Mindful Magazine June 2022 - Trust Your Heart

trust your heart

W H AT TO D O W H E N E M OT I O N S T R I CK YO U R M I N D 7 M I N D FU L SE LF - C A R E PR AC T I CE S • H OW N AT U R E H E A L S US E M B R ACE YO U R FL AWS, LE T GO O F YO U R M I S TA K E S

JUNE 2022 mindful.org

WHAT IS ENOUGH?

Learning to love the life you have

CONTENTS THE SELF-COMPASSION ISSUE

7 SELF-CARE PRACTICES 12 Connect with Compassion 23 Ground and Settle 27 Nourish Your Heart 32 Navigate Difficult Emotions 42 Spark Intimacy 52 Notice What’s Present

PHOTO BY IVAN KMIT / ADOBESTOCK. COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY PLAINPICTURE / SCORE BY AFLO / TETSUYA TANOOKA

54 Open to the Natural World

Tune In to Your Deepest Nature

Being in nature allows us to let go of the need to try or do—freeing us to sense and receive what is present within and around us, writes Rochelle Calvert. Discover how taking your practice outside can help you to heal and live skillfully.

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contents

22

Embrace Your Flaws, Let Go of Your Mistakes

Love Without a Plan

28

Our brains crave novelty, writes neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo.

Here’s how we can benefit from making room for improvisation in our relationships.

Trust Your Heart: What to do when emotions trick your mind

46

How Nature Heals Us

56

What Is Enough: Learning to love the life you have

46

STORIES

Befriend Your Wild Nature By practicing mindfulness in nature, writes Rochelle Calvert, we can develop a calm presence and deepen our embodied awareness.

18 Mindful Living

Moving Through Burnout

22 Inner Wisdom

Ain’t No Body Better

24 Health

Taking Things to Heart

28 Brain Science

Why Did I Do That?!

EVERY ISSUE

56

Coming Undone, but Not Unmade What do we do, asks Kate Bowler, when the future we planned suddenly looks different from what we imagined?

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

VOLUME TEN, NUMBER 2, Mindful (ISSN 2169-5733, USPS 010-500) is published bimonthly for $29.95 per year USA, $39.95 Canada & $49.95 (US) international, by Mindful Communications & Such, PBC, 515 N State Street, Suite 300, Chicago IL. 60654 USA. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Mindful, PO Box 469018, Escondido, CA 92046. Canada Post Publication Mail Agreement #42704514. CANADIAN POSTMASTER: Send undeliverable copies to Mindful, 5765 May St, Halifax, NS B3K 1R6 CANADA. Printed in U.S.A. © 2022 Mindful Communications & Such, PBC. All rights reserved.

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On the Cover

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from the editor

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

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I love watching bird murmurations move across open fields in rural Pennsylvania where I live. Starlings flying independently as one organism, stretching away from each other and then pulling back together. Each bird responsible for finding its way as part of the whole.

As I write to you from my kitchen, there’s a war displacing millions of people on the other side of the world. Temperatures in Antarctica are 70 degrees higher than normal.

Millions of people are rejecting toxicity in the workplace and leaving their jobs. Social issues continue to divide us.

I often get letters from readers asking how they’re supposed to show up right now. What can they do? I have no answers, of course. What I can offer is that it’s helpful to drop in and connect with what’s true for you. Ask yourself: Have I checked in on how my body is holding grief right now? Do I know what my values are? Have I named them?

Am I taking care of myself so when the opportunity to act on behalf of the greater good arises, I have the energy, resilience, compassion, and composure to act with skill?

This issue you hold in your hands is called The SelfCompassion Issue because treating ourselves better has to begin with getting real and kind about our own messy human lives—our flaws, our habits, our pain. Once we have a sense of our own particular flavor of human messiness, and we’ve shown ourselves some kindness about it, we can show others the same. And that is how change happens: It ripples out from the places we heal ourselves; it recoils when we rub up against what still hurts—like a glorious murmuration of interconnectivity, we ebb and flow together.

To open some brave space for reflection, we’ve gathered together some fantastically human voices: Rochelle Calvert and Mark Coleman explore the healing found in nature-based mindfulness practice (p.46). Writer Leslie Garrett reveals why our emotional reactions don’t always line up with our real values (p.28). In the midst of a burnout epidemic, Misty Pratt reports on the power of moving our body to reclaim joy and resilience (p.18). And historian Kate Bowler shares the beauty that imbues every moment when we’re directly in touch with our mortality (p.56).

We have a lot of work to do. No one is coming to save us.

But, we can find our way to what we know is true: There are kind people everywhere. We’re all beautifully imperfect. There’s still awe to be found in the wild places. And when we connect, we’re capable of great things. The future we want is created in this moment, together.

With Love,

PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAIRE ROSEN

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in your words

Caring for You Mindful readers share how they practice self-compassion What does self-compassion mean to you?

Being as gentle and understanding with myself as I am with the people I care most about.

Jane McWilliams Being able to say that was/this is hard, and yet I am OK. Wendy L. Nurturing my inner child, showing myself the love and patience I give my children (most of the time ) thehappybase Lovingly accepting my imperfections, reconciling with my self-saboteur, and holding space for myself when I’m feeling inadequate. sass_allard Relating to ourselves with kindness, feeling connected to others, and being aware of

How important is practicing selfcompassion to you?

our experience at any given moment. mindfulness_music_ and_health

THE MOST!

Constantly and gently reminding yourself that you deserve to live a beautiful and intentional life driven by you, opposed to one built on the unconscious fears of others.

YOU!

inthismomentbox Asking ourselves what we needed in times of suffering that we didn’t get growing up, and finding ways to offer it to ourselves in the present. juradohall

How do you practice self-compassion?

Giving myself extra grace and extra care when things feel tough. juliesleilaty

NOT AT ALL! Next Question…

Where do you find happiness?

Send an email to yourwords@mindful.org and let us know your answer to this question.

Your response could appear on these pages.

→ @dr.shivanigupta practices self-care by winding down for a good night's sleep.

↑ @noodlingaround_sf reminds us to unplug and notice the bold expressions of passion that are all around us if we look for them. ↓ @theconnectioncreator celebrates connection with their authentic selves and their community.

stitch-ins, sent out handwritten notes to policy makers, and crafted solidarity banners that have been hung all over the world, all following the motto on their website that reads, “If we want our world to be more beautiful, kind, and just, then let’s make our activism beautiful, kind, and just.”

TOP OF

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

YOU HAVE A DAD IN ME After walking his own daughter down the aisle, Dan Levins, a 45-year-old

hairstylist from East Tennessee, couldn’t imagine anyone missing out on that special moment so he took to TikTok, offering to stand in as a dad

to any LGBTQIA+ couples who were missing their parents on their special day. The video, which has now amassed over 60,000 views, has created a supportive network with a Facebook group of 35,000 members.

“I thought I was creating a group

for people to physically connect but there are many more virtual connections happening now than walking someone down the aisle.

We’ve had a few weddings, but the majority of what’s happening in the group has been people building friendships and family,” Levins told Mindful.

STITCHING TOGETHER From tomato jam to embroidered handkerchiefs, The

Craftivist Collective is adding a new tool to the activism toolbox—Craftivism. In 2008, Sarah Corbett, the collective’s founder, felt burned-out by the confrontational nature of activism. Compelled to explore other ways she could make a difference, she stumbled upon craftivism, a form of activism that nudges people to stop, think, and act through the use of handcrafted objects. Since then the collective has hosted group

Gina Rollo White, founder of notfor-profit Mindful Junkie, is no stranger to teaching mindfulness to first responders.

The program she created, Tactical Brain Training, helps them learn to downregulate stress and safely navigate jobrelated trauma.

This year, she’s aiming high: training all the firefighters in DC, through a partnership with Hath’s Heroes (founded by Capitals hockey player Garnet Hathaway and his wife Lindsay). The connection to hockey isn’t only “exciting and fun,” it reinforces her training, says Rollo White: Mindfulness skills support the physical intensity,

PHOTOGRAPH BY KARLY SANTIAGO / UNSPLASH, SHARON MCCUTCHEON / UNSPLASH

FIGHT FIRE WITH MINDFULNESS

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focus, and stress management required to succeed, whether you need to hit the ice or fight a fire.

WEAR IT WELL

ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMY KAZANDJIAN, SPENCER CREELMAN

At 16, Prasidha Padmanabhan has a mission: to gain equality for all women, with a focus on uplifting those long ignored or silenced. The Indian American student in Fairfax County, VA, founded the student-led organization Women for Education, Advocacy & Rights (WEAR) in 2020 after witnessing comments online about disenfranchising women.

Among WEAR’s achievements so far: collaborating with local schools to update curricula with BIPOC women’s history; holding women’s rights webinars at schools and publicly; and fundraising for supplies to donate to women’s shelters.

BE THE LIGHT Author Monica Paraghamian and illustrator Amy Kazandjian aim to kindle explorations of healing and resilience for the thousands of families displaced by the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The two Arme-

nian-Canadians collaborated on a second edition of Paraghamian’s mindfulness-based children’s book Precious Light, translating into Eastern Armenian, with new artwork

by Kazandjian that features Armenian iconography.

“Hopefully it opens the door to helping process some pain and allowing them to fully form healthy identities in themselves and as Armenians so that they can thrive,” Kazandjian says.

The pair are partnering with Armenian youth support organizations to offer the book to displaced families and children.

ACTS OF kindness

by AVA WHITNEY-COULTER

GUITAR HERO

A Colorado teen named Fallon, who has Williams Syndrome and a deep love of music, often visited J.B. Hart Music Co. to play guitar. So when an anonymous stranger gifted Fallon his dream guitar, it’s no surprise he smiled from earto-ear—a sweet moment caught on camera that’s now captured the hearts of thousands who’ve seen it on the music store’s Facebook page.

GOOD DOG

When Alfie Kitson’s terrier Millie made national news dropping litter in trash bins in

Hereford, England, the dog unknowingly performed another good deed by reconnecting her owner with his siblings. Kitson’s sister, who he’d lost touch with 20 years ago, saw his name in the news.

She and their brother were then able to find him and reunite after years apart.

SLICE OF LIFE

At IBRIS, a pizzeria in Trento, Italy, owner Ibrahim Songne brings together two of everyone’s favorite things: pizza and kindness. Songne began offering pizza sospesa, inviting customers to purchase an extra slice for someone in need, an idea that has spread to pizza restaurants throughout Italy.

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Research News

by B. GRACE BULLOCK

Research gathered from Stanford University, California State University San Marcos, Pace University, and others.

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CALM KIDS Taking just a few slow, deep breaths can help calm young children, according to researchers at Stanford University.

They randomly assigned 342 young children to either a breath training or a control group. The breath training group watched a one-minute animated video teaching them how to slowly inhale by pretending to smell a flower, and exhale by pretending to blow out a candle.

The control group watched a video with similar animated images but no breathing

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exercise. Children’s physiological stress was measured using two biomarkers: heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). RSA is the changing pace of the heartbeat when a person inhales and exhales.

Higher levels of RSA are linked to increased stress resilience. The study found that even one minute of deep breathing can help young children calm down.

Children in the breathing group showed marked decreases in heart rate and increases in RSA while watching the video, with the greatest effects occurring during the second half of the video when most of the deep breathing occurred.

Children in the

control group showed little change in either measure of stress.

(This video is available on Stanford’s website.)

STRESS RX To see if mindfulness might buffer against work stress faced by emergencycare professionals, researchers in New York and Switzerland asked 190 emergency room medical personnel to complete surveys regarding their dispositional mindfulness, anxiety, depression, social support, and life events. Questionnaires were completed just

top of mind

after they began working in an emergency room, then again three and six months later. Higher levels of mindfulness at baseline were linked to less anxiety, depression, and social impairment over time even after accounting for work stress, negative life events, and low perceived support from colleagues. Those reporting more mindfulness were also less likely to feel depressed over time even in the absence of workplace social support. This

San Marcos tested whether mindfulness training caused participants to act helpfully toward people of other racial groups.

Researchers assigned 78 white women to either a meditation group, or a control group with sham meditation instruction.

Prior to training, everyone completed surveys assessing mindfulness, empathy, agreeableness, anti-Black prejudice, and attitudes on social equality.

Both groups then

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN

Those reporting more mindfulness were less likely to feel depressed over time even in the absence of workplace social support.

suggests that mindfulness may help emergencyroom workers to better cope with work stress.

MAY I HELP? A randomized controlled trial from California State University

received 20 minutes of instruction in small groups for three consecutive days.

To assess helping behavior before and after, experimenters led each participant into an empty room with one chair where they were

presented with two scenarios. In the first, a person entered the room and dropped a stack of papers. In the second, a person on crutches entered and stood against the wall.

Both identified as Black or African American. These scenarios lasted roughly one minute.

Those higher in mindfulness at the beginning of the study were more likely to engage in helping behavior—such as helping pick up the papers, or standing to give the person on crutches their chair—regardless of group. People in the mindfulness training group were more helpful than the control group. Lastly, participants in the mindfulness group who were lower in mindfulness at the beginning of the study were more likely to help others following training. More studies are needed to see if these findings hold up with men and with those of other racial groups.

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BEGINNER’S MIND Q&A

PLANT KINDNESS Q

There is so much pain and suffering in the world. I have my own worries and fears too, and I get overwhelmed. How can I make space for my own pain— and everyone else’s, too?

A

2 Bring your awareness to the sensations around the heart. All the children of the world, just like you, have their own struggles and pain. Offer them these phrases: I care about your difficulties. May you be held in compassion.

May your heart be at peace.

3 Connect with tenderness. Now include the adults too: I care about your difficulties. May you be held in compassion. May your heart be at peace.

4 Now radiate boundless compassion to all beings without exception. The suffering of the world is vast. And so is the heart that can hold it. I care about your suffering.

