is such an important goal in life, then, why are we so determined to change ourselves and to try to change others?
Indeed, can we actually change? And will practices like mindfulness change us? And further, will arguments and persuasion inspire other people to change for the better? Or should we just throw up our hands: People don’t change; let’s leave it at that.
When we consider whether anyone can change, we need to look at the framing behind the question first. When we ask whether a person can change, too often we’re indeed thinking in terms of personality: a longterm, ingrained way of being in the world, backed up by neural pathways and brain chemistry. These do not change rapidly, and in fact, familiarizing yourself with these tendencies and their effects is a key part of what it means to get to know yourself.
Trying to change what’s fundamental about yourself or anyone else is generally a nonstarter. If instead you first accept that as given, embrace it even, you can look at what can change in shorter periods of time: habits and views, what we actually do and say, and whether it does harm. If an outgoing person irritates a lot of people in an office, trying to make them less outgoing is hardly the place to start. Why not go out there with them, get to know them better? At that point, levers for change might present themselves. The problem is not who they are; it’s what they’re doing or maybe something they’re not seeing or you’re not seeing..
Change can feel so very hard to bring about, but it is inevitable. It will happen of its own accord. But it’s also in a constant interplay with continuity. In my daily walk in the woods, there’s a tree trunk that branches into two smaller trunks. At that juncture there’s a triangular cradle that fills with water, a tiny birdbath. When cold, it’s ice. When warm, it’s water. When hot, it vaporizes. When it →
The superb science journalist Sharon Begley, who wrote a regular column for Mindful until her untimely death in early 2021, was fond of studies of personality: the different types, how much they’re influenced by our environment and our relationships, and—most potently— whether our personalities can change.
In my daily walk in the woods, there’s a tree trunk that branches into two smaller trunks. At that juncture there’s a triangular cradle that fills with water, a tiny birdbath. When cold, it’s ice. When warm, it’s water. When hot, it vaporizes. When it rains, there’s water again. It’s always different. It’s always the same.
rains, there’s water again. It’s always different. It’s always the same. There is always deep continuity beneath the changes on the surface. Human beings have such deep continuities: our identities and personalities. That’s why we can get to know ourselves, our tendencies, our tastes, our predilections, and, yes, our blind spots, faults, and foibles. Otherwise, we’d be unrecognizable, a TV screen randomly and rapidly changing channels.
Despite our deep continuities, though, we do change, and as Sharon Begley reported, even our personalities change, but not quickly. Living through times when tribalism seems at an all-time high, when views are held with adamantine vehemence— and broadcast day and night in every conceivable medium, with no breathing space—it seems impossible to imagine how polarities will diminish.
With time, though, and shifting circumstances, we all will change. And the perspective offered by mindfulness practice can help—both to bring about helpful change and respond to changes that leap out at us. It teaches us a kind of recipe for navigating change: time plus kindness plus curiosity plus not-knowing.
Though I loved my dad dearly as I was growing up, he also drove me crazy. He seemed authoritarian, rigid, and old-fashioned. I was the youngest of seven children and my dad was already old when I was born. When the full complement of our family was at home, I was too young to perceive the stresses he was under. Familiar ground shifted seismically for his generation. The Vietnam War raged. A brother served there, while other family members opposed the war. My oldest brother dropped out of college with only months to go, moved to Greenwich Village, brought home LSD on a sugar cube, and deposited it in the fridge. If I fast-forward to 10 years later, when I moved back home after college for a while, my dad had aged, like wine—philosophical, at times playful, wise, and very kind. He had a certain melancholy as well, a part of his personality. He was a realist, and the world saddened him. During the period when I so desperately wanted my father to change— to think like me, to be younger—my eyes and ears were closed. I didn’t see or engage the whole of him. Perhaps
that’s always the way with fathers and sons, parents and children, but the point remains. People are shifting and changing in ways we don’t see, and time will effect change. You cannot will a plant to grow faster. With attention, though, you can help it become healthier, and appreciate its growth, but that’s not likely if you’re in a rush and resenting the plant for not growing according to your timetable.
The world unfolds differently when, rather than rushing, we persist patiently—persistence allows us to see change happen, to be there for it. A meditation group I wanted to be part of in Manhattan was very in-groupy. When I would show up for sessions, almost no one reached out to me. I wasn’t one of them. But I just kept showing up. Gradually, a kind of “you’re still here?” quality settled in. They opened up. They changed, and it changed me. Ever since, I’ve tried to pay kind attention to newcomers in any situation.
