Mindful Magazine August 2022 - 10 Meditations for Summer Self-Care

10 MEDITATIONS FOR SUMMER

Self-Care FIND DELIGHT IN YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK PLUS! WHY OUR BRAINS ARE DESIGNED TO FORGET

UNCOVER YOUR JOY Insights from 10 powerful women in mindfulness

AUGUST 2022 mindful.org

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CONTENTS THE HAPPINESS ISSUE

10 MEDITATIONS FOR SUMMER 12 Start Where You Are 21 Awaken Curiosity 23 Connect to Happiness 38 Take One Breath 39 Rest Your Attention 40 Listen to Your Body 41 Welcome Open Awareness 42 Appreciate Joy

PHOTO BY LEONID TIT / ADOBESTOCK. COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY MARNIE GRIFFITHS / MOMENT / VIA GETTY IMAGES

43 Explore What’s True 55 Cultivate an Open Heart

Savor the Joy of the Moment

Summer invites us to slow down, be present, and appreciate the world around us, writes Barry Boyce. Explore our collection of tips and practices to help you savor all the richest bits of summer—from the joyful moments to the mundane.

p.34 August 2022 mindful 1

contents

Summer Self-Care: Savor the Moment Summer offers the perfect invitation to take more opportunities to slow down, be present, and appreciate your life.

44

Meet the Movement 10 powerful women leaders of the mindfulness movement share what they’ve learned about living a life of meaning and how cultivating happiness fits into the equation.

18

How to Make Your Own Luck

22

Find Delight in Your Everyday Life

28

Why Our Brains Are Designed to Forget

44

Uncover Your Joy Insights from 10 Powerful Women in Mindfulness

STORIES

18 Mindful Living

Why We Believe in Luck

22 Inner Wisdom

Are You Happy Now?

24 Health

Finding Meaning in the Mystery

28 Brain Science

Why Our Brains Are Designed to Forget EVERY ISSUE

56

Let Your Garden Grow Gardener, artist, and activist Nkoula Badila shares how she discovered just how deep her roots grow—and what she needs in order to thrive.

2 mindful August 2022

4 From the Editor 7 In Your Words 8 Top of Mind 16 Mindful–Mindless 66 Bookmark This 72 Point of View with Barry Boyce

VOLUME TEN, NUMBER 3, 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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Heather Hurlock is the editor-in-chief of Mindful magazine and mindful.org. She’s a longtime editor, musician, and meditator with deep roots in service journalism. Connect with Heather at heather.hurlock@mindful.org.

4 mindful August 2022

It’s been difficult for me to think about happiness lately.

I’ve been in a spiral of grief and sadness with a detour into COVID and a concussion thrown in for kicks. My fuse is short, my tongue is sharp, my moods are stormy. But even still, I receive glimmers of love that remind me who I am at my core. For example, just last night I lost my temper with my two precocious daughters (who were doing everything except what I was kindly asking them to do). After I cooled down, and apologized, my daughter said, “I get it. We all have big emotions sometimes, Mom.” I nearly cried. And, when I was with my dad yesterday who’s ill and not long for this world, I told him: “You’re in my heart forever, Dad.” And though he isn’t strong enough to say much, he looked at me with a light in his eye and said, “And you in mine.” I cried the whole drive home.

These little sparks tell me that my life is more than just the difficult moments. My life reaches back in time, through my parents and their parents, and into the future through my kids. It ripples through the people I talk to every day—and even to you, dear reader. And, in this way, we all weave a tapestry of connection that can hold us in our time of need. How beautiful to recognize that our lives are a web of care woven across time and space, holding the love that’s been given and received like tiny drops of dew.

Is this what happiness is made of? Maybe. Roshi Joan Halifax, on page 27 of this issue, says, “Relationships, doing good in the world, benefiting others—these are threads that make the cloth of happiness.”

We’ve been asking our network of mindfulness teachers, researchers, and writers what leads to happiness. And this issue you hold in your hands is packed full of wisdom we can’t wait for you to discover.

On page 56, Nkoula Badila shares what planting a garden with her family taught her about self-care, community, and nurturing a connection to her roots. On page 44, 10 women who are blazing pathways in mindfulness offer insights that remind us of the ways joy is alive in the practice. And on page 34, four teachers—including founding editor Barry Boyce—offer practices to inspire a sense of savoring in your summer days—no matter what they bring.