I care about your difficulties.

May you be held in compassion. May we all be held in compassion. May our hearts be at peace.

Coming home to this moment, how does your heart feel? Allow whatever’s happening in your heart to be there. May we continue to plant the seeds of compassion and kindness.

Vinny Ferraro is a nationally recognized leader in designing and implementing interventions for at-risk adolescents and is currently Senior Trainer for Mindful Schools. Vinny is also a board member and former Training Director of the Mind Body Awareness Project and is the principal author of MBA’s mindfulness-based curriculum for incarcerated youth.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BLAKE FARRINGTON, CLAY BANKS

When we touch in with pain, we are exploring what compassion looks like in our hearts, and in our world. So whether we’re watching the news, or we get an emergency call from a family member, our hearts go out to those who are in difficult situations. We realize we’re all connected and that we belong to the world.

Then our work is to acknowledge what’s hard and be with that, allowing it to move us. Then we can explore our heart’s relationship to pain.

Here’s a practice for connecting with compassion for the world.

1 Turn your attention inward. See if the breath can flow right through the heart as we hold ourselves like we would hold anyone we love.

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top of mind VOICES RISING • JASMINE MARIE

Helping Black Women

Take a Breath

by OYINDA LAGUNJU

“ PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY JASMINE MARIE

We can work on every system to be more at ease and balanced.

“Breathe Together. Heal Together. Grow Together.”

These words aren’t just the slogan of an organization—for Jasmine Marie, founder of Black Girls Breathing, they are an invitation to a community she is committed to serving.

“Black women needed a space to heal the trauma that’s trapped in their body; trauma is held,” Marie says.

“That can be scary when you really learn more about how trauma impacts our daily lives. But the good thing is that we can undo that. We can work on every system to be more at ease and balanced.”

With a pledge to reach one million Black women and girls by 2025, Black Girls Breathing has been a space for Black women to connect through breathwork and community in order to cope with the unique stress they experience. With monthly sessions—held both online and in-person—Marie affirms that Black women have a space in mindfulness, and it’s a space we’ve occupied for a long time.

“I feel like how mindfulness has been showcased to us would make us feel like Black people don’t do that, but we’ve been doing mindfulness in different ways. Like seeing your grandma humming around the kitchen while she’s cooking—she’s in tune to what she’s doing. Those are mindful moments; being able to just take in where you are,” Marie says. “Those moments of just simple living are so restorative. Nothing reminds me to live in the present moment more than being around my mom, who’s retired, and my grandmother.”

And for the moments she feels burnedout?

“I don’t think that I’ll be able to solve every social issue, but if I can create a space where Black women can experience community, then that’s my work.

If they can experience that freedom, then that’s my work. I always ask myself, if everything stopped right now, would you be proud of the work? Yeah, I’d be proud right now.”

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top of mind

Come to Omega and Cultivate a Kindness Revolution —Ted Lasso Style Join former ABC News anchor and creator of the Ten Percent Happier app, Dan Harris, and a team of renowned teachers and fans of the Ted Lasso TV series:

Brené Brown

(via livestream only)

Elizabeth Lesser La Sarmiento Dawn Mauricio Jess Morey Mary Latham

THE ART OF HEALING Feeling Healing Neuroscientist, mindfulness teacher, and founder of the “Science of Social Justice” framework, Dr. Sará King recently launched her third project with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, titled, “Art and Awareness as a Catalyst for Collective Healing.” This installation pairs

July 8—10

OMEGA Located in Rhinebeck, New York, 90 miles north of New York City

Register at eOmega.org or call 800.944.1001

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artwork with soundscapes to explore how increased awareness of ourselves, our environment, society, and culture can help heal intergenerational trauma. “There’s something so visceral about standing in front of a gigantic painting and bearing witness to the emotions and other sensations that arise within the soma,” King says.

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We often think of art and science as separate or even opposites, yet there’s a growing wave of organizations, medical school programs, and people exploring the ways in which the two fields overlap, and how they can work together to inform our view of healing and health care.

Paging Dr. Wonder

PHOTOGRAPH BY WORAWUT / ADOBESTOCK

Art and science are both rooted in a sense of wonder and desire to understand the world—this is the foundational principle of ArtMed inSight, a consulting organization founded by artist Anne Willieme that brings the study of art to medical education.

With classes and collaborations with prominent universities and hospitals in the US, ArtMed inSight aims to help medical staff and students explore self-awareness, emotional intelligence, human experience, and vulnerability by learning about and interpreting art.

Documenting Hope At the main campus of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, an art gallery features several exhibitions each year to encourage inspiration, dialogue, and different points of view. Their exhibition “Celebrations: Selections from 100” features photos taken by documentary photographer Lynn Johnson, displaying moments of sadness, determination, hope, and healing at the hospital to celebrate its 100th anniversary.

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

by AMBER TUCKER In a new twist on wanting to see the color of your money, a crypto marketplace is pioneering “metaNFTs” using 10,000 colors. If you own a color, you’ll earn royalties generated by the sale of other NFTs containing that color. In other words, says the founder, “We’re going to be turning colors into money.”

We’re meta-over it.

More Wordle for everyone! The popular online game is being adapted for several Indigenous languages, including Gitksan, SENĆOŦEN, and Ōlelo Hawai‘i, giving Native and Indigenous speakers and learners a playful way to engage with their language.

MINDFUL

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Can skincare be more than just skin-deep?

Recognizing that stress and anxiety may worsen flare-ups, UK company Wild Source isn’t just selling oils, masks, and scrubs—with each purchase, you also get guided meditations that are supposed to complement specific products.

A prototype created

by Japanese professor Homei Miyashita, “Taste the TV” uses flavor canisters that spray onto a lickable (ew) screen, simulating the flavors of 20 dishes.

It’s intended to create a “multisensory viewing experience.” We call it “a whole new way to spend dinnertime in front of a screen.”

Fifty-eight future students of Central Michigan University were disappointed after being awarded full scholarships—by accident. While “testing its email technology,” the school erroneously sent out a slew of prestigious scholarship offers.

After apologizing, the school still proffered smaller amounts of funding. ●

MINDLESS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN

The tawny mining bee, red mason bee, and patchwork leafcutter bee are among the nearly 250 species of solitary bees in the UK. A new building mandate in Brighton and Hove requires the inclusion of “bee bricks”: concrete blocks with small holes in which buzzy friends can nest and hibernate, which may protect their populations from biodiversity loss.

NATURE MEDITATIONS Reconnect with the Outdoors Meditations to take you outdoors and away from the screen SOOTHE • HEAL • INSPIRE

Downloadable for use anywhere and perfect for groups of friends or family $119 $99—SAVE 20% WITH CODE MINDFULMAG

mindful.org/nature-meditations

mindful living

Coping with any degree of burnout can leave us feeling stuck. Sometimes, what we need to begin healing and to rediscover joy is to (literally) move our way through it.

By Misty Pratt

“Look at all these beautiful bodies,” the instructor shouted over the music. The beat of the song made my whole body vibrate as the bass swelled in a rhythmic crescendo. I concentrated on the instructor’s movements, mimicking the flawlessly choreographed blend of international dance. All around me, bodies gyrated, a wave of arms swinging in unison, and joyful shouts echoing off the gym walls.

I swallowed hard, blinking away tears. It felt as though I was giving my body a chance to catch up to the sadness I’d been suppressing throughout the pandemic. I had recently dusted off my gym membership after the worst of the lockdowns, and it was my first in-person Zumba class in almost two years. I had forgotten what it was like to dance in rhythm with a roomful of people, and months of tension melted away with each boom of the bass.

“Burnout” is a tame descriptor of what many of us have been coping with since early 2020—an overwhelming feeling of “drowning” may better exemplify our collective experience. I’ve faced job loss, a long search

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Misty Pratt has been a health researcher for over 10 years and works as a research coordinator with the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.

She is also a freelance writer and voice for the Ottawa blog Kids in the Capital.

Misty’s research interests include mental well-being and maternal health. She is a frequent contributor to Mindful.

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mindful living

for work in a global pandemic, and the unattainable balancing act of working from home and parenting my kids through virtual school. Other people I know have worked as nurses in packed ICUs, faced delayed cancer treatments, grieved loved ones without funerals, and endured financial insecurity.

RETHINKING BURNOUT The World Health Organization (WHO) defines the phenomenon of burnout as being characterized by three things: feelings of exhaustion, reduced productivity at work, and a sense of detachment from one’s job. You probably don’t need me to define burnout for you, though.

We know it when we feel it.

It’s the overwhelming to-do list, the mental load and physical exhaustion, and the inability to find joy in our daily lives.

In essence, burnout can feel a lot like depression, but the key difference is that it relates directly to the work we do. The WHO states that burnout can’t be applied to describe experiences we have outside of an occupational context, but it will be interesting to see how this official definition changes after COVID-19.

The pandemic has forced us to define “work” in a much broader way. As the world screeched to a halt, the lines between the different parts of our lives blurred and then disappeared altogether. Work

took up every waking hour, as I tried to squeeze in time at the “office” when my kids didn’t need me to address tech issues, help with homework, and support them with the emotional challenges they faced during lockdown.

“It’s a very Western approach to separate work from everything else that you do, as opposed to seeing your entire life as holistic,” says Jenée Johnson, a mindfulness, trauma, and racial equity program leader in the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Johnson maintains that our jobs have never been separate from the rest of our lives. “What you do to express your gifts, talents, and abilities is not different…from your life.”

WHAT DOES HEALING REALLY LOOK LIKE? In my experience of burnout, this dichotomy of work/life has led me to a systematic approach to my exhaustion. I’ve compartmentalized all the parts of my life and tackled the problem through a set of objectives and tactics: drink a green smoothie in the morning, 10 minutes of meditation on my lunch break, 150 minutes of moderate to intense exercise each week, yoga, regular massages… The list of things I thought I had to do is endless. If I added up how long it would take to do all these activities, I’d likely run out of time in my day to work, sleep, and care for

my family—not to mention the financial burden that is unfeasible for many people.

Like a server in a busy restaurant, I’ve tried to balance all my plates—work, family, relationships, selfcare, hobbies, finances, caregiving—while conveniently ignoring the heart of the issue: that I’m not supposed to be carrying so many plates in the first place. The unfortunate result is that the weight of responsibility is placed on me, the individual, and the message I’ve internalized is that if I’m struggling, I’m just not trying hard enough.

In the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, coauthors Emily and Amelia Nagoski argue that the problem is not that we aren’t trying; it’s that wellness has been sold to us as something achievable through a set of specific goals. They propose instead that wellness is “a state of action—it is the freedom to move fluidly through the cyclical, oscillating experiences of being human.”

For me, the most relevant part of their statement to my own experience of healing from burnout is the verb “to move.” If we want our bodies to release stress and not get stuck along the way, we must literally move through what Emily and Amelia call our emotional tunnels. How do we do that?

Johnson uses the analogy of a zebra running from a lion: “The lion’s coming, and [the zebra] runs, runs, runs, gets away, and what does he do?

He stops and he shakes it off, and then he goes back to eating the grass.” →

m PODCAST Burnout: Heard of it?

Mindful is teaming up with Lemonada Media to present a four-part podcast series exploring the causes and conditions that lead to burnout, plus what you can do to avoid it or heal from it. Sign up to learn more. mindful.org/ burnout

June 2022 mindful 19

mindful living

If we reframe wellness as the freedom to be human, rather than as an unattainable to-do list, we can learn to build the capacity to withstand emotional distress—without getting stuck along the way.

MOVING THROUGH OUR EMOTIONAL TUNNELS Shake it off. It sounds like a simple directive (and a great Taylor Swift song), but it’s a process that takes time and a bit of trial and error. None of us are accustomed to embodying our emotions; instead, we put them in a cognitive context, and try to think our way through stress, using to-do lists, time management apps, and a carousel of selfcare tips pushed at us by the wellness industry.

I’ve tried all those strategies, and while some of them have been moderately effective in the past, the pandemic put a halt to my usual go-to activities. I had to find new ways to move through my emotions.

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I’ve been fortunate that even in the worst of the lockdowns, I’ve been able to get outside. Time in nature has been a saving grace, and short walks in my local ravine have given me a chance to slow down and savor my solitude. Many people tried their hand at their first vegetable garden, discovering the immense pleasure we can derive from digging in the dirt.

Time outdoors connects us to all our bodily senses, as we ground ourselves in the earth through touch, smell, sound, and—once you get a chance to reap your garden’s harvest—taste.

If Zumba or other choreographed dancing is not your thing, movement is open to us in all different forms. Certain types of traditional yoga practices use shaking or vibrating the body to release muscle tension and to regulate the body’s fight-or-flight response. You don’t need a special yoga class to practice this—get up and jiggle around for five minutes. It may feel silly at first, but I’ve always loved the wave of calm that washes over me when I’m done. Tensing and releasing parts of the body, like the neck, shoulders, and hands, can also help to release tension.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, BE HUMAN Many of the tips for embodying our emotions work with vibration, movement, and sound, because those are the ways we stimulate our vagus nerve—the nerve

that connects our brain to organs throughout our body. It also performs key functions for our parasympathetic nervous system, helping us to move from “fight or flight” to “rest and digest.” Activities to stimulate the vagus nerve include deep and slow breathing (letting your exhale be longer than your inhale can have an especially soothing effect), singing, humming, or chanting, and body movement. During times of intense lockdown stress, my kids and I practiced humming to defuse tension—it usually led to fits of giggles, which also had its benefits.

When I had exhausted all other coping strategies and still felt stuck in my emotions, I let the tears flow. Crying is an underrated strategy for helping our bodies cope with stress hormones, and scientists have identified that “emotional tears” (rather than tears that may fall in cold weather or because of dust in the eye) may have a different chemical composition and can trigger the body to release oxytocin and endorphins. These are the loving and calming hormones that ease our physical and emotional pain.