Trying to push change onto ourselves and others usually invites resistance, our innate mechanism for preserving the status quo. For example, when we start to meditate, part of us may say, “You don’t want to do this. You don’t need to do this. You don’t need this much intimate time with yourself. Who knows what you might uncover? Things are just fine.” Ah, but if things were totally fine, we wouldn’t be motivated to practice meditation in the first place.
Pushing back with an equal or greater force is the surest way not to loosen up that resistance—our own or someone else’s. Being kind, even in →
the simplest of ways, is a better start. If someone is yelling, will yelling back help?
If they’ve been unkind, it’s natural to ask, Why would I be kind to them? In fact, we’re not being kind to the part of them that’s yelling. We’re being kind to the vulnerable human being somewhere in there, who is lashing out— most likely from habits developed to get by, to make up for something they feel they’re not getting. We may not think kindness is warranted for people acting wrongly (or we ourselves when we’ve done something we’re not proud of), but as Sharon Salzberg points out in Real Change, creating an atmosphere of loving-kindness does not equate with condoning someone’s behavior or views. We are kind because we care, because in our heart we want something better for everyone, and that starts with showing someone that our door is open, even if theirs doesn’t seem to be.
Loretta Ross, a Black feminist activist and a cofounder of reproductive justice theory, wrote in the New York Times about working on a mountaintop in rural Tennessee with women whose partners were Ku
Klux Klan. They wanted anti-racist training to help keep their children out of the group:
All day the women called me a “well-spoken colored girl” and inappropriately asked that I sing Negro spirituals. I naïvely thought at the time that all white people were way beyond those types of insulting anachronisms.
Instead of reacting, I responded. I couldn’t let my hurt feelings sabotage my agenda. I listened to how they joined the white supremacist movement.
By getting to know them, she reached the point where she could share with them how she felt when she was eight and her best friend called her by the N word. She made real progress. Seemingly, the women were already inclined to change, but they had much further to go, and Loretta’s basic kindness allowed them to take the next steps.
Kindness is often expressed through simple ritual. In many cultures, offering tea or some other kind of drink, and some food, even if just as
Even the most stubborn and intractable can at times be moved by patient, innovative, and adaptive exploring.
a token, is the first gesture. Many cultures hold in high regard the grandmother’s kitchen—the place where an elder offers you wisdom that comes out of the simple warmth of a cup of tea, a bite to eat. And a more relaxed sense of time, and timing.
When we let go of the impulse to rush and we let our hearts be open, our intrinsic curiosity can emerge, which we can inspire in others as well. We explore rather than implore. We become whisperers.
That seems to be the principle at the heart of The Winter Institute’s Welcome Table, a program that brings healing to communities with a history of distrust. In the June 2016 issue of Mindful, Barry Yeoman wrote of the program’s monthly meetings, “where trained facilitators help participants tell and listen to personal stories. One goal of these conversations is to foster relationships across race lines—ties that later translate into civic activities aimed at promoting racial justice.” Storytelling allows curious exploration of another’s experience, in a way that’s simply not possible in the thrust and parry (and bloodletting) that occurs on social media.
Even the most stubborn and intractable can at times be moved by patient, innovative, and adaptive exploring. In his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, and a recent article in Harvard Business Review, organizational psychologist Adam Grant tells stories about how notoriously difficult it was to dislodge Steve Jobs from his fixed views. In one famous case, Jobs passionately opposed Apple having a phone. He compiled a list of reasons, foremost among them was that only nerds would want it.
Key people, though, saw a phone in Apple’s future, Grant writes, and sought ways to spark his curiosity, for example by asking, “If Apple →
made a phone, how beautiful and elegant could it be?” It opened a door in his mind, so they persisted for months of meetings, secretly building prototypes, which they eventually showed to Jobs. A dialogue started. They refined designs. They did not fight him. Rather, they found a way to his heart by asking questions and presenting possibilities, and a groundbreaking device emerged. (Of course, now the change we need is for all of us to learn how to unhook from our addition to this kind of device! Change begets more change.)
In our eagerness to change ourselves or to change others, our mind races, generating lots of different futures, but in fact, none of these futures is real. They may suggest possibilities, but they are not outcomes. They’re phantoms in the mind.