This life of ours can be exasperating. That’s just how it is sometimes. In those moments, I hope you can find the glimmers of love that are no doubt showing up for you, too. And in them a reminder that happiness isn’t out there somewhere to be found. It’s inherently yours.

With Love,

PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAIRE ROSEN

Happiness is Yours

Healthy Mind, Healthy Life

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

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in your words

Happiness is...

Here's what's putting a spring in Mindful readers' steps!

Where do you find happiness?

For me, happiness is found in nature. Nothing is better than walking in nature and appreciating the energy, sounds, smells, beauty, and feeling of everything.

Karen Emmons On a mindful walk with my dog, taking nature in, observing, noticing!

Jennifer Squires I find happiness when I tap into my inner little girl. She finds delight in the simplest things; this transforms the entire world into a place of beauty!

Coach Cherise When I wake up without pain, see my lovely daughters , see my dog after work, and when my husband hugs me inthismomentbox

Next Question…

How do you find moments of calm?

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

Do you believe money can buy happiness?

92% YES

Is happiness a state of mind?

What made you happy today?

Passing the day with my husband. I don’t need external things to make me happy.

↑ @veggietrish is all smiles with the birthday celebrant!

eugenia_shpilman Watching my friend’s little boy just be a little boy, having fun. catieslife

76% NO

Sitting outside an Italian grocery store/deli in the sun, eating lunch with my husband. barbzuccarello

Does happiness depend on external circumstances?

Sitting outside on my deck this morning drinking my tea and thinking of my grandmother. mindfulmummie

71%

NO

Taking care of my inner self. bbfr21

↑ Sara Meredith finds happiness in this beautiful garden oasis.

↓ @Radhekrishna finds happiness lies in the folds of a birthday card.

top of mind

TOP OF

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

GIVING MORE When the United Nations published research showing that women in Latin American countries experience high

levels of income inequality, Mexicoborn Spanish teacher Claudia Jones recognized how she could help empower women to close the gap. In

August 2020, she launched Mindfulness, Opportunities, Resilience, and Equity (MORE) Latinoámerica, an online educational platform by and for Spanish-speaking women. Initially, her friends doubted the project’s feasibility, but today it has helped more

than 15,000 people learn new skills, from optimizing a LinkedIn profile to practicing mindfulness to developing leadership.

“Personally, if I had not had an education, it would have been very difficult for me to overcome the adversities in my life,” Jones told USA Today.

GET DRAWN IN Van Gogh Museum visitors in Amsterdam can experience a mindfulness session surrounded

by a collection of works united for the first time in an exhibit called Van Gogh and the Olive Groves. The sessions are a part of the museum’s new mental health program Open Up with Vincent. Calling on Van Gogh’s connection to the healing power of art and nature throughout his life, the program includes painting workshops, meditation videos inspired by scenic paintings, and teaching materials for schools.

The most visible signs of the climate crisis are external—but, to truly address them, we may need to look inward. In a report released in April 2022, authors Jamie Bristow and Rosie Bell of The Mindfulness Initiative and Professor Christine Wamsler of Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS) explore “the common thread of our interrelated socioecological crises”: the paradigm of disconnection from nature, from other humans, and from ourselves.

According to the report, available on The Mindfulness Initiative’s website, scientific research suggests that mindfulness and compassion can help us shape a new story about our future. “We need to support people to turn toward difficult emotions like grief and fear, but the neglected inner dimension of the climate crisis isn’t only about increasing people’s personal resilience amid adversity,” says Bristow. “By reconnecting to ourselves, others,

PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA ANDERSON / UNSPLASH, FERNANDA / ADOBESTOCK

THE CLIMATE WITHIN

top of mind

and nature and shifting our disconnected worldview, we can address the root cause of the crisis and enable effective action.”

NOW WE ARE 10

PHOTOGRAPH BY ESVETLEISHAYA , ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN

The Mindful Birthing and Parenting Foundation is celebrating the tenth anniversary of Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body, and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond, in which Nancy Bardacke lays out Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP). “There’s an overarching sense of the impact now,” says Kimberly Streeter, CFO at the Mindful Birthing and Parenting Foundation. Mindful Birthing launched global interest in MBCP and a teacher training program that is

now taught in 33 countries. (Read more about MBCP in China on p. 55.)