While burnout is a societal problem that calls for systemic change, these individual coping tools can help us take back some of our agency. If we reframe wellness as the freedom to be human, rather than as an unattainable to-do list, we can learn to build the capacity to withstand emotional distress—without getting stuck along the way. ●

mindful living

“This book will change your life.”

—ALEXANDRA ELLE, AUTHOR OF AFTER THE RAIN

DANCING TO FREEDOM

m AUDIO You Are Enough Jenée Johnson invites us to hold our attention on five affirmations to be more compassionate to ourselves, embracing our unique human experience. mindful.org/ enough

Women are particularly vulnerable to the experience of burnout because of higher rates of PTSD, depression, anxiety, and gender-based social discrimination, and for some groups, racial trauma.

All of this underscores the importance of (re)learning to feel freedom and joy in our bodies.

One example: Jenée Johnson facilitates the Femme! dance program, created by author and entrepreneur Bernadette Pleasant. The class is designed for women to reclaim their feminine power in the way they walk through the world.

Participants start with gentle grounding and awakening exercises, followed by an “emotional tour” through a range of human feelings—joy, rage, sensuality—and end with time for reflection and meditation. Choreographed and free dance movements are set to drumming that matches the pulse of the human heartbeat, grounding women in the ancient wisdom of their bodies. If the Femme! class is not offered in your community, seek out other body-positive dance classes that incorporate drumming or free dance.

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FOUR ESSENTIAL PRACTICES TO HEAL AND DECLUTTER MINIMALISM

Be free from attachment and clutter to stay focused without distractions MINDFULNESS

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Build a powerful self-care routine to relax after an overwhelming day S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y

Cleanse and detox from toxic and unnatural consumption to feel healthier

June 2022 mindful 21

inner wisdom

Ain’t No

BODY BETTER

by Elaine Smookler

When you make a point of being curious, kind, and non-judgmental about all the shenanigans your body will get up to, you may find it much easier to manage it all, and love your body, just as it is.

Long, lean, smooth, and shapely, my ever-youthful Ken and Barbie dolls clearly had it made. Their perfect smiles beamed with joy no matter how many times I accidentally dropped them in the toilet or threw them down the stairwell. Shining and glorious, beyond sickness and death, their changeless bodies would remain as their maker intended, and patented them, to be.

The rest of us, on the other hand, find ourselves with bodies that just won’t stop changing. Sometimes we

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

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PRACTICE

BE A

ILLUSTRATION BY SPENCER CREELMAN

Mountain

like those changes, sometimes we fear the changes our body goes through, and sometimes we feel so disconnected from our body that we simply can’t even tell, or don’t want to know, what the heck is going on in them there hills.

For many, childhood traumas or plain old negative comparisons can become the thought hooligans that make it hard for us to believe that we really might be OK with the body we have, just as it is.

For something a little different, what might happen if you tried on the idea of being the loving caretaker

of the dynamic dynasty known as your body? Might you feel differently about yourself if you choose to love every lumpy, bumpy, numb, and tingly stage your body journeys through?

As our own caregivers, we can show our bodies love through eating nourishing food and shaking our booties. Exercising and eating wisely provide many positive outcomes for body and mood, so by all means let’s run, skip, and sprout ourselves silly. At the same time, it’s good to notice if fitness and diet goals become sneaky forms of self-aggression. Loving your body as it is right now is always the perfect starting line for a life of joy and connection.

Kindness, curiosity, and tenderness can be wise guides to help you navigate the relentless reality that your beautiful body will expand and contract, advance and retreat, and be continually transforming, with or without your approval.

Your body will never be quite like this, ever again, whatever it is. Can you stand in wonder at the whole show your body is putting on? Can you love yourself just as you are, exactly as you are, right now? ●

1 2 3 4 5

When you’re feeling shaky and finding it hard to remember how gorgeous you are, take a few moments to settle into the mountain practice. Explore it as a way to find ease and comfort as you settle into the earthy grounding joy of being you, exactly as you are.

Your eyes can be open or closed. You can do the mountain practice sitting, standing, or lying down.

Begin by breathing naturally, in and out through the nose. After several breaths, bring your attention to the body you’re in today.

Notice your feet touching the ground, your thighs pressed into the chair, and your buttocks weighted by gravity. Bring your attention to your lower back, your middle back, your beautiful belly, and your chest and shoulders. Feel the slope of the neck and your head nobly perched atop it all. Acknowledge how your body feels—whether it’s softness, strength, stiffness, pain.

Now imagine that you are looking at a majestic mountain. See its peaks reaching up to the clouds. Follow its snowy streams through lush forests down into flowered meadows.

Allow yourself to imagine that you are this mountain. Your head becomes the sun-reaching peak, your shoulders and arms are the sides of the vibrant mountain. Your seat and legs are the stable foundation, your feet and toes like outstretching tree roots.

With each breath, you become a breathing mountain. Feel its grandeur and presence deep within you. Enjoy being unconcerned about what the other mountains think of you, saying these words to yourself on the in-breath and out-breath: I see myself as a mountain.

I feel calm and stable.

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mental health

Taking Things TO HEART

By Jonathan Fisher, MD FACC

m

What does our emotional state have to do with the physical health of the heart? Cardiologist Jonathan Fisher explains the links between thoughts, emotions, and cardiovascular wellness, and how the skills of emotional intelligence can help you take good care of your heart.

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Jonathan Fisher leads a heart-centered body scan to notice sensations in the body and bring awareness to the present moment. mindful.org/ heart

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTE GUDALJ / UNSPLASH

AUDIO Body Scan

mental health

For millennia the heart has been portrayed as the seat of our emotions. While this imagery has been popularized in art and literature, modern neuroscience and cardiovascular research have only recently begun to explore the connection between human emotions and physical health.

Over time, our hearts are literally shaped by our emotions and moods. Just as we now know we can rewire our brain’s connections using specific practices (a process known as neuroplasticity), the structure and function of the heart may undergo changes in response to our emotions: one form of a process known as cardiac plasticity.

Balanced Mind, Strong Heart Difficult emotions are shown to risk harming the physical heart. For example, a 2014 meta-analysis of 30 prospective studies (40 independent reports), with 893,850 participants and follow-ups ranging from 2 to 37 years, found that depression predicted the excess risk of developing coronary heart disease or heart attack. Anxiety, traumatic events, anger,

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Jonathan Fisher, MD, is a clinical cardiologist, mindfulness meditation teacher, and organizational wellbeing and resiliency leader. In 2020 he cofounded the Ending Physician Burnout Global Community and organized the world’s first global summit dedicated to ending physician burnout, with over a thousand participants from 43 countries.

frustration, and unrelenting job stress all pose similar cardiovascular risks, and likely share a common physiologic pathway.

The most extreme example of negative emotions impacting heart health is a condition known as stress cardiomyopathy, commonly referred to as “broken heart syndrome.” In this condition, the physical heart weakens and sometimes fails as a result of extreme grief, emotional distress, or surprise. The risk of heart attack increases 21-fold within 24 hours after the loss of a loved one.

Conversely, research has shown that positive prosocial emotions like gratitude, optimism, and empathy can have the opposite result, reducing stress and helping the heart enter a state of balance and calm.

Optimism, life purpose, and positive affect have been linked with reduced risk of developing coronary heart disease (CHD). In one large trial, 97,253 healthy women were followed for over eight years. Optimists were found to have a lower risk of CHD, including 30% lower CHD mortality, and 14% lower total mortality.

Those with higher levels of cynicism and hostility were found to have a higher risk of early death, either from cancer or other causes.

While we may not be able to control some factors in heart health, such as the genes we inherit, understanding the connection between emotions and cardiovascular health allows us to cultivate the emotions that nurture both our emotional and physical heart.

Our emotions serve to move the body toward self-protective action.

A Change of Heart In order to understand how emotions impact our bodies, it’s important to know where they come from.

Many of the factors of stress reactivity begin in the mind. It is our perception and interpretation of events and our experiences—the meaning we make consciously or subconsciously—that determines our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

There are three overlapping mechanistic pathways, found in our mind, body, and behavior, linking stressful emotions, psychological well-being, and cardiovascular health. Let’s take a brief ride along the mindheart highway.

First let’s look at where emotions come from, then we can unpack the difference between feelings, emotions, and moods.

Emotions—primal, unconscious bodily responses— originate in a matter of seconds from the limbic centers of the brain (e.g., the amygdala), providing information to the more modern and uniquely human prefrontal cortical centers responsible for meaning-making and planning.

Emotions then give rise to feelings. Contrary to what we might believe, emotions are different from feelings, says Antonio

Damasio, chair in neuroscience, as well as professor of psychology, philosophy, and neurology, at the University of Southern California.

According to Damasio, feelings are the meaning we give our emotions based on our memories and beliefs, and the subjective labeling of our experiences. For example, if we are called on to speak in public, we might experience emotional responses such as a faster heartbeat, tense muscles, and a sensation of butterflies in the stomach. These physical sensations are then interpreted by our conscious mind, which labels them as a feeling: “fear.”

Moods are the constellations of emotions and feelings that may have no connection to an initial triggering event, and can last for days or more. When we have recurring emotions and feelings and begin to identify with them—seeing an emotion as part of who we are— we may not be consciously aware of them, because they seem like constant companions instead of information that arises and passes.

How Emotions Propel Us Our emotions help the body move toward self-protective action. Even the root of the word emotion reminds us →

June 2022 mindful 25

mental health

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of this—e movēre, from the Latin word meaning to move outward. To better understand this, let’s explore how emotions crucially connect our brain with our body.

All emotions set off a chain reaction of electrical and chemical signals from the brain, which travel throughout the body along the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Our organs are all programmed to receive these physical signals and have receptors covering their surfaces. This is why a single emotion like stress can trigger signals that result in inflammation and blood platelet activation (tendency toward blood clots), and cause our cells to age more rapidly.

Emotions also affect the function of the brain itself, influencing our ability to focus, our patterns of thought, our levels of energy/motivation, our ability to sleep, and even our appetite.

Which brings us to the final stop on the mind-heart highway: the behaviors triggered by our conscious and unconscious impulses that our emotions influence. Our mental state determines our tendency toward or away from selfcare, our adherence to healthy lifestyle choices, and our likelihood of developing and maintaining a supportive social network.

Research has shown that our personality, which can encompass many of our default ways of reacting to the world, is a risk factor for heart disease.

Many of us might have heard about the link between having a Type A personality and developing

26 mindful June 2022

heart disease. However, more recent studies have shown that it’s only certain Type A traits that may increase cardiovascular disease risk: depression, anxiety, anger, and hostility are all strong factors increasing the risk of developing heart disease, with depression being the strongest contributing factor.

Here’s the good news: With practice, we can rewire certain aspects of our default patterns of emotional reactivity.

Strengthen Your Heart and Emotional Wellness The American Heart Association identifies seven primary determinents of cardiovascular health.

They include tobacco use, nutritional choices, level of exercise, body composition, blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar. Where we fall on the behavior spectrum (e.g., unhealthy vs. healthy, maladaptive vs. adaptive) will determine how many of these indicators we have. Over time these behaviors and shifting parameters can result in heart-related symptoms and adverse health events, or lack thereof.

While we cannot draw neat lines between where our mental health ends and our physical health begins, understanding this connection between our emotional state and health-related behaviors can improve our heart and general health.

By learning to become mindfully aware of our inner state, we can literally help protect our hearts. ●

PRACTICE

EMOTION-CENTERED HABITS

for Heart Health

BY JONATHAN FISHER

1 NOTICE WHAT’S PRESENT We can commit to developing awareness of emotions in the body through the regular practice of mindfulness of emotions and body sensations.

2 EXPAND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE We can work to improve our emotional literacy—our own vocabulary of feelings that can adequately describe our inner experience. This takes practice and may require help from others.

3 RESPOND WITH INTENTION We can become an active agent in choosing our emotional reactions to everyday events. We can also cultivate nurturing and self-sustaining positive feelings— including optimism, gratitude, and empathy—and commit to practicing the skills of navigating challenging emotions with a sense of curiosity and self-compassion.

June 2022 mindful 27

brain science

28 mindful June 2022

brain science

WHY DID I

Do That?!

By Leslie Garrett • Illustrations by Edmon de Haro

When we’re in “hot states” like excitement, anger, or stress, our behavior can surprise even ourselves. Leslie Garrett unpacks what’s happening in the brain in these moments, and how we can aim for a bit more self-compassion.

My friend shared the story in hushed tones during a late-night run.

Her friend had discovered that her husband was cheating and that he’d taken the other woman to a hotel room in another town. My friend’s friend got into her vehicle, drove three hours to this town, then staked out the hotel.

This woman had only a hazy notion of what she would do if she saw her husband and his paramour. Luckily she never saw them. She probably would have worried anyway. After some cold cramped hours in her car, she began ABOUT THE AUTHOR Leslie Garrett is the author of more than 15 books for children, as well as a journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and Cottage Life. She currently works as coeditor of Bluedot Living, Martha’s Vineyard, which focuses on local grassroots solutions for climate issues, and aims to expand to locations around North America.

to calm down and drove back home.

“What was I thinking?” she’d asked my friend. “What was she thinking?” my friend asked me.

Sometimes our behavior surprises even ourselves. It has happened to me. It has likely also happened to you.

Maybe, despite your lawn sign that reads “Love Wins,” you flipped the bird to a driver who cut you off. Perhaps, like another friend of mine widely known for her kindness, you told an antsy child to “sit the [bleep] down” during a sleepless transatlantic flight.

These experiences are jarring.

That’s not who I am, we later think to ourselves. So, what happened?