In his decades of work with dying people, Frank Ostaseski developed five principles, which he presents in his book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. The last is Cultivate
Don’t-Know Mind. We like to feel we ought to know how the story turns out, and at times we figure we’ve got a pretty good guess, but in fact, we’re often surprised by how a story unfolds. A few I’ve seen: A stockbroker chucks it all to publish books about the meaning of life, a college administrator starts an organic farm, children many have written off eventually become teachers in the yoga program started at their Baltimore grade school.
Frank shares a potent example from his own life about a surprising turnaround. As a teenager, he was molested for several years by a parish priest, a friend of the family. It left him deeply scarred and in fact homophobic. Though he’s now clear that there’s no connection between pedophilia and homosexuality, at the time they’d become conflated in his mind. He was also deeply distrustful of authority and organized religion, but gradually he allowed himself to follow the Zen teacher Stephen Levine, who seemed neither religious nor overly authoritarian. As meditation practice opened him more to his deep feelings, trauma from his past gnawed at him. He decided to disclose to Stephen
what he was going through. Levine suggested he work with people dying of AIDS. He freaked out:
I grabbed him by his shirt, threw him up against the wall, and yelled, “Are you crazy?” My inner hurt adolescent was exploding. In that moment, all I could experience were prohibitions against this idea and a great deal of pent-up anger. What a ridiculous notion, how absurd, I thought, that I should serve the very type of person who, in my confused mind, had caused me so much harm.
But even as the word No! left my mouth, I knew Stephen was right. It was a moment of sudden awareness, a recognition of the meaning that was to be found in my suffering. I had to do it.
The groundbreaking work he did as the first director of the Zen Hospice Project changed his life forever, and immeasurably benefited many others. And it emerged from the dismantling of fixed ideas about future possibilities, about who he was and who others were.
One day, Rhonda Magee discovered something in the middle of a mindfulness exercise she’d done many times with her law students: the classic raisin exercise, where one learns to experience the simplest of things fully. Something new emerged that day when the students were asked to describe their experience. For several of them, it was more than a convenient snack. They came from California farm-worker families. They described the depth of meaning this dried fruit had in their lives, symbolizing toil and struggle and people doing whatever they could to support a family.
Perhaps no one in that class has seen a raisin the same way since. Before we try to change something— about ourselves or another—perhaps it would be wise to first leave some time and space, then to generate kindness and caring, and finally see things with fresh eyes, every day, as fully as we can, suspending judgment. ●
We are kind because we care, because in our heart we want something better for everyone, and that starts with showing someone that our door is open, even if theirs doesn’t seem to be.
A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself
Nedra Glover Tawwab • TarcherPerigee“‘Boundaries’ can be such a broad and intimidating term,” therapist, author, and relationship expert Nedra Glover Tawwab writes in the first few pages of Set Boundaries, Find Peace . And it is true. Moving through the world while setting and respecting boundaries is no easy feat. Similar in sentiment to the title of Chapter 1, you may even be wondering: What the Heck Are Boundaries? Through a series of relatable stories and scenarios, Glover Tawwab shows us how different types of boundaries and boundary violations can show up in real life. However, Glover Tawwab doesn’t stop at recognizing what this may look like in our lives: She offers thoughtful responses we can use in similar situations, exercises comprised of prompts geared toward self-reflection, questions formed to uncover what boundaries we may need to explore, and guidance on how to meet resistance to the boundaries we’d like to hold. She also explores how past trauma can impact our ability to maintain healthy boundaries.