“This is really an opportunity for folks to be aware of what’s happening in their bodies and the relationships in the room and to be able to be participants in it with our senses.”

Streeter says. “It’s tools and skillfulness for navigating the good parts, the joyous parts, and the parts that are more challenging.”

PICK-ME-UP IN AISLE 9 Anthony Sartori took a job at a grocery store while he was creating the mental-health nonprofit Evolving Minds. While working there he noticed a need to invest in the mental health of instore employees.

“There’s a wide

range of cultural issues that come up within the grocery store that grocery store workers have to face every day,” Sartori says.

“And with all that stress and the trauma of the world, there wasn’t really a system in place to support employees’ wellbeing internally.”

This observation led him to create Mindful Grocery Stores, a program designed to bring mindfulness practices that focus on gratitude, kindness, and joy into the work environment every day. The program has been adopted

by MOM’s Organic Market in Baltimore, MD, with workers sharing that they have noticed increased feelings of connection, community, and care for one another.

ACTS OF kindness

by AVA WHITNEY-COULTER

PET FRIENDLY

When John Burley was hospitalized for pneumonia, he had no one to take care of his 12-yearold dog, Boomer.

When his nurse Jennifer Smith found out the dog had been taken to the pound, she inquired at nearby shelters and adopted Boomer so Burley could rest easy knowing that the dog was in good care.

TACO ‘BOUT IT

Early in the pandemic, youth speaker Sam Demma heard his friends were having a hard time so he sent an order of their favorite food: tacos. The grateful friends paid it forward by designing

a logo that says “Be Someone’s Taco,” which Demma now uses to encourage kids to act with kindness—to be other people’s tacos— and the trend has taken off.

INSTA-HERO

Instacart worker Jessica Higgs saved lives when she went against company guidelines to warn an elderly man’s daughter that she suspected a gas leak in his home.

The daughter immediately raised Higgs’ tip from $14 to $100, and the next day said that Higgs had been correct and had saved the lives of the woman’s father and son.

Higgs later posted a TikTok that went viral, urging viewers, “If you see something, say something.”

August 2022 mindful 9

top of mind

Research News

by B. GRACE BULLOCK

Research gathered from University of Washington, Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and others.

GUILT FREE? Researchers at Yale and the University of Washington explored how a person’s state of mind while meditating, and their social context, might affect their behavior toward others. In one study, individuals were asked to recall and write about a situation when they felt guilty. Half were then asked to mindfully focus on their breath; others were told to let their minds wander. Afterwards, they completed a survey assessing their feelings of guilt, then were asked to imagine they’d been given $100

and estimate how much they’d donate to the person they had wronged. Those who’d done the mindfulness exercise reported less remorse and, on average, were willing to donate nearly 20% less than those who’d let their minds wander.

In another experiment, participants were divided into three groups. One group practiced mindful breathing, the second let their minds wander, and the third browsed the internet. They were all then asked to write an apology letter to someone they’d wronged. Letters were rated by two independent evaluators on whether the individuals took responsibility for their actions, and

10 mindful August 2022

if they offered to make up for their wrongdoing. Mindfulness group members offered less sincere apologies than those in the control groups, suggesting that practicing mindful breathing was linked to diminished feelings of guilt and less willingness to patch things up.

There was one notable exception: In a similar experiment, individuals were assigned to a breathing group, a lovingkindness meditation group, or a control condition.

This time, those who’d listened to a loving-kindness meditation were more likely than the others to want to make amends. This suggests that the effects of mindfulness on prosocial behavior may

top of mind

depend on the type of meditation practiced.

TEACHING THE TEACHERS Researchers in Brazil randomly assigned 76 public school teachers with no history of meditation to either an 8-week mindfulness-based health program

listening, walking meditation, and a body scan. The neuroscience group learned about nervous system development and biology, neuroplasticity, and the biology of memory and emotion. Before and after training all participants completed questionnaires about their levels of stress, quality of life, mood, and resilience. They also provided blood samples to assess their

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN

A mindfulness-based intervention may reduce public school teachers’ perceived stress, improve well-being, and lessen inflammation.

or an 8-week applied neuroscience course for educators. Each group met weekly and had 10-30 minutes of daily “homework.”

The mindfulness group practiced breath awareness, loving-kindness, self-compassion, compassionate communication, mindful

physiological stress and metabolic activity.