The “Hot-Cold” Empathy Gap Dr. George Loewenstein, a professor of psychology and economics at

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, is curious about that too.

In the early ’90s, he noticed something intriguing on his runs, which included a steep hill—so steep that stairs are built into it. On the ascent, his body screamed at him in pain.

But within 10 to 20 seconds of cresting and beginning the descent, he could barely remember how horrible it felt. A few days later, Loewenstein would repeat the whole thing. While his initial curiosity focused on physical pain and our inability to recall it, he wondered too about emotions, eventually broadening his theory to include them. He wanted to answer the question: When humans are in a particular emotional state, why, he wondered, are we so bad at imagining ourselves in a different state?

Loewenstein called this effect the “hot-cold empathy gap” and theorized that when we are in a “cold” →

June 2022 mindful 29

brain science

(unemotional) state, we struggle to imagine how we will feel and to predict how we will behave when we are in a “hot” state (for instance, fearful, angry, hungry, or in pain). Part of what creates the gap between hot and cold states is that we struggle to empathize with others whose behavior seems ridiculous or unwarranted—an interpersonal empathy gap. We’re similarly unempathetic to ourselves when we’re in a different emotional state—an intrapersonal empathy gap. When we’re calm, we can’t imagine being angry enough to punch a wall. When we’re well-rested, we can’t imagine being exhausted enough to snap at a child.

This gap includes physiological states too, which explains why our plan to eat healthier goes right out the window when, stomach grumbling, we open our cupboard and pop open a bag of Doritos. One of Loewenstein’s studies focused on the disconnect between healthy people taking unhealthy risks, such as smoking. He also considered the gap medical personnel could exhibit toward people experiencing pain, essentially underestimating their experience.

“We’re never going to be able to imagine how we’re going to feel and act in a different emotional state,” Loewenstein says, whether that different emotional state is our own or someone else’s. “Our brains are not capable of doing that.”

What our brains are capable of, he says, is noting patterns of behavior.

We might notice, for instance, that when we’re in a hot state of excitement, we become overly generous.

When we’re in a cold state, perhaps examining our bank balance, we promise ourselves we won’t offer to pick up the tab for everyone’s meal the next time we get dinner with friends. Then the next time rolls around and, well, out comes our joie de vivre and our wallet.

But Loewenstein thinks that the key to managing behaviors we don’t want begins with noticing our patterns. Our overspender might decide to carry only enough cash to cover their own meal.

Then, even in a state of excitement or

30 mindful June 2022

enthusiasm, when the impulse arises to cover the whole tab, they can’t.

Zindel Segal, Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto, points out that, when we’re in a hot state, the regions of our brain being activated tend to be lower down and farther back—the brain stem, cerebellum, and limbic system—which generate our fight/ flight/freeze responses. At the same time, there isn’t a lot of activity in the regions of our brain that help us understand our own or another person’s behavior. “You’re very much locked in a state of high arousal,” he explains, “and usually the solutions we search for are the ones that we’ve been habitually drawing upon.” Not surprisingly, Segal, who’s also a founder of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, urges us to consider a mindfulness-based approach. If we apply mindfulness to the hot-cold empathy gap, he says, it allows us to pause and connect with our own or another person’s experience. It grants us the space to label our emotions and create “greater moments →

When we’re calm, we can’t conceive of ourselves being angry enough to punch a wall.

When we’re well-rested, we can’t imagine being exhausted enough to snap at a child.

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PRACTICE

HOW TO NAVIGATE DIFFICULT EMOTIONS

BY SHARON SALZBERG

Sometimes when a painful emotion comes up, we layer shame and blame on what’s already difficult. For example, we may think to ourselves, “I should be able to do my job better.” We also tend to project into the future and worry about what the pain may feel like tonight, next week, or next year. When we do this, we’re not only facing the pain of present difficulty, but the anticipation of pain, which is actually in our imagination.

The first thing we can do to cultivate our resources for managing difficult emotions is allow ourselves to feel the emotion, shift our attention to noticing the sensations present in our body, and forgive ourselves for what we feel.

We’re human beings, and feeling this way is natural.

1 Sit comfortably

and close your eyes or leave them slightly open in a soft gaze.

2 Begin by listening to

the sounds around you.

Relax and allow your experience of the sounds to come and go. Just let them wash through you.

3 Bring your attention

to the feeling of your body sitting. See if you can feel the earth supporting you.

32 mindful June 2022

4 See if you can feel

space touching you.

Space is always touching us.

We just need to receive it.

5 Bring your attention

to the feeling of your breath. Just the normal, natural breath, wherever you feel it most distinctly— in the nostrils, the chest, or the abdomen. Find that place, bring your attention there, and just rest. You don’t need to worry about what’s already gone by. You don’t even need to anticipate the very next breath.

6 Recognizing that

your attention is going to wander is critical to understanding meditation as resilience training. Your mind will go to the past, to the future, or you might fall asleep. It’s OK. Recognize that you’ve been gone, see if you can let go gently, and bring your attention back to the primary object of your attention. We let go and we begin again, we let go and we begin again. That’s the actual practice.

7 When you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze.

of choice on how we learn to act when these emotions are present in our mind and also in our bodies.”

We Are Not Our Emotions The emotions themselves are not the problem, Zindel reminds us. Emotions convey important information about what we need. The problem is that “hot” emotions get prioritized in our brains, taking parts of the brain offline that can help us identify them and relate to them in a more intentional way.

Dr. Sará King agrees, noting that emotions are automatic. King, a postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Oregon Health Science University, says that emotions are not good or bad, per se, they just…are. She says that people often conflate their emotions with the negative feedback they might get from others about those emotions and conclude that “this is who I am and this is who I’ll always be.” She adds, “That can be really difficult to hold with compassion, because then people start having thoughts like I’m a bad person who does bad things and thinks bad stuff and has bad emotions. Mindfulness practices are really training us to constantly bring our attention back to the body, back to the breath, and remembering that no matter what we’re feeling inside of our bodies, it’s temporary. It’s passing.

It’s just a phenomenon of our experience. But it is not who we are.”

The practice of mindfulness is really a practice of building awareness, adds Segal. “That awareness is an opportunity to shine light on things that we didn’t really know about ourselves,” he says, “and make choices about which ones you want to strengthen and which ones you might want to let go of.”

Loewenstein also urges us to make space to bridge this gap. “It seems to me that pausing is not sufficient. It’s what you do with the pause that’s really important.” ●

neuroscience

love without a plan Our brains crave novelty. Neuroscientist and writer Stephanie Cacioppo explores whether or not unpredictable events might invigorate love and how we can benefit from making more room for improvisation in our relationships.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARI DEIN

June 2022 mindful 35

ILLUSTRATION BY MARI DEIN / ADOBESTOCK

neuroscience

w

hen I woke up on the morning of September 28, 2011, I had no idea that this would be my wedding day. John had been invited to a MacArthur Foundation event in Paris, an international mind-meld of twelve academics from different fields who all had something to contribute to the study of aging. The group included some of the world’s top public-health experts and psychologists—among them my fiancé, John Cacioppo, one of the founders of social neuroscience, most famous for his pioneering work revealing the mentally and physically damaging effects of loneliness. John was invited to discuss, among other things, how the elderly could protect themselves against the dangers of loneliness. At the time, he and I were several months into our long-distance love story and getting good at juggling business and pleasure.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephanie Cacioppo is one of the world’s leading authorities on the neuroscience of social connections.

Her work on the neurobiology of romantic love and loneliness has been published in top academic journals and covered by the New York Times, CNN, and National Geographic, among others.

I had taken the high-speed train from Geneva to Paris the previous afternoon. I tried to work on my laptop as the train sped through the Jura mountains and the vineyards of Burgundy, but I was too distracted by my anticipation. It was crushing to spend weeks away from him, but that bit about absence making the heart grow fonder? That’s not just a saying—it’s science.

In an interesting 2013 study, people in long-distance relationships were shown to have more meaningful interactions with each other—even though they could only communicate via text, phone, and video chat—compared to couples who saw each other every day. This, paradoxically, resulted in a deeper connection for the long-distance couples. Across social species, we see the power of distance to refresh relationships—even in elephants, who give each other more elaborate greetings after a prolonged absence.

Part of the reason is the social brain’s innate preference for novelty. Distance keeps us from taking a person for granted. Distance reminds us what we miss about our significant other. No wonder that parting is such sweet sorrow—and reuniting feels so good it hurts.

That day in Paris, John left the hotel early to meet up with the other conference attendees.

After a long morning session, he took a break with his good friend, the Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen. They had last seen each other a month earlier, at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, when John was headed to yet another European conference (and another date with me). But a bad snowstorm had delayed his flight.

“Look on the bright side,” Laura told him then. “If the flight is canceled, you don’t have to give your talk.” →

June 2022 mindful 37

neuroscience

38 mindful June 2022

So, did I want to get married today? I did a double take when that message flashed on my phone.

But it only took me two seconds to reply. “Sure.”

Then I dashed out of the hotel room to find a white dress.

Turning Your Back on the Frontal Lobe By surprising me, John had instantly found a way of making our wedding special and unique, however it turned out. Such a spontaneous ceremony wouldn’t work for everyone, of course, but it’s worth considering the role that unpredictable events might play in love, and whether we can benefit by making more room for improvisation in our relationships.

So much of our social experience, especially when it comes to romance, has to do with expectations. Maybe we have an image of the man or woman we will marry long before we’ve met them. Usually, we call this a type, an ideal. Or maybe we have in our mind’s eye the perfect first date: a walk by the lake, a hike in the woods, a romantic restaurant. When it comes to the wedding—an opportunity not only to proclaim our love but also to show off our good taste and social network—we probably know how it should look. Perhaps more importantly, we know how it should not look.

If these expectations actually set us on a course toward genuine happiness, then they are all well and good.

But I would argue that in many cases such plans can become a kind of mind trap, forcing us to pursue a preconceived kind of happiness that we may never reach or that, once reached, may not actually make us happy.

To take just one study proving this point, the Yale psychologist Robb B. Rutledge and his colleagues conducted

ILLUSTRATION BY MARI DEIN / ADOBESTOCK

John suddenly looked very serious.

“No, I’m meeting someone over there, someone important.”

He started to tell Laura about me, how we had fallen for each other after a chance encounter in Shanghai, how he needed to be on that flight. Laura knew about all the wreckage from John’s two divorces. It struck her that John spoke about me as though I was his last chance at love. He said he wanted to get this one right.

Now, in Paris, Laura wanted an update: “How are things with Stephanie?”

A sheepish grin. “We’re getting married.”

“Wow, John, that was fast! Congratulations! I’m so happy for you.

When is the big day?”

He looked momentarily confused.

“Oh, I don’t know if we’ll do a classic wedding. Steph and I are both so busy. We’ll probably just go down to City Hall in Chicago during our lunch break.”

“You know, I could marry you right now.”

Laura had just gotten ordained as an internet minister to officiate the wedding of one of her grad students.

She meant her suggestion purely as a joke—“There was not a shred of seriousness in it,” she later told me—but John didn’t seem to realize this.

“You mean, like, today? You know, Steph’s here in Paris with me… That could actually work!”

He grabbed his phone and began typing a message to send to me. DO YOU WANT TO GET MARRIED AFTER WORK TODAY? “John, wait—what are you doing?!”

Laura said. “Are you crazy? These things must be planned out.” John didn’t seem to be listening. The conference was about to resume. Laura just shook her head and muttered under her breath, “John, you don’t know women.”

He smiled devilishly. “You don’t know Steph.”

neuroscience

How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!

JANE AUSTEN

an experiment in which they had participants set expectations before playing a decision-making game with small financial rewards. Their results show that the ultimate amount of money participants won did not determine their happiness. Rather, what predicted their level of happiness was the difference between their initial expectations and the outcome. If they had no expectation of winning and ended up with even a tiny amount of money, they were happy.

Applying this expectation formula to love relationships, the more we love without expecting any rewards in return, the more we will increase our chance of happiness. This is in line with a large body of research showing that setting realistic expectations leads to greater relationship satisfaction. But adjusting your expectations does not necessarily mean lowering them. It’s more about letting go of the social pressure that often drives us to pursue unrealistic expectations without understanding what it is we really want or need, and what we can do without.

The important thing about letting go of your expectations is that it should feel like an act of generosity or faith in your relationship—and not a sacrifice. Otherwise, you will likely feel that you’re giving up something important to you for the sake of your partner, leading to feelings of resentment or spite, which can spell serious trouble. An interesting study from the Netherlands shows that while couples greatly appreciate it when their partner makes sacrifices for them, when they begin to expect such sacrifices they feel much less gratitude and no longer see their partner’s sacrifices in quite the same positive light. This finding is in line with a theory I’ve long held: Expectations kill gratitude. →

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What You Expect Is What You Get Expectations don’t only complicate life within a relationship, they also can get in the way of connecting with someone in the first place. What if you find the “One” but you don’t recognize that person as such because you had a different idea of what the person you marry should look like?

Conversely, what if you stay in an unhealthy or abusive relationship for too long because you and your partner should be perfect together, because on paper your partner is the kind of person who should check all your boxes? Sometimes the search for that perfect partner can make someone go to extraordinary lengths.

Such was the case with Linda Wolfe, an Indiana woman who married 23 times—earning her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records—

but who never found Mr. Right.

Shortly before her death in 2009, she said she was still holding out hope that husband Number 24 would come along to fulfill her dreams.

These dreams, hopes, expectations, and scripts we write for our future, which play out over and over in our minds, are managed (in part) by the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Considered for decades a mysterious brain area, the PFC is now seen by many neuroscientists as one of the parts of the brain that make us most human.