In her writing, Glover Tawwab always comes back to the truth that boundaries “can be such a broad term.” She’s apt to acknowledge that everyone’s expectations and needs to feel safe in a relationship are different—and boundaries are valid in a variety of settings that involve family, friends, romance, work, and technology. She presents easy steps to set boundaries (and notes that they’re “maybe not so easy, but doable”) and gives everyone a foundation to start doing the work of setting boundaries with a smart and painless selfassessment quiz “to see which type of boundaries show up for you the most.” – KR
Yogic Breathing & Mindfulness
Tools for Instant Anxiety Relief
Domonick Wegesin, PhD • New HarbingerFor those of us grappling with anxiety, the first step toward calm can be a kind reframing: “Most anxious folks cannot pinpoint exactly why they are anxious. That’s OK. There’s a simpler way,” writes Wegesin. To wit, shifting from the why to the what. What are your symptoms, your triggers? What calms your anxiety? And what will help you shift
your relationship to it? He presents a collection of tools, or skills, in a sequence to help you learn to navigate anxiety. The chapters—from The Observer Tool, all the way to The Choose Your Story Tool and The Kindness Tool—are broken down into easily digestible chunks, each with a brief practice to explore. – AT
Anna Lembke • Dutton
In Dopamine Nation, psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke unpacks the neuroscience of dopamine with a lens of compassion rarely offered to the topic of addiction. Meanwhile, her matter-offact tone offers a realness that drives home the importance of paying attention to balance when we’re like “cacti in a rainforest.” Almost all of us will experience a feeling
so good that we can’t stop wanting more, and understanding the “why” can help us hold one another accountable without holding each other back. With compelling anecdotes from both clients and Lembke herself, the author illustrates what the science looks like in real life and helps us understand the dopamine-saturated world we live in. – AWC
Open Drawn On the Way and you’ll swear you’re getting a secret glimpse into an artist’s sketchbook. Each page is embellished with sweet sketches and handwritten notes from author Sarah Nisbett and as a bonus, is rich with tips to start your own sketchbook. Nisbett offers wisdom from her sketching practice and gently encourages us to begin by centering curiosity, empathy, and wonder—qualities that will
also serve our daily lives. She reminds us to follow joy, be kind to ourselves, and stay curious about the world and our place in it. The book is an invitation to learn how to see the world “as a place filled with stories; how to see the people around you differently, as works of art; and how to see yourself differently, as someone whose voice has a place, even if it’s just in the private pages of your own sketchbook.” –KR
In early February, we were honored to host thousands of healthcare professionals at a remarkable online summit. All
Improve Focus. Strengthen SelfAwareness, and Live More Fully
Merriam Sarcia Saunders,
Rockridge Press
This handy book delivers exactly what its title promises: mindfulness exercises specifically designed to address some of the frustrations a person with Attention Deficit Disorder may face. Even without an official diagnosis, those who struggle with focus and follow-through—and who doesn’t, in this never-ending pandemic—will find practices here that may help smooth the way. Sarcia Saunders introduces basic meditation techniques and exercises for focusing on a task, getting things done, and managing
LMFT •
habits, along with selfcompassion, acceptance, and more. Her practices address restlessness, stimming, executive function struggles, and emotional regulation (difficulty recognizing or naming emotions can be a hallmark of ADHD). She includes movement practices, short practices for on-the-go, and practical exercises for morning and night—including mindful approaches to showering, eating, and coming home from work—with the compassion and expertise of a fellow ADHD traveler. – SD
LEADING WITH GENUINE CARE Episode: “Nate Klemp on Applying Mindfulness in Everyday Life”
With 10 years of philosophical training, it’s clear that Nate Klemp was always searching for something more, though he didn’t exactly know what. In this episode of Leading with Genuine Care, the coauthor of The 80/80 Marriage sits down with host Rob Dube to discuss how a biking accident and the constraints of academia led him to mindful -
ness and meditation. Klemp discusses how he uses these “inner technologies of the mind” to change his inner habits. With wisdom from Nate’s grandmother Hilda, the duo discusses the role our physical health plays in our mental state, what an 80/80 marriage looks like, and why daily gratitude is essential. – OL
I’M CURIOUS WITH ASHLEY ASTI
Episode: “A Practice for the Tired & Weary with Rashid Hughes”
In this grounding conversation, meditation teacher and creator of the R.E.S.T. practice Rashid Hughes and host Ashley Asti dig deep into the four pillars of the practice: Relax your attention. Release. Exhale all striving. Empty. Sense the silence. Surrender. Tune in to awareness. Trust. It’s a
NPR SHORT WAVE
practice that invites us to be with ourselves—something Hughes notes isn’t honored in society. “There’s an inherent worthiness in who we are that doesn’t have to be worked for or earned,” Hughes says. With practice, “we’re reprogramming our systems, our bodies, to begin to trust that it’s safe to stop.” – KR
Episode: “What Happens in the Brain When We Grieve”
In this brief but poignant conversation, psychologist
Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor and host Emily Kwong waste no time diving headfirst into a topic we so often avoid. They get real about the current pervasiveness of grief, why the privileged are also privileged in the grieving process, and how recognizing the suf-
fering of those who have lost loved ones in the COVID-19 pandemic can help us move forward. “I really think of grieving as a form of learning,” says O’Connor. In this episode, she unpacks how the terrible process of adapting to the loss of a loved one can lead to post-traumatic growth. – AWC
THE MINDFULNESS WORKBOOK FOR ADDICTION, 2 nd ED. Rebecca E. Williams and Julie S. Kraft • New Harbinger
Current research shows that mindfulness can help to heal many forms of addiction. This guidebook presents evidence-based strategies with a down-to-earth voice, ideal for readers to use either on their own or with therapy. Williams is a psychologist, specializing in recovery from mental illness and addictions, while Kraft is an author (including writing this book’s first edition) and mental health advocate.