At study’s end, the mindfulness group’s quality of life and resilience increased significantly, and perceived stress and negative emotion decreased significantly compared to the control group.

Mindfulness group members

also showed decreases in several pro-inflammatory markers, and increased antioxidant activity. This suggests that a mindfulnessbased intervention (MBI) may reduce teachers’ perceived stress, improve wellbeing, and lessen inflammation and oxidative stress.

UNDERSTANDING MBIS University of Wisconsin at Madison and Brown University researchers conducted a systematic review of 44 meta-analyses of 336 randomized controlled trials of MBIs with more than 30,000 participants. The result? In many cases, MBIs can reduce symptoms for a variety of conditions better than no treatment.

Compared to other therapies, mindfulness practices offer some benefit, but more research is needed to understand what works, for whom, and for which conditions MBIs are most effective.

August 2022 mindful 11

BEGINNER’S MIND Q&A

START WHERE YOU ARE I’m an absolute beginner. Is there an optimal state of mind to be in to meditate?

What about time of day?

A

Welcome! The best time to meditate is when you can allow yourself to safely and fully engage in the moment. There is no special place or state of mind to be in, nor an exact way to practice. Mindfulness meditation meets you where you are. The mere thought of taking a minute to slow down is your cue to start.

You can try allowing your daily routines to become your meditation practice.

1 When you get out of bed, notice your surroundings, feel your feet on the floor or your hands on your thighs, and be present with yourself. Feel the sun, notice the experience of water on the skin as you shower and brush your teeth. Notice how many colors are in the first meal you eat. Pausing for a moment to yourself is self-care, and is not selfish.

Jason Gant is an Athletic Mental Skills Coach at VillageTribe and Kaiser Permanente.

His practice focuses on recognizing we are living in a VUCA world—Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. He supports well-being by shifting into a Visionary, Understanding, Clarity, and Agile reality through the use of mental skills and mindful life design.

12 mindful August 2022

2 Continue this practice through the day. At any moment throughout the day you can look down, notice your feet on the floor (or wherever else you may notice you’re grounded to the earth), and invite a pleasant color or object in your immediate environment into the experience.

Here you are! Present.

3 Notice your state of mind after meditation and allow that moment to lead your next step.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID MAO / UNSPLASH, PROVIDED BY JASON GANT

Q

top of mind VOICES RISING • CATHY CAMPBELL

Bearing Witness

“

for the Better

by AVA WHITNEY-COULTER

PHOTOGRAPH PROVIDED BY CATHY CAMPBELL

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

For Cathy Campbell, growing up in Key West, Florida, was growing up amidst “chosen family.”

“That’s one of the life lessons I learned early. You need a community to wrap around and support you,” she says. Her mother modeled this as a social worker and activist in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

“My mom always finds some way to contribute to make things a little bit better and that’s a value she has instilled in me,” she says.

Campbell has shown up for others in her work as a hospice nurse, chair of the Acute and Specialty Care department at the University of Virginia School of Nursing, and hospice chaplain. Lately, she’s found a renewed sense of purpose.

At a hospice conference, she wandered into a room offering refreshments and soon realized she was at a presentation about LGBTQ+ healthcare. The presenter was a trans man who shared a story about a hospital stay where he had to be cared for in a bed in the hallway because nurses weren’t sure if he should go in a shared room with men or with women. In fact, trans people often report unjust treatment in emergency rooms, sometimes being outright refused care, and many delay seeking medical help because they fear mistreatment.

By the end of the presentation, she says, “I felt awful. A sense of shame.

And I was mad.”

So in 2021, she organized a two-day “think tank”

event with psychologists, counselors, spiritual care providers, doctors, nurses, funeral home staff, and experts like Danica Roem— the first out transgender woman elected to a state legislature.

“This offered such a light at that moment in time and offered such a space to be seen and see others and laugh and cry and sit in stillness,” says Dallas Ducar, CEO of Transhealth Northampton and a trans woman herself, who helped organize the event. “I think self-care for the queer community, specifically, is just so revolutionary and different. Like many marginalized communities, it’s relational.

It’s to learn that you are not alone or the only one.”