Located smack in the front of the cerebral cortex, it contains some of our newest hardware, evolutionarily speaking. Its large size and extensive connections with a diverse pool of neighbors enable it to contribute to a broad range of mental functions, including decision-making, language, working memory, attention, rule learning, planning, and the regulation of emotions, to name just a few.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARI DEIN / ADOBESTOCK

We have a natural tendency to expect help, support, and sacrifice from our partner to some extent, but the beauty of our evolved brain is that we are neurologically wired to control this tendency and, if so moved, to expect less from our partner and give more in return—intentionally. The next time you have romantic dinner plans with your partner but they feel “brain-dead” after, say, an entire day of back-to-back Zoom meetings, ask yourself what’s more important: sticking to the script you had for how that evening should play out, or letting it go for both your partner’s sake—and your own. You might discover that going to bed early and spending the night cuddling under a warm blanket or stargazing together from the comfort of your backyard was actually more romantic than whatever elaborate evening you had planned.

neuroscience

I sometimes describe this region as the brain’s “parents,” telling you what you should and shouldn’t do.

The processing that occurs in the PFC is the closest thing we have to Freud’s notion of a “superego.” This part of the brain helps us distinguish right from wrong, control and suppress urges, see silver linings in dark situations, and forces us to make hard decisions and delay gratification, if it benefits us in the long-term or benefits some cause greater than ourselves.

It is a little-known fact that humans don’t have a fully mature PFC until about age 25. This explains why you might have done things at 18—a keg stand? a tongue piercing?—that you would never have done a decade later. Yet as much as we need the PFC in order to be functional and responsible adults, there are times when we want to reconnect with our younger selves, not to second-guess our actions so much, to think less about the future and more about the now, to be in the moment. I think often about the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s definition of genius: It’s nothing more than “childhood recovered at will.”

I love this idea. And when I am truly living in the moment, this is how I see the world, with the joyful curiosity and sense of wonder that children possess. This is not, however, an invitation to impulsive behavior. We don’t want to completely turn off our PFC. That would be a disaster.

If we did that, we would be ruled mostly by our impulses. We would lose a grip on and lack the ability to regulate our emotions, to manage psychological pain, and to complete tasks we had scheduled for the future. We would end up looking at the world less like children, who are eager to learn and discover new things, and more like patients with a lesion, a tumor, or a disease affecting the front part of the PFC (known as the orbitofrontal region). Such patients exhibit a lack of impulse control, have difficulties →

Social pressure often drives us to pursue unrealistic expectations, without understanding what it is we really want or need.

EXPLORE

6 QUESTIONS TO SPARK

INTIMACY IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

BY NATE AND KALEY KLEMP

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Nate Klemp, PhD, and Kaley Klemp are coauthors of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for Happier, Stronger Relationship.

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1

What’s really going on with you? This is an invitation to take your conversation one level deeper, an invitation for your partner to talk about their challenges, struggles, and victories you may not know about.

2

What’s something that you feel proud of? This question helps you and your partner understand each other’s contributions—at home, at work, or in family life—more clearly and witness your passion for the things you care most about.

3

What thought keeps looping in your head? Most of us have at least one stressful thought swirling in our minds at all times. Sharing these with your partner will not only bring you closer, it will also help you release the grip of these thoughts.

4

What change have you noticed in yourself that I may not have noticed? Maybe you made the “Dryuary” commitment to taking a break from alcohol, or they took up a new hobby. Life moves so fast that

it’s easy to miss these changes. By asking, you can extend the invitation to help support each other.

5

What’s something you say you want to do, but you haven’t yet made happen in your life? This question brings with it both a heightened understanding of each other and an opportunity to support each other in beginning to change something.

6

What are the three things about our life together that you’re most grateful for? Shifting your attention to a few things you’re grateful for is a way to experience well-being and happiness—the research is strong and well-documented. If you can turn this question into a regular habit, you may start to notice a shift in the tone of your conversations, from everyday stress to a more well-rounded outlook on your life together.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARI DEIN / ADOBESTOCK

Whether a relationship is just beginning or already spans decades, sometimes we forget to be curious toward one another. No matter how well you know each other, allowing your partner the chance to surprise you is an excellent way of keeping things fresh and in-the-moment. Next time you’re tempted to scroll through your phone instead of catching up after work, try one of these reflective queries—they just might spark a thoughtful conversation and, at the same time, bring you closer together.

neuroscience

m RESOURCE Strengthen Your Connections Find our best practices to nurture your relationships with mindfulness. mindful.org/ relationships

in meeting personal and professional responsibilities, and make all manner of social faux pas.

While the PFC is essential to our social nature, sometimes we let it control us too much. Studies show that rumination, recurrent negative thinking, self-focused thinking, and even obsessive-compulsive disorders are associated with changes in the PFC. The prefrontal cortex on overdrive is not a pretty sight. We think less flexibly, we obsess over minute details, make ourselves sick with worry, turn something over and over endlessly in our head. In such cases, we are trying too hard to stay on script, to anticipate what will happen, to plan and perfect.

This kind of PFC-driven overthinking can at times be a roadblock to creativity. When neuroscientists zap parts of the PFC to reduce its influence (using a noninvasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS), we find that people show a cognitive enhancement as they are better at solving problems or brain teasers, and tend to think more outside the box. With mental training, we can achieve similar results, whether that means coming up with a solution to creative problems at work or finding a way of turning a scientific conference into an impromptu wedding party. Not only are we more creative when the PFC is kept in check, we’re also in a better mood. Studies show that the less we ruminate, the higher our subjective measures of life satisfaction and happiness are.

The Joy of Missing Out So the question then becomes: How do we keep the PFC in balance?

How do we benefit from all its useful aspects—the way it helps us plan, save, and control unhealthy or harmful tendencies—without letting it rule our life, causing overthinking, anxiety, and other problems? In other

words, how do we go off-script? How do we say no to FOMO, the fear of missing out, and say yes to JOMO, or the joy of missing out?

Popular antidotes to combat negative overthinking include meditation and mindfulness exercises. Such techniques have in recent years gained in scientific credibility. Two of the people who helped change attitudes toward meditation and mindfulness are the American neuroscientist Richard Davidson, a master in mind-body interactions and a pioneer in the art of reining in the PFC, and the French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, a master in finding wonders in solitude and strength in self-introspection.

Together they have formed a friendship and collaboration with the Dalai Lama. They have conducted experiments in Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and in other laboratories around the world) in which they used EEG and fMRI to study the brains of Tibetan monks and other students of meditation. Their results show how highly trained practitioners (with over 9,000 hours of lifetime practice on average) can control negative thought processes, accept every feeling as they come in a nonjudgmental way, and modulate the activation of various brain areas, including the PFC—the region which, as Professor Davidson elegantly described, is “absolutely key” in emotion regulation, as the PFC is “a convergence zone for thoughts and feelings.”

Yet it’s not only eminent monks with years of training in meditation who can benefit from such techniques. In 1999, Davidson and his colleagues contacted the CEO of a biotech company and suggested that he teach his employees mindfulness meditation and then assess how it might affect some measures of physical and mental health. Forty-eight employees volunteered to take part in nonjudgmental moment-to-moment →

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that participants who went on a 90-minute walk through a natural environment showed reduced neural activity in the parts of the PFC that foster rumination.

Celebrating the Spontaneous Before that day in Paris, John and I had been falling deeper and deeper in love—but rumination had started to kick in. There was one big biological fact separating us: our ages. John was 60. I was 37. And he worried whether marrying a much younger woman was a good idea. I don’t think he cared about what it looked like, the assumptions some people would make based on their own scripts for a “proper relationship.” I don’t think he was thinking about himself at all. Rather he was worried about me.

If something happened to him, I would be alone and, much worse from John’s perspective, I would be susceptible to loneliness. John knew, perhaps better than anyone on the planet, what loneliness could do to a healthy brain.

And he was sensitive to the actuarial reality of our circumstances. If we tied the knot, odds are he would not be around to celebrate my 60th birthday.

“We may be in love, but we haven’t committed yet,” John said. “We’re still on the outside of this. I know, because I’ve studied it, the kind of loneliness that overwhelms a widowed spouse.

The idea that you could live with that for decades—I can’t in good conscience put you in this position.”

I’m stubborn. I told him to forget it. I told him that I could never let something as seemingly trivial as age

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awareness training, which is also known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (or MBSR). Every week for two months, the employees participated in a two-and-a-half-hour session. The researchers measured the volunteers’ brain waves (focusing on the PFC) before and after the training period. At the end of the eight weeks, the results were clear. Compared to a control group, MBSR volunteers showed a 12% drop in their anxiety symptoms and a shift from right to left PFC activation. Interestingly, the PFC in the right hemisphere of the brain tends to process negative emotions, whereas the left PFC specializes in positive emotions—an indication that the mindfulness training was working.

There are now numerous mindfulness apps and behavioral therapies that can help ruminators become meditators and gain new insights not only into their physical and mental health but also into how their brains function. In time, they can learn to suppress the impulse to obsessively focus on negative past and negative future events, putting the PFC in a more peaceful place. What mindfulness practitioners find is that being in the moment can quite literally clear the mind of unwanted and unnecessary negative thoughts and replace them with more constructive thinking. Such intentional change in mindset will open you up to experiences that may be richer, deeper, and more meaningful than anything you could have ever planned or ever imagined.

Finally, nature has also been shown to have a potent effect on reducing rumination and regulating PFC activity. For instance, a 2015 study performed at Stanford showed

“

neuroscience

Being in the moment can clear the mind of unwanted and unnecessary negative thoughts and replace them with more constructive thinking. dictate our love. Looking back, I can’t help but think that it wasn’t only our age but also our academic specialties that influenced our positions. I was arguing for the joyful power of love, and he for the destructive power of loneliness.

We decided to take a week away from each other. No phones, no Skype.

Some emotional distance. I went exploring caves with a girlfriend in southern France. And he went on vacation to Peru. We both spent our trips going through the motions of having fun, trying to distract ourselves from the fact that we missed each other so much it was hard to breathe. At the end of the week he sent me a photograph of his left hand.

He had put a silver band on his ring finger. “I’m yours,” he wrote.

On the day of our wedding, the whole scientific conference metamorphosed into a wedding party.

We couldn’t rent a spot on such short notice, so we decided to do the ceremony guerrilla style in a random corner of the Luxembourg Gardens, near our hotel. John asked Dr. Jack Rowe, a professor of public health

at Columbia, to give me away. (“But I haven’t even met the bride!” Jack said.) Laura would officiate. The hotel chef whipped up a wedding cake with just a few hours’ notice. The University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank Furstenberg, armed with his iPad, served as our photographer.

As John and I stood there, united in our love, I found myself looking at the people around us, many of whom I had only just met. They were beaming. None had expected to end up attending a wedding, but each played a role in the affair, each felt a sense of taking part in something special. Both our spontaneous wedding ceremony in Paris and our official wedding in Chicago two weeks later remain two of the best moments of my life, but I have to confess, in my deepest heart, I feel like our spontaneous ceremony marked the first day when John and I became man and wife. In holding romantic expectations lightly—our own, and those of the people around us and society generally—we were creating space for all the unusual and marvelous qualities of those moments and, really, of our connection. ●

Excerpted from Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection.

Copyright © 2022 By Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo.

Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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wild nature

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PHOTOGRAPH BY IVAN KMIT / ADOBESTOCK

befriend your

Disconnection from nature has left us feeling uprooted and displaced. By practicing mindfulness in nature, we can develop a calm presence and deepen our embodied awareness.

BY ROCHELLE CALVERT, PHD

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N

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ature is always changing, evolving, letting go, surrendering, adapting, dying—revealing to us how it is to be alive.

These are beautiful lessons. If we are present in our lives, we can awaken to our own true nature and experience being more fully alive.

Think of a time recently when you were touched by an experience of being with nature. Maybe you noticed the bud on a flower just about ready to burst into bloom, or the stillness and solidity of a tree you stood next to, or the gentle flow of water. As you connect to and learn to become fully present to these experiences, you can begin to feel that you, too, can experience a sense of innate well-being.

The potential to bloom and open, the solidity and fluidity you perceive in nature are all present within, for you to connect with and experience.

By calling these qualities to our attention, nature supports our intention to be present. It allures our attention and invites us to be with this moment as it is. The heart of mindfulness practice is establishing a clear and kind relationship with what is here in this moment, skillfully responding to and engaging with life.

Traditional mindfulness practice is intended to support the development of awareness through specific meditations that emphasize cultivating awareness of the breath, the senses, the body, mind, and heart, and open-

ness to all things. Students are often encouraged to explore these practices indoors, in a group setting. For some people (especially those who have experienced trauma), this learning format can be challenging, requiring more effort and giving rise to feelings of being stuck or unsafe. Practicing mindfulness in the support and community of nature can alleviate some of these difficulties.

Practicing mindfulness in nature also allows us to practice mindfulness with nature. Learning to experience awareness of the breath, the senses, the body, the mind, and the heart in a natural setting gives us greater access to our inner experiences. We are likely to feel more naturally present and curious about our inner landscape when we are supported by a natural landscape.

Nature herself provides the container for a mindfulness practice that reduces the need to try or “do” and instead helps us to sense and receive what is arising and present within and around us. (I refer to nature as feminine because I experience her as a divine presence. You may choose to replace nature with another word or concept that resonates with you.)

We know that being in nature can slow the heart rate, reduce levels of stress hormones, and help our brains to orient to calm and natural alertness, all of which are conducive to the practice of mindfulness. →

ILLUSTRATION BY ORTIS / ADOBESTOCK

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY ORTIS / ADOBESTOCK PHOTOGRAPH BY BASHKATOV / ADOBESTOCK

“

Mindfulness in nature gives us the opportunity to awaken to what is within us as well as around us, to heal and live skillfully.

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this sense of embodiment grows, we develop an increased ability to be kindly present to all that is arising in our inner landscape—in our sensations, body, mind, and heart—as well as in the external landscape, responding to what is happening as it unfolds.