The Workbook provides a start-where-youare approach, welcoming readers still in active addiction, and uses a gradual skill-building model. Uncovering the roots of our compulsions, the authors write, is how mindfulness supports recovery: “We have the ability to dream, to imagine, to contemplate, to create. Memories and imagination are wonderful gifts.” At times, however, these gifts “pull us from the present moment and send us time traveling,” thus fueling stress, anxiety, and desire to escape. This is human, not unique to those who struggle with addiction—and we can make different choices by nonjudgmentally getting to know our minds.
In Part 1, Williams and Kraft explore the interplay between emotions, thoughts, and behavior change, patterns that keep us in addiction (avoiding feelings, self-blaming, withdrawing…), and mindful strategies to support more balanced ways of thinking and acting. Part 2 delves into loss, and how addictions are developed and maintained. The final part concerns grief; healthy relationships and support systems; a second chapter on mindfulness practices, added for this new edition; and other mental health challenges. Throughout, readers also engage with case studies, journaling prompts, and exercise worksheets, which are also available online. – AT
“The more you interact with your emotions, the less they are strangers.”
WIRED FOR LOVE
A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection
Stephanie Cacioppo • MacmillanMany artists and scientists have tried to capture what love is. However, few have married both approaches in the way Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo has in this book. Laying out the science behind why and how we fall in love beside her human experience of love and loss, she gives readers an intimate look into her relationship with fellow neuroscientist Dr. John Cacioppo, and Stephanie’s journey to healing after
losing him to cancer. The author explains the science of love in a way that’s easy to understand and shares her experience with grief in a way that makes you feel a little less alone. Filled with a little something for everyone, Wired for Love is a unique take on a memoir that will take you on a journey of grief and healing with a reminder to keep your heart open to all the beauty and pain that life might bring. – OL
STRESS-FREE PRODUCTIVITY
A Personalized Toolkit to Become Your Most Efficient and Creative Self
Alice Boyes • TarcherPerigeeInitially, one may wonder as I did how an already-written book could be a truly “personalized” toolkit, but the answer becomes clear not long after the first page of Stress-Free Productivity. Alice Boyes marries the psychology of productivity and priority with anecdotal examples and a choose-your-own adventure structure that helps the reader guide themselves through this information-rich book. Quizzes help you determine what information in the book will be most helpful to you personally.
“Experiments” show you how to put the advice and science into practice, gather insight into your own personality and preferences, and choose how to move forward.
Boyes expands the commonly held definition of productivity, writing that “focus isn’t the full story of how to get things done.” She advocates for a balance between discipline and having the courage to wander astray. What that balance should be for you is the question she helps the reader answer. – AWC
When we’re in a rough patch, it’s easy to feel as though we’re going through it alone. But the truth is as human beings, we’re all connected, and in those moments when we feel isolated, we can draw on the strengths of one another to keep moving forward. This meditation from Bob Stahl can help you develop a deeper sense of connection—both to the present moment and to those around you.
When we realize how connected we all truly are, we can start to see how one small act of kindness can ripple throughout our community. Acting from a place of loving-kindness can help us amplify the good in each other. This loving-kindness meditation from Sharon Salzberg can help us move through the world with compassion, look beyond our differences, and treat everyone with compassion—even those we don’t necessarily agree with.