As a result, this year, Cambpell will work with the event’s planning board to publish a white paper of recommendations and research on end-of-life care for trans elders. “It was a powerful opportunity to really hold space and bear witness to the suffering, but out of that suffering to be able to come together and talk about what is next,” Campbell says.

August 2022 mindful 13

top of mind

Somavedic The beauty of harmonized space Harmony is about creating a coherent, life-supporting space for the body and mind to thrive.

Find out more at somavedic.com

PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES We’ve all heard that life is a journey, not a destination. Maybe that’s true—but you still have to get from point A to point B occasionally. And while travel might not have been at the top of your agenda for the last few years, some in the transportation industry are betting on mindfulness as a driver in the return to travel.

Fuel, Calm, and Collected Sitting in traffic can be frustrating, raise cortisol levels, and even stoke the fires of road rage. But the Mindfulness Concept Car wants to put the calm back in highway calamity. Ford has presented a modified Kuga SUV complete with an array of stress-busting features. Need a power nap?

Lie back in the reclining driver’s seat with neck support. Need a quick breather?

Plug in to the infotainment center stocked with guided yoga and meditation sessions.

Note: You do need to pull the car over to make use of most features. But hey, the car has ambient lighting and can monitor your heart rate when another driver cuts you off.

top of mind

Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT )

©

™

An 8-Week Online Course “ Compassion is a response to the inevitable reality of our human condition—our experiences of pain and sorrow—and offers the possibility of responding with understanding, patience, and kindness.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY WAHID SADIQ / UNSPLASH

Thupten Jinpa, Ph.D. Principal Author of CCT ™

Plane and Simple

Right on Track

Air travel in a pandemic is a new ball game. There are cancellations and delays like we’ve never experienced before and a new host of anxieties that have little to do with a fear of flying. But not to worry, airports across the US seem to have found a winning solution: Build more sensory rooms, meditation areas, and quiet spaces so the average traveler can find a moment of peace in the COVID-fueled chaos. Only time will tell if these efforts actually make flying less overwhelming but in the meantime one can only hope ventilation systems are also being upgraded. With a fancy meditation room come a lot of deep, full-body breaths.

Among the many industries that suffered during the pandemic, train firms in the UK took a hit due to the lack of daily travelers. So much so that many have promised to make the travel experience “more relaxing” by offering free hot beverages, access to a mindfulness app, a rewards program for frequent commuters, and their word that they’re cutting back on blaring announcements. And what about what most transit users really want? you might ask. A ride that arrives on time. No one clipping their toenails during their commute. Well, that might be a bridge too far.

Compassion Institute’s (CI) flagship program, Compassion Cultivation Training© (CCT™ ) draws on insights and techniques from psychology, neuroscience, and contemplative practice. It offers practical skills, tools, and knowledge that you can integrate into everyday life. Research has shown CCT™ can lead to: support for your health, happiness, and well- being; reduction of stress, depression, and anxiety, and improvements in relating to others and the world.

Join CI Founding Faculty and Senior Teachers in upcoming CCT™ cohorts this Summer and Fall:

July 19 – Sept. 6, 2022 with Maria Paula Jimenez Palacio

Aug. 4 – Sept. 22, 2022 with Amanda D. Mahoney, MA

Aug. 18 – Oct. 6, 2022 with Lakiba Pittman, MA

Sept. 20 – Nov. 8, 2022 with Erika Rosenberg, Ph.D.

Register at compassioninstitute.com/classes 15 mindful August 2022

top of mind

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

by AMBER TUCKER “Let’s share this dream that all children should grow up in a home full of books,” writes Country legend Dolly Parton. She founded Imagination Library in 1995: an international program that delivers one free book each month to any child age 0 to 5. As of March 2022, over 178 million books have been distributed.

Through her nonprofit, Girl Well, 17-year-old Kayli Joy Cooper is making selfcare more accessible for other girls. So far she’s reached over 500 underprivileged girls across 5 states, giving away self-care kits full of items for promoting physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

MINDFUL

16 mindful August 2022

Budding writer eight-year-old Dillon Helbig from Boise, Idaho, wanted to share his passion for storytelling—so he snuck a notebook with his own illustrated tale onto a library shelf. After discovering it, staff offered to make “The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis” part of their collection.

Dude, where’s my steering wheel?! Vehicle insurers report a huge increase in theft of steering wheels and airbags, linked to ongoing supply-chain disruption. Airbags are surprisingly costly, with pilfered ones likely sold by thieves to less scrupulous buyers.