Mindfulness in nature gives us the opportunity to awaken to what is within us as well as around us, to heal and live skillfully.

If you have a history of unhealed trauma, it can affect your physical, mental, emotional, behavioral, and relational experiences. Feelings of being disembodied and disconnected may impede your ability to make wise decisions. By practicing mindfulness in nature, you awaken your inner sense of safety, well-being, and connection. You can learn to step out of patterns of reactivity and into patterns of healing, wholeness, and healthy living. ●

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rochelle Calvert, PhD is the author of Healing with Nature: Mindfulness and Somatic Practices to Heal from Trauma. She’s a certified mindfulness teacher with the Mindfulness Training Institute and the International Mindfulness Teachers Association.

She’s also founder and clinical director of New Mindful Life, which offers mindfulness, naturebased, and somatic experience therapies.

PHOTO BY ROBERTUZHBT89 / ADOBESTOCK

Mindfulness practice can be both formal and informal. For formal practice, you designate a specific period of time to meditate, during which you may sit, move, walk, stand still, or lie down to focus your attention in a particular way. To develop your informal practice of mindfulness, you bring mindful awareness to activities throughout the day, such as eating, drinking, showering, dressing, cooking, talking, driving, texting, and sending email.

Nature supports both formal and informal mindfulness. Beautiful outdoor settings can help us sustain and extend a formal mindfulness practice. Nature also draws us in with its colors, textures, and scents: We tend to be more present in an activity when we can feel the texture of leaves, smell the flowers, and appreciate the fine details as well as the vastness of nature. Awareness of nature supports our informal practice of mindfulness, teaching us to be present in our dayto-day lives.

By practicing mindfulness in nature, we begin to feel more fully alive and embodied—at home in the body. Many of us also often intrinsically feel at home in nature, and this sense of ease can help us learn to be present in all aspects of our life. As

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Six Benefits of Spending Time in Nature The average American spent 4.2 hours per day using mobile devices alone, plus another three hours per day watching TV, according to data collected between 2019 and 2021. Meanwhile, as of 2019, nearly half of the US population didn’t take part in outdoor activities even once that year. This disengagement from the natural world is associated with increased rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, among other problems. At the same time, interest is growing in the ways nature can restore our health and well-being. Research has shown that nature can improve vision, memory, and concentration; restore mental energy; relieve stress; reduce inflammation; sharpen thinking; and expand creativity.

Returning to nature can help us experience ourselves and others more deeply and enjoy renewed feelings of health and wholeness.

Florence Williams, in her book The Nature Fix, reports the following findings from research into the benefits of nature for humans:

1

After five minutes in a forest surrounded by trees, the heart rate slows, facial muscles relax, and the prefrontal cortex quiets.

2 3 4

Water and birdsong improve mood and alertness.

Spending 15 minutes in nature can reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Spending time in natural landscapes increases alpha waves in the brain, which are associated with calm and alertness.

5

Spending an hour and a half in nature reduces rumination and helps us to be less preoccupied with problems.

6

Spending two hours (120 minutes) per week in nature can make us happier and boost overall health and well-being.

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M I N D F U L N E S S P R A C T I C E S F O R T U N I N G I N T O N AT U R E

MINDFUL LISTENING

Tuning In to the Sounds of Nature

BY MARK COLEMAN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Coleman is an author and Insight Meditation teacher. He leads nature meditation retreats and mindfulness teacher trainings worldwide.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY SILVIO / ADOBESTOCK

Mindfulness is essentially a deep-listening practice that cultivates a profound quality of receptivity. Listening is a beautiful doorway to the present moment, a tuning in to what’s here.

With listening practice, we develop the qualities of receptivity, relaxation, and a sense of naturalness.

We don’t need to make much effort to hear anything. A sound arises and is known quite easily and naturally in awareness.

So, with this particular meditation, the intention is to cultivate a sense of ease, receptivity, openness, and where we allow the sounds to be the locus for our attention, simply present to the ebb and flow in the soundscape.

meditation

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ORTIS / ADOBESTOCK

Find a place outside where you can sit comfortably, relaxed, safe, and at ease.

I suggest you sit with your eyes closed, or if that’s not comfortable, lower your gaze.

Begin by just sensing your body sitting. Then turn your attention to sounds, to hearing, to listening. Be aware of the panorama of sounds: distant sounds, near sounds.

Depending on where you’re doing this meditation, you may hear an array of nature sounds: birdsong, the sound of wind. And, most likely: human sounds, mechanical sounds, traffic. From the perspective of awareness, simply attune to sounds coming and going in the field of your attention.

Stay present in awareness where each sound is coming and going. There’s no need to label the sound or visualize the source of the sound. Simply be present to the ebb and flow of sounds.

Be aware of the silence that the sounds emerge from and pass back into. Of course, you’ll notice many other things in the field of your experience: sensations in the body or breath, thoughts, images, feelings. Acknowledge those things when they call the attention. And then keep attuning awareness to hearing, listening to the soundscape, the ebb and flow of sounds. Allow your attention to be wide, open, spacious, receptive. Sounds are coming and going in the field of awareness.

Notice any tendency to a preference for some sounds over others—the liking of certain sounds, the disliking of certain sounds. In this practice of mindfulness, we’re simply present to the whole range of experience. Notice any response or reactivity.

Try to rest in the still point in the center, present to this whole range of experience of sounds, welcoming and inviting them all in.

Notice when attention wanders and acknowledge that without judgment, bringing attention back here to the experience of sitting; listening, being mindful of the impact of this experience of simply listening with open awareness.

Notice how hearing impacts your body, heart, or mind. Notice how effortless this experience of mindful listening can be. There’s no need to struggle or strive.

We’re simply hearing and are aware of hearing.

As we bring this practice to a close, notice the influence of this simple meditation, mindful listening.

Notice its impact. Sense what influence it’s had on your mind and heart and body.

You may choose to practice this in different locations throughout the week. Notice what it’s like to practice mindful listening indoors or outside in a park or in a busy area where you live, where there are a lot of sounds.

I invite you to be aware of how you can bring awareness to sounds as a support for mindfulness, as a support for presentmoment awareness. See how sounds are inviting us over and over, here, in this moment. Let’s be curious as we move through this week, to explore sounds, and how we can bring awareness to them wherever we are.

m VIDEO COURSE Nature Meditations Go outdoors using practices you can take anywhere.

Use the code MINDFULMAG for 20% off. mindful.org/ outdoors

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M I N D F U L N E S S P R A C T I C E S F O R T U N I N G I N T O N AT U R E

LOVING-KINDNESS

Opening Our Hearts to the Natural World

We live on an enchanting planet, this beautiful Earth. You could say we’re here because of love— because of the benevolence that comes from nature and the abundance of this Earth. For many of us, one of the easiest places our heart is touched and opened, where we feel a sense of connection, kinship, and love is in nature. Whether by looking up at the night sky, seeing a bird fly by our window, or when we’re more deeply immersed in the woods or walking by the ocean—wherever we may find ourselves in a natural setting, it is easy for the heart to bloom.

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MOVING BEYOND OUR SENSE OF SELF And so with loving-kindness practice, what’s most helpful is to find the most supportive place or environment that allows you to feel that sense of connection.

Ideally, you’re doing this practice in a natural setting such as a park, or you could be sitting on your deck or in a garden, or out by the ocean where you feel a sense of warmth, love, or connection with the world around you.

You don’t have to be physically in nature, however, to do this practice. You might be sitting at home, but you may be recollecting times you’ve been in nature, in a forest, touched by contact with an animal, having been near the ocean, or remembering a sunset or the night sky. And in reflecting about that, it’s allowing you to feel that sense of connection. Because what loving-kindness practice does is open the heart; it takes us beyond our small sense of self. And, of course, being out in nature, a sense of connection is immediately apparent: We can touch in with a wider sphere of experience. It can take us out of that sometimes-constricted sense of self, where we feel small or separate or isolated.

So the loving-kindness practice itself, as well as being in nature, is a way to allow the heart to open, to soften, and to abide more naturally in a sense of openhearted connection.

PHOTOGRAPH BY KEOPASERTH / ADOBESTOCK

BY MARK COLEMAN

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First, find a posture where you can feel comfortable, where you feel safe in the environment you’re in. You can close your eyes for a few moments and just let your attention settle. First attune to your body: Sense the physical body touching the ground. Feel your connection with the earth. Notice the support of the land, of the earth, under you.

It’s always there: present, supportive, nourishing.

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As you sense your breath, consider that with each inhale you’re taking in oxygen released from leaves, plants, plankton.

Each exhale releases carbon dioxide that’s reabsorbed by plant and tree life either nearby or far away. Sense how this simple breath connects you to this vast web of life.

Feel any sense of appreciation as you inhale; that the life— trees and grasses—sustains you, nourishes you. And with the exhale, foster a sense of well-wishing, warmth, love, appreciation to all the photosynthesizing life that allows you and all breathing beings to live, to survive.

Now, take a moment to reflect on a time when you were recently touched by some experience in nature—something that moved you. Perhaps it was an encounter with an animal or bird. Perhaps it was an ancient tree in a forest, or a deer and her fawn, or the vastness of the night sky.

Recalling that experience, extend your heart with a sense of warmth and kindness, love, well-wishing, toward whatever it was that touched you. Radiate a sense of kindness and friendliness.

If you are sitting outside, you may choose to look around. Take in the trees, meadow, grasses, or desert terrain, or whatever landscape is around you. And, again, extending a sense of warmth, friendliness, love. You can do that through phrases that express your heart’s wish for life: May these grasses, may these trees, may all the beings that live here—animals, birds, insects—be healthy. May they be safe and protected.

Use whatever words come to you that express your heart’s wish for the life all around you. Say these words silently. Repeat them a few times. They can be inspired by whatever is around you, or whatever comes into your mind and heart. Consider whatever part of nature touches you—and extend this sense of warmth and loving-kindness. May all the beings on this earth be safe and protected from harm.

May all endangered species, and all species, be safe. May all creatures be happy and thrive. May all life be healthy and vital.

Sensing into the life around you, the experience of love is always a process of giving and receiving. You may be feeling how loved or touched you are by the natural world, and how the heart naturally wants to respond with offering loving-kindness, well-wishing, or gratitude.

Remember to include oneself as part of Earth’s moving surface, worthy of love. Continue to radiate love to all peoples everywhere: those near and far, those you know and don’t know. May all these life forms, or beings, or peoples, or creatures everywhere be safe from harm, be protected, live with health, with happiness, with safety.

So, in these last moments, allow the heart to radiate in all directions—to all elements of this Earth, to the life that lives here.

As you end this practice, you can take this heartfulness anywhere because this kindness is the essence of your own heart. The nature of the heart is to love, to be kind and compassionate. So, whether you’re moving about in the city, or out in nature, see if you can extend this quality of heartfulness, this kindness everywhere. Radiate love through a sense of friendliness and warmth to yourself, to each other, and particularly to Earth on which we live and the natural systems on which we depend. ●

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self-compassion

PHOTOGRAPH BY NIILO ISOTALO / UNSPLASH

Coming Undone but Not Unmade

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What do we do when the future we’re facing suddenly looks different from the one we imagined? Writer Kate Bowler had to consider this question as she navigated a cancer diagnosis while raising a young child, and contemplating not just the meaning of life, but the meaning of her life.

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am a professor of history, so I know this in my bones: Nothing is inevitable. History is made by people who stared, blinking, into the uncertain future. Their paths were not lit before them by sacred meteors. For most of us, this sounds like good news. We choose and choose and choose again.

Before the baby, before the diagnosis, before the pandemic. Before.

Before when I was earnest and clever and ignorant, I thought, Life is a series of choices. I curated my own life until, one day, I couldn’t. I had accepted the burden of limitless choices only to find that I had few to make. I was stuck in this body, this house, this life.

American culture has popular theories about how to build a perfect life.

You can have it all if you just learn how to conquer your limits. There is infinity lurking somewhere at the bottom of your inbox or in the stack of self-help books on the bedside table. It taunts you as you grip the steering wheel in traffic, attempting your new breathing practice, or in the predawn minutes when you could be working out.

I have seen these guides to endless progress for sale in airport kiosks.

There are bucket lists galore with glossy photographs of thrills and architectural wonders; calendars with rituals to eradicate inefficiencies; and writing journals juiced with visionary wisdom from gurus and titans of industry. These are the formulas for a meaningful life, how to live one and how to end one.

But the truth is somewhere inside of me: There is no formula. We live and we are loved and we are gone.

Tumors budded and spread across my colon and liver without my consent, and here I am. I feel a spark of horror each time I remember it: We come undone.

This is what happens to all of us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kate Bowler, PhD is a New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and a professor at Duke University. Her latest book, No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear), grapples with her diagnosis as she come to terms with limitations in a culture that says anything is possible.

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My precarious diagnosis has triggered a series of mental-health assessments at the cancer clinic during which lovely and well-meaning counselors, all seemingly named Caitlin, are telling me to “find my meaning.” They wonder if I should consider making a “Bucket List,” as many other patients have found the process to be clarifying. What new skill could I learn?

What classic movies should I watch?

Is there a passion I might reignite?

Cross-stitching? Restoring a vintage car? Soaring in a hot-air balloon?

I attempt to take notes while they are talking, but I find myself in a flurry of queries to the internet about the origin of the term bucket list, followed by a long period of processing my disappointment that it only became popular in the eponymous 2007 movie starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Boring. But I resolve to try to follow the lead of The Caitlins nonetheless. After all, what do I know about dying? I’ve never done it before.

On those merciful days without medical treatment, I begin to spend long afternoons in the stacks of the library digging through the history of the bucket list. The phrase itself is easy enough to date. In the eighteenth century, the term became a horrible reference to the act of either “kicking the bucket” from under your own feet (suicide) or having it knocked out from underneath you (homicide).