Creating an environment where everyone feels heard and appreciated is part of the bedrock on which community can be built. Not only is community an essential factor in our mental wellbeing, it also allows us to be a source of support for each other. Feeling and expressing gratitude, says Shalini Bahl-Milne, is one of the ways we can foster community. This gratitude practice can help you cultivate a newfound sense of appreciation for those around you, so that you can act from a place of love. – OL
It may seem like a disconnect to present readers with a 500-plus-page book on the personal and systemic problem of focus degradation, but Johann Hari’s deep investigation of the ways our individual and collective attention has been shattered is highly compelling—and in fairness, almost 200 pages are extensive endnotes and resources. Hari, who resigned from The Independent in disgrace a decade ago, after plagiarizing quotes and smearing his journalistic rivals online, presents a thoroughly articulated, exhaustively reported, and meticulously documented exploration of the change in our ability to resist distraction. He goes deeply into, and then beyond, the obvious culprits: We are exposed to more information than ever before, which has a tendency to exhaust our attention resources more rapidly; the technology we use, especially smartphones and social media apps, which is designed to keep us coming back for more by keeping us outraged. He explores the effects systemic issues like surveillance capitalism, pollution, and work culture have on our attention, along with childhood trauma, diet, and the dearth of childhood free play. Hari interviews scientists, sociologists, professors, authors, psychologists, tech engineers. He weaves in his own personal journey with focus, and makes a compelling case for what he calls an Attention Rebellion, likening the need for collective social change to earlier struggles for gay rights or women’s liberation. He harkens back to the Industrial Revolution, and the way workers continued to fight, together, for more humane working conditions, which led to the 40-hour work week, and weekends. Hari points out that we are faced with massive challenges, like the climate crisis—and we’re going to need to be able to pay sustained attention to solving it. One question he doesn’t address: Will the Attention Rebellion be planned on social media? If you’re feeling that your lack of focus is your fault, let yourself go deep with this book. – SD ●
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“Independent as a hog on ice.”
That’s one of my favorite expressions from my days working in Washington. It’s a rich image. Yes, the hog is independent. He’s all by himself. Because nobody is going to come to the aid of a hog flailing around on ice, hurting themselves and not helping anybody else in the long run.
The image speaks well to the limitations of overcelebrating independence and raising it to the highest of virtues, which we see displayed in the cult of the independent genius and personal freedom at all costs. The belief that the smartest people in the room are the ones who should run the world results in parents going to outlandish extents to turn their children into the smartest people in the room. And the primacy of personal freedom can lead to a kind of toxic individualism that ignores the inevitable communal effects of personal choices.
entities. We depend. Therefore, we’re enmeshed in an unavoidable web of interdependence.
Recently, the power of this interdependency came home to me vividly when I contracted COVID-19. After having been conservative for the first 18 months of the pandemic, during the fourth wave, I ventured out, traveling to see family, friends, colleagues, and clients. And though one cannot know for certain where exactly the virus entered one’s system, it most likely occurred when I
to me so tangibly, two mindfulness teachers separately alerted me to a book, The Extended Mind, by Annie Murphy Paul, a work of science journalism that reports on research that demonstrates that mind is not limited to the organ in the head, the “brainbound” understanding of mind, in philosopher Andy Clark’s words. In her book, Paul lays out three ways the mind extends outward: It is always embodied, located, and socially connected. Movement and gesture clearly affect the nature and quality
PODCAST Real Mindful
Barry Boyce and managing editor Stephanie Domet dive deeper. mindful.org/ real-mindful
In fact, as the great Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi pointed out, we have two sides to our nature. What he called independency and dependency. Yes, we are distinct, as represented by our name, address, genetic inheritance, personality traits. Yet we do not exist as an entity cut off from all other
attended a team-building event where no one wore masks, and as it turns out, several people who were unvaccinated (unbeknownst to me) got sick and spread it to a number of other people, likely including me.
When I tested positive, it was one of the most uncomfortable challenges of my life to have to contact the 17 people I had extended contact with, let them know I had tested positive, and advise them to get tested. They were relatives and friends and close associates, and each of those 17 people were connected to many other people. The instantaneous connectedness we have with so many other people became immediately and vividly apparent. Abstract to concrete in a flash. (Fortunately, because of the vaccine, I had a mild, almost imperceptible case, and none of the people I was with contracted COVID.)
Around the same time that connectedness was brought home
of our thinking, as does the landscape and soundscape we’re situated in, and who we do our thinking with and how. Adopting this broader view has significant implications for how we adapt and thrive personally and collectively. It invites us to consider how our perceiving and thinking mind is always connected to larger wholes. It’s worth continually noticing how the condition of our body and where we are located have a potent impact on our ideas, insights, and perspectives— and mindfulness can help with that. Beyond that, given the daunting collective challenges we face, finding ways to extend our mindfulness outward to improve how we think as groups may be vital to our survival. ●
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.
Movement and gesture clearly affect the nature and quality of our thinking, as does the landscape and soundscape we’re in, and who we do our thinking with and how.
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