But the idea that we should seek out a series of defining experiences is as old as our historical record. The ancient Greeks compiled a list of marvels known as the Seven Wonders of the World including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Travelers in the Roman Empire could consult guidebooks to steer them to the home of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras and his famous theorem.

A bucket list disguises a dark question as a challenge: What do you want to do before you die? We all want, →

ILLUSTRATIONS BY GERALDINE SY

Bucket Lists

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PHOTOGRAPH BY SIMON BERGER / UNSPLASH

MINI COURSE Embracing Uncertainty Frank Ostaseski leads a 4-part video series in open-hearted awareness. mindful.org/ fearless

self-compassion

in the words of Henry David Thoreau, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” But do we attain that by listing everything we’ve ever wanted to do? Should we really focus on how many moments we can collect?

The problem with aspirational lists, of course, is that they often skip the point entirely. It is much easier to count items than to know what counts.

What Counts?

The maxim “live in the moment” is ancient wisdom repackaged. Don’t worry, be happy. Hakuna matata.

You only live once. It is the marrow of hedonism—that centuries-old philosophy rooted in the pursuit of pleasure—and the hope of every college student. Gather ye keg stands while ye may. Heaven seems distant when paradise is now.

There are versions of this philosophy which are, of course, pure idiocy.

Living in the moment can make us careless and materialistic, selfish and prone to wanton acts of never taking a multivitamin. Why recycle? Why save for retirement? Tomorrow is nothing but happiness deferred.

But in this digital age of exhaustion and distraction, the ability to be present-minded has become a rare and valuable commodity. My inbox is flooded with newsletters explaining how various philosophical, religious, and psychological strategies of mental self-management will help me embrace the fullness of each day, unfolding each moment like a gift. Our therapeutic culture swears this is freedom: freedom from our dizzying thoughts and our conflicting emotions as we exorcise the demons of negativity and desire. In this new strain of heroic individualism, people master the world by conquering their own inner worlds.

The terrible gift of a terrible illness is that it has, in fact, taught me to live in the moment. Nothing but this day matters: the warmth of this crib, the sound of his hysterical giggling. And

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when I look closely at my life, I realize that I’m not just learning to seize the day. In my finite life, the mundane has begun to sparkle. The things I love— the things I should love—become clearer, brighter.

Burdened by the past, preoccupied by the present, or worried about the future, I had failed to appreciate the inestimable gift of a single minute.

Time is not an arrow anymore, and heaven is not tomorrow. It’s here, for a second, when I could drown in the beauty of what I have but also what may never be. Hope for the future feels like a kind of arsenic that needs to be carefully administered, or it can poison the sacred work of living in the present: taking my medication, asking about a friend’s terrible boyfriend, and inhaling the smell of my son’s skin as he sleeps next to me. I want to be alive until I am not.

What Is Enough?

There will never be enough of these moments for me. Enough anniversaries with the man who still thinks that late adolescence was an acceptable time to get married. Enough pages of history books I scribble and then immediately send to my father, who will put on his glasses and squint at the screen impassively until he loudly declares it to be “Quite acceptable!” Enough early mornings feeding spoonfuls of glop into my son’s mouth between our fits of giggling. And if those are the measures of time, I am bankrupt.

Once every few hours I pause what I am doing because I can’t take a breath. I have caught a glimpse of the terrible someday when, even though I am his mom and he is my son and those words keep the birds in the sky, I may not be able to hold him.

I prepare for these moments each night, wide awake, imagining a time when I will be gone, even from his memory. When he will not know the weight of my hand on his blond head.

m VIDEO COURSE Being a Compassionate Companion Learn from Frank Ostaseski about caring for someone facing serious illness or end of life with empathy, patience, and joy. mindful.org/ caring

self-compassion

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUNO AGUIRRE / UNSPLASH

In my finite life, the mundane has begun to sparkle.

He will wonder which of his features are mine (his mouth) and what traits started with me (his evil laugh). He will be at a party and someone will say, “You remind me of your mom,” and he will feel a pang that a stranger knew me and he did not.

I canvass everyone I know who has lost a parent to find out what stories they cherish, and I incessantly google articles about longterm memory in children. Exactly how old does he have to be to find me in his memory? And what work do I need to do to be remembered? I put this question to my psychologist, who shakes his head. “Kate, you are laying the foundation. It’s there, but, yes, you might not get to see what he builds on top of it. The foundation is the part that doesn’t show.”

We are the sum of our experiences, the story goes, and require no retrospection. The road behind us could never have led anywhere but here.

And I’m closer to the truth of this experiment—living—and how the horror and the beauty of it feels almost blinding. I’m coming undone, but I’m not unmade.

All along, I wanted a formula for how to live, and cancer treatment has provided the clearest one of all.

Follow the rules. Keep to the schedule. Trust the experts. Smile! You’re so lucky. All of our masterpieces, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. All of our work, unfinished, unfinishable. We do too much, never enough, and are done before we’ve even started. ●

Copyright © 2021

by Kate Bowler All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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MAKE THE MUNDANE

Sparkle

We can wait a long time for the big moments of our lives to arrive. They are few and far between—a marriage, a birth, a big trip, a graduation. Those milestones that live in our future and in our past and that make up the highlight reel of our lives.

And then there are the days in between—the mundanity that, as Kate Bowler observes, can begin to sparkle when we consider all the moments that make up our time on earth.

What happens when we look for the sublime in mundane moments of our lives? We asked illustrator Geraldine Sy to capture the beauty and connection available in even the most basic daily experiences. May this illustrated ode inspire you to love the life you have, in all its ordinary beauty.

Notice moments of play Savor the feeling of the air on your skin, the sounds of children’s voices raised in exuberant play, the scent on the breeze, the reminder that not everything needs to be taken seriously.

Consider what goes into the piece of fresh produce you hold in your hand—sun, rain, wind, pollination, cultivation, selection, harvest. All the hands that worked to put that piece of produce in yours.

Engage all your senses, including your sense of gratitude.

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ILLUSTRATION BY GERALDINE SY

Grow your gratitude

self-compassion

Savor the beauty of nature Connect with wonder at the natural world. Feel the earth beneath you, the way night air feels, the silence around you. Marvel at the industry of fireflies, the light they bring to the darkness.

Slow your roll Take a moment to see the world from a canine’s-eye view. Tune in to the scents, sights, and sounds of a simple dog walk, and let yourself feel the excitement your furry friend is bringing to this daily experience.

Connect with love Drop into a moment of connection with a friend, and with your surroundings. Whether the conversation is deep or light, see if you can be fully present, noticing your surroundings, your companion, the taste of your coffee, how it feels to be with someone who loves you as you are.

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BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

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

EXPANSIVE LEADERSHIP Cultivating Mindfulness to Lead Self and Others in a Changing World Latha Poonamallee, PhD • Routledge

We live in a world that’s diverse, complex, and constantly changing, and with all those changes comes a call to shift our leadership styles.

Expansive leadership, as Dr. Latha Poonamallee explains, “is an invitation to explore how to be a leader in an expansive, inclusive, robust, and resilient way.” As Chair of Faculty of Management and University Fellow at the New School in New York City, Poonamallee can help leaders usher in this new era of change with kindness, self-reflection, curiosity, and mindfulness.

While there are a lot of leadership books out today, Poonamallee successfully uses various guides and exercises to differentiate hers from the rest. This 28-day journey, filled with daily journal prompts, meditations, and a reminder to “be kind and cultivate a curious mind,” allows you to create space for deep reflection and gives you the tools to enact change in yourself and your teams.

Think mindfulness could benefit your organization, but you’re not sure where to start?

Poonamallee demystifies the role of mindfulness in leadership and provides a layered approach to how you can become an effective leader and build inclusive organizations. An expansive approach to mindfulness, she says, guides us toward treating those around us with kindness and respect.

So whether you already see yourself as a leader in an organization or your personal life, or are looking to become one, you will find ways here to embrace change and transformation. While Poonamallee jokes that the book wrote itself, it’s clear that her honesty, diligent research, and thoughtful prompts make this book a great addition to any bookshelf. – OL

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FIVE GOOD MINUTES OF MINDFULNESS Reduce Stress, Reset, and Find Peace Right Now Jeffrey Brantley • New Harbinger

In five minutes you can brew a cup of tea, solve a Wordle (on good days), or do one of the 100 practices from Five Good Minutes of Mindfulness. Whether you choose tea, Wordle, or a mindfulness practice, there’s no right way to spend five minutes.

But thinking about what you can do in that time puts this collection of practices into

perspective. It’s accessible no matter the level of your mindfulness practice. All you need is a few minutes to establish presence through mindful breathing, set your intention, and do the exercise you’ve chosen from the book. From slowing down to gratitude to connection, there’s a fiveminute practice for every day, mood, or situation. – KR

PEACE IS A PRACTICE An Invitation to Breathe Deep and Find a New Rhythm for Life Morgan Harper Nichols • Zondervan Books

Even if all around us seems to be falling apart, says Harper Nichols—an artist, musician, and author of four books—we have the power to dip into peace. Because, she writes, “Peace is the river in the desert, not on the other side of it.” She relates her own struggles, including her autism diagnosis at 31, from a worldview rooted in both her Christian perspective and

in simply being human, with the countless joys and challenges we share. This compassionate, refreshing, and down-to-earth book guides us through myriad practices to cultivate peace amid challenges. A few examples: Work with your light and shadows; awaken empathy; allow yourself to rest, and to trust; share your story; and “let go into love.” – AT

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THE MODERN LOSS HANDBOOK An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience Rebecca Soffer • Running Press

Rebecca Soffer wants you to think like a crab (OK, hear her out.) “They don’t try to follow any particular trajectory. They change course when something isn’t working for them—and decide pretty quickly when it isn’t,” Soffer writes. She proposes that the same applies to grief. Being able to adapt and weave your grief into your life takes time and some discomfort. That’s where The Modern Loss Handbook comes in. It’s a journal, task manager, and memorial

rolled into one delightfully illustrated space to honor your grief. You’re guided through prompts, mindfulness practices, and tips to help you stay connected to yourself, connected to the world, and connected to the person who died (referred to as “your person”). How you use the handbook is up to you. You can follow the exercises, remember, feel, mess up, try again, or as Soffer writes, you can toss the book across the room if you so choose. – KR

GUTSY Mindfulness Practices for Everyday Bravery Dr. Leah Katz • Broadleaf Books

While many of us might not be quick to label ourselves as brave, in this book, Dr. Leah Katz lets us know that under all of the societal expectations, self-doubt, and fear lies an endless capacity to be brave. Filled with self-affirming reminders, humor, and honesty, Gutsy reads like a conversation with an old friend.

Throughout various chapters, Katz touches on real-life issues such as relationships, pain, and body image to

remind us of the moments of bravery we show in our personal, everyday battles.

Dr. Katz draws on her Jewish faith and culture, as well as her expertise as a psychologist, and shares her own fears to help us acknowledge that there is bravery in honesty, self-care, gratitude. And if you’re looking for a reminder of your inner strength and worthiness, there is also bravery in simply picking up this book. – OL

WHAT HAPPENS IN MINDFULNESS Inner Awakening and Embodied Cognition John Teasdale • Guilford

In the early ’90s, John Teasdale, a groundbreaking psychology researcher at Oxford University, along with Zindel Seigel, of the University of Toronto, and Mark Williams, also of Oxford, developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. MBCT has proved to be not simply a complement to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but a beneficial program in its own right, widely practiced and subjected to ongoing research. Teasdale, now retired, has produced his magnum opus in What Happens in Mindfulness, an ambitious book that makes an important contribution to the scientific understanding undergirding the mindfulness movement.

Teasdale notes that as mindfulness practices expand their reach, it becomes increasingly valuable to understand the efficacy of mindfulness through secular views and models, not to replace religious ideologies, but rather to use within contexts such as psychologists’ study of the mind and clinicians’ concerns with healing patients.

The model he relies on was employed in the development of MBCT: Interactive Cognitive Subsystems (ICS), a framework for understanding mental activity “firmly rooted in cognitive science and in what we currently know about how our minds work.” ICS departs sharply from earlier approaches that treated the mind as a kind of disembodied “symbol-processing computer.” ICS emphasizes embodiment.

The interplay between two kinds of knowing—conceptual and holistic-intuitive—is the book’s driving force. “We try to achieve happiness,” Teasdale writes, “using the problemsolving strategies of conceptual knowing, rather than experience the happiness of wholeness linked to holistic-intuitive knowing.” Part one examines the pursuit of happiness through these two ways of knowing, illustrating the value of enhancing the oft-ignored holistic way of knowing. Part two investigates mindfulness practice to try to understand how and why it works.

Part three explores how far the practice can go, helping us transcend duality and separateness, discover intrinsic joy, and unlock compassion and our capacity to live in a state of flow. – BB

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PODCAST

reviews MINDSET MASTERY Episode: “How Mindfulness and Self Reflection Can Change the World with Saundra Davis” Money is seldom the meaningful aspect of financial goals, says podcast guest Saundra Davis, a financial coach and mindfulness teacher. It’s about what the money can buy, and for many it adds up to peace of mind, freedom, or legacy.

Her refreshing perspective takes into account the deeply emotional nature of financial

planning, and therefore, the responsibility of financial coaches like herself—and not only for people who are wealthy. She offers a candid account of her personal experience with poverty and her journey into the world of finance. “Just because you’re broke doesn’t mean you’re broken,” Davis says. – AWC

WILD WITH SARAH WILSON Episode: “Johann Hari: THIS is why you’re finding the world too much” If you haven’t yet delved into Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, let yourself be convinced by this highly engaging episode.

Host Sarah Wilson probes some of the book’s salient topics, including why it matters that we read differently on a page versus on a screen; the real productivity cost of believing our brains can multitask; and the combo of

personal and systemic shifts needed in order to truly attend to what Hari describes as the “unprecedented tripwires and trapdoors” we now face as a species. From climate chaos to political upheavals, he says, “If we lose our greatest superpower, our attention, at the moment of our greatest crisis, that’s going to be a real problem.” – AT

LIFE KIT Episode: “Mindfulness 101 with Jon Kabat-Zinn” It may be an understatement to say that mindfulness is a hot topic—but with all the information out there, it might actually feel more difficult to learn the basics. Enter Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), who helps us cut through all the noise and explains mindfulness in a way that’s

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approachable and backed by science. In this engaging 20-minute conversation with host Shereen Marisol Meraji, Kabat-Zinn highlights the importance of awareness in a mindfulness practice, dispels some of the common misconceptions about mindfulness, and shares a breathbased meditation practice for beginners. – OL

“Friendships have always been essential to human survival and evolution.”

HOW TO BREAK UP WITH YOUR FRIENDS Finding Meaning, Connection, and Boundaries in Modern Friendships Erin Falconer • Sounds True

“The truth is, I chose this title to get your attention,” Erin Falconer admits in the first lines of the introduction to How to Break Up With Your Friends. Compassionately cutting friends loose is only a part of Falconer’s deep dive into the meaning, importance, practice, and ritual of nourishing friendships. Don’t worry, you’ll get what you initially chose the book for (in Chapter 9), but first Falconer outlines how to be a good friend (to yourself, too). By the time you turn the last page, you’ll understand that “so much of friendship really is about you: who you are, what you need, and what you can give.”

Through a refreshing mix of anecdotes from Falconer’s life and the lives of other women she interviewed, and expert advice, you’ll learn how to evaluate whether a friendship is serving you in its current form and how you can take the steps to strengthen a relationship–or ultimately break up with your friend. Falconer is honest in her thoughts on friendship and how you can “bring the fullest human being possible into relationships.” Taking a look inward to assess what you expect from your friendships doesn’t necessarily come easy but simple “homework” assignments at the end of chapters make the workload lighter. The work you put into one friendship may not match the work you put into another. It’s the circumstances that can make dynamics tricky, but Falconer acknowledges that and offers her voice to remind you that you’re not alone. – KR

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LIFE, PART TWO Seven Keys to Awakening With Purpose and Joy As You Age David Chernikoff • Shambhala

Chernikoff—a longtime meditation teacher and counselor, and a former director of conscious aging program Sage-ing International— shares this insightful vision of what it means to become a wise elder. Dispelling the notion that aging inevitably saps us of meaning and joy, he deems our later years our spiritual prime: “The challenges inherent in the aging process,” writes Chernikoff, “can become a direct pathway to the actualization of our best human qualities—wisdom, joy,

Let the planets be your guide to reestablish trust in your own body and inner wisdom.

Nutritionist, certified strength and conditioning specialist, and astrologer Claire Gallagher guides you in the healing powers of each planet and how to use food, movement, and lifestyle to realign and empower.

compassion, generosity, loving-kindness, and equanimity.”

He then maps that path, drawing from many wisdom traditions as he illuminates seven core principles for growing older: Embracing the Mystery, Choosing a Vision, Awakening Intuition, Committing to Inner Work, Suffering Effectively, Serving from the Heart, and Celebrating the Journey. It all adds up to a compassionate, harmonious work, lighting the way to connection and purpose as hallmarks of this part of life. – AT

THE EXTRAORDINARY GIFT OF BEING ORDINARY Finding Happiness Right Where You Are Dr. Ronald D. Siegel • Guilford

Am I doing this right? Will people like it? …like me?

Questions like this plague most of us every day. If they don’t, we may be a narcissist, sure we are the greatest! How do we break free and discover a middle way between withering self-examination and unjustified over-confidence?

Siegel, a longtime meditator and clinical psychologist, explores “how we humans evolved to be so preoccupied with evaluating ourselves, why we can’t win at this game, and what we each

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

might do about it.” Findings: Our brains are preoccupied with assessing social rank and likability (primal survival concerns); as circumstances change, we keep moving the yardsticks out of our reach; and the good news is that we can give up the game, with a mindfulness toolkit that can interrupt our endless search for greater self-esteem. His diagnoses and prescriptions are delivered with humor, care, and lots of stories. It’s a helpful message that goes down easy. – BB

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Practical advice and tools to help parents of kids ages 18 months to 4 years respond skillfully and with mindful intention, especially in difficult moments, from the popular author of Sitting Still Like a Frog.

From the bestselling author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships, the definitive guide to finding your perfect timing for life’s biggest decisions. Filled with relatable stories and helpful practices, Ready helps us understand our own perfect timing in everything that matters most.

Stay calm, steady, and composed through the ups and downs of life with yoga poses, relaxation techniques, meditations, and lessons on how to manage stress, grief, anxiety, and life’s transitions.

The first-of-its-kind workbook that uses three easy steps to repair your relationship with money, from financial therapist Bari Tessler.

SHAMBHALA.COM

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TUNE IN TO

mindful Visit mindful.org for featured meditations from Sharon Salzberg, Chris Germer, and Cheryl Jones 3 PRACTICES TO HELP YOU FIND STRENGTH IN SELF-COMPASSION

1

Open Your Heart

with Sharon Salzberg

We tend to show more compassion to others than to ourselves. While it can be easier for us to lend a shoulder or a kind word to a friend, it can be a lot harder to open ourselves up to receiving the same.

In this guided meditation, Sharon Salzberg invites us to open our hearts to giving and receiving love and reminds us that there’s nothing special we must do to deserve love—the fact that we simply exist is more than enough.

2

Try a Self-Compassion Break

with Kristin Neff and Chris Germer

As much as the good moments are a part of life, so too are the difficult ones—and self-compassion can allow us to soften our approach to difficult events and emotions. While this may seem obvious, it’s so easy to forget. This guided practice from Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer can be a pleasant reminder to apply the three core components of self-compassion—mindfulness, common humanity, and kindness—when life gets rough.

3

Meet Yourself Where You Are Right Now with Cheryl Jones

Mindfulness invites us to appreciate the present moment instead of wishing things were different.

This also applies to the way we look at ourselves, including some of the mistakes we’ve made and ways in which we wish we were different. In this meditation practice, Cheryl Jones leads us in a practice to foster self-acceptance and offers a way of learning to work with ourselves, and not on ourselves. – OL

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WHO IS WELLNESS FOR? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind Fariha Róisín • Harper Wave

In her third book, Fariha Róisín considers that uncomfortable question, who gets to be well? Her answer, conveying the breadth of true wellness and the depth of interconnectedness, is visionary: Either wellness must be for everyone, or it is for no one. “It deeply concerns me that whiteness and capitalism have co-opted wellness, relegating caring for oneself as a privilege when wellness should be for all,” she writes. “How can we be individually well if we aren’t well collectively?”

Róisín brings the perspectives of a queer Muslim woman who is part of the Bangladeshi diaspora, now living in New York. In courageous and richly insightful prose, and weaving in quotations from dozens of experts and teachers, she explores how “wellness” is constructed by unjust social and economic systems. She also reflects frankly on her own traumas: abuse by her mother, white supremacy, chronic illness.

Her own healing, she says, was a catalyst for the book’s themes: “Starting with an inquiry into my own wellness inevitably meant that I had to expand to think of other people’s, too.”

Part 1, Journey to the Mind, looks at attitudes toward meditation and intuition. Róisín discusses epistemicide (the destruction of knowledge) as key to colonialism, with visible impacts on Western interpretations of meditation that often erase its original contexts. “If you meditate,” she wants us to ask ourselves, “why do you do it?” Part 2, Journey to the Body, explores the physiology of trauma, dysmorphia, white appropriation of yoga, and chronic illness. Part 3, On Self-Care (“a chance to choose myself again and again”), also investigates self-harm, esoteric traditions, and sexuality, referencing wisdom from bell hooks and Audre Lorde: “There is an inherent radicality to caring for yourself when you come from a lineage of oppressed people.”

Lastly, in Introduction to Justice, she probes the need for economic degrowth, healing friendships, and a relationship of gratitude and reciprocity with the Earth. “There is sacredness here, there always was,” she says. “It’s about seeing it with fresh eyes and remembering everything can be a teaching.” – AT

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F R O M B ESTS EL L I N G AU T H O R

J A M E S B R YA N S M I T H WONDER SEEKER 52 Ways to Wake Up Your Creativity and Find Your Joy Andrea Scher • Harper Design

Author Andrea Scher seeks to remind us of magic—that source of wonder that is abundant in our surroundings, ourselves, and our connections with one another, if only we turn our attention to it. “Here’s what I know: our capacity for wonder and delight is also the gateway to our joy,” she writes.

This volume is a guidebook to levity, creativity, and delight in a time when it feels so needed. Scher skillfully navigates the reality that life

is sometimes heavy, emotions are sometimes difficult, and we sometimes just don’t feel joyful, especially lately, and that’s OK. She offers space for reflection with prompts and offers personal stories in and around the main feature, which is a collection of ways to connect with ourselves, one another, and a sense of awe. If you could use a little help to fall back in love with the goodness that surrounds us despite everything else, this book is for you. – AWC

FREEDOM FROM HEALTH ANXIETY Karen Lynn Cassiday • New Harbinger

"James Bryan Smith has given us a valuable

guide to caring for our souls in The Good and Beautiful You. Convinced that Christ is the

The paradox of health anxiety is that we risk spending our healthiest moments worrying about losing physical health instead of enjoying it, writes author Karen Cassiday. We may unintentionally sacrifice our mental health in our worry and striving to get ahead of any possible threat. “Your real dilemma is not whether or not you have, or will get, a terrible illness,” she tells us. “It’s how you’ll live well in the life that you have been given.”

In this book, she helps the us face our fear and determine what “living well” looks like for us. This is the beginning of building new habits and neural pathways that help us shift focus to the positive and be present with what’s here now. Anecdotes, reminders, guided meditations, and therapeutic exercises add up to in a well-rounded and practical guide for people who struggle with a chronic fear of illness, death, and dying. – AWC

June 2022 mindful 69

way to the wellness of the soul, Smith points us to paths where we can find healing for our damaged souls. This book will help many people!"

BRIAN Z AHND, coauthor of When Everything’s on Fire

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point of view

MY ONION JOURNEY

by BARRY BOYCE, FOUNDING EDITOR

m

72 mindful June 2022

not continue to ignore the halfdecade’s worth of extra stuff that had accumulated in the basement. This was not Marie Kondo. She would have a heart attack at the sight of my basement. It does not spark joy. But it could at least bring a semblance of tidiness. As I began clearing things out, I started to notice that I was in physical pain, and it was clear that most of the pain was self-inflicted.

For hours on end, I rushed to get to my imagined finish line, fretting and

to the center. I’m not so sure about the finality of that, so I find another metaphor even more powerful.

Continuing to meditate can be like traveling through different neighborhoods of an enormous city—the city of your mind. In my case, I finally stumbled into the neighborhood where people rush about crazily trying to get there. I didn’t notice it before, because I was preoccupied with exploring adjacent neighborhoods, where perhaps I

As I began clearing things out, I started to notice that I was in physical pain, and it was clear that most of the pain was self-inflicted. panting, and the lack of rhythm and relaxation in the work was taking its toll. That’s when it came to me: Yep. This is what I do, and I’ve done it for a long time. And if there are other people around when I’m in that frame of mind, my ability to notice what’s really happening with them is vastly diminished. The baggage cluttering up my mind is not bringing joy to me nor to those around me.

The ongoing process of practicing meditation over a lifetime has been likened to peeling away layers of an onion, that trusty multipurpose analogy for getting to the heart of the matter in stages. I would agree it’s like that. The mind of curiosity freed up by the simple act of doing nothing starts revealing insights. Ah, something truly true. And then…after a while you realize it’s not the whole picture (That’s true, but also…).

The onion journey, though, presupposes you’re going to make it

was discovering something about listening better, or judging less, or noticing the sky more.

The insights born of contemplative practice start to yield more insights, more neighborhoods to explore. It’s just like my basement cleaning: Just as I tidied up one area, the untidiness of another area revealed itself more vividly. More to clean up. It can be daunting; habits of cluttering up the regions of our mind can be longstanding and deep-seated. It could be discouraging. When will it end?

That’s just it, though. It doesn’t need to end. Each insight, each new neighborhood to explore, brings fresh air, and the only moment that matters is now. What’s the rush? ● ABOUT THE AUTHOR Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org and author of The Mindfulness Revolution. He has been an avid mindfulness practitioner for over 40 years.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL

It can be quite a sobering thought should you come to realize, as I have recently, that what you thought of as an aberration is actually a habit.

The part of you that works hard to maintain self-esteem can sometimes get carried away: “I don’t do that very often. That’s not me. That’s not who I am.” When you begin to realize that, hey, maybe that is who I am, because I do that kind of a lot, the dastardly inner critic—the evil counterpart to rose-colored-glasses man—can run roughshod over you, reducing you to an inert lump with its withering words. Fortunately, there is a middle way, as proponents of self-compassion readily point out. For starters, you can laugh at yourself, heartily. Then, give yourself a break. Breathe. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and see what’s there to be learned.

I learned that I regularly get into an intense rush when I’m doing something I don’t want to do. I clench my jaw, I tense my muscles, I breathe wrong, COURSE and I enslave Come as my mind to an You Are imagined ticking Barry Boyce clock, as if I were leads a 7-day the TV character self-paced Jack Bauer, from mindfulness 24, who has to retreat. single-handedly save the entire mindful.org/ world before diy-retreat the clock strikes midnight.

A few weeks ago I finally decided I could

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