For four women in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, claiming to run a cupcake business, the icing on their cake was 3.6M in tax fraud. Their “recipe” included fake invoices and sales records, such as transactions with “Vandalee Industries”—a reference to a fake company from Seinfeld that helped to tip off an investigator. ●

MINDLESS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SPENCER CREELMAN

Lasagna purée inside a toothpaste tube, a sachet of pizzaflavored powders, and a boozy beverage take on pasta carbonara are just a few experimental eats you can try at Ristorante 1978 in Italy.

Chef Valerio Braschi also has a menu based on emozioni, revealing no ingredients but only the emotions he feels for each dish.

Everyone deserves a coach who believes in them.

We all do better when we have someone rooting for us.

In collaboration with leading neuroscientists, Mindful has created a one-on-one coaching experience to help you develop tangible, easy-to-apply habits tailored for your individual life.

ARE YOU READY? SIGN UP AND DISCOVER WHAT’S TRUE FOR YOU.

coaching.mindful.org

mindful living

Why we believe

IN LUCK

by Misty Pratt

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.

18 mindful August 2022

PHOTOGRAPH BY MILOS TOMASEVIC / UNSPLASH

Our notions of chance, fate, or fortune really can shape what happens to us—just not in the way we might think. Here’s how our practice reveals a wiser way of “getting lucky.”

Imagine you’re driving to work one morning. The sun is shining, the roads are clear of traffic, and you feel a hopeful sense that today will be a good day.

Suddenly, you see a dark shape out of the corner of your eye, and you feel a jolt of impact. Another driver has run a stop sign and slammed into your passenger side door. After determining that you are (thankfully) still alive, your first thought might be, Of all the luck.

But what kind of luck is it? Good luck that you are unharmed and alive to tell the tale, or bad luck that your vehicle is now destined for the junkyard?

Science tells us that whether you label an experience good luck or bad luck has a lot to do with your personality. Dr. Barbara Blatchley, professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and author of the book What Are the Chances? Why We Believe in Luck, says that Western psychology once considered a belief in luck to mean that a person lacked self-efficacy and was incapable of making change.

Despite this traditional view, behaviors that are driven by a belief in luck are still commonplace in our

mindful living

society—crossing our fingers, knocking on wood, or holding onto a lucky object are all things people do, but may not care to admit.

As science has evolved, so too has our understanding of what drives our belief in luck and our behavior.

“Some more recent research has come out, showing that people who believe themselves to be unlucky have diminished executive function…and are not as happy or adjusted,” says Blatchley.

“They see themselves as lacking control and may be less capable of dealing with whatever comes along.”

In a survey of university students living in Hong Kong, researchers showed that happier participants were less likely to see luck as an external force that held influence over their lives, and more likely to consider themselves to be personally lucky. Participants with a more neurotic personality believed in a fate-driven luck that could strike at any moment (like getting hit by a car), versus luck as something that inherently benefits us (like surviving a car crash).

THE LOGIC OF LUCK Blatchley says that humans have evolved to detect patterns in our environment because patterns make life predictable. “When you can predict what’s going to happen next, the world is a less dangerous and uncertain place,” she says.

This means that we really dislike attributing anything to randomness and will search high and low for

a cause. When situations feel out of our control—like in the example of the car crash—we fall back on luck to explain them.

“Our minds do this labeling and categorizing because the brain is wired for us to survive,” says Steven Hick, a mindfulness teacher and the director of MBSR Ottawa. “Without that ability to know that’s dangerous or that’s friendly, we would die.” Hick says that while our ability to label is crucial for our survival, it doesn’t represent the truth of our existence. Labeling often creates a dualistic view of our world (good versus bad, or lucky versus unlucky), but in mindfulness practice, we come to recognize that everything is interconnected and interdependent. Our lived reality is much more nuanced than we’d like to believe.

Hick points out that all cultures have their version of luck. “It seems to be a human trait to attribute circumstances to some kind of chance, fate, or fortune,” he says. Many belief systems support the notion of fate, like many Christian sects that believe all humans are born sinners, or Eastern spiritual traditions that view bad behavior from a past life as having consequences in our current life.

HOW LABELS LIMIT US A belief in luck appears to soothe our discomfort with randomness but can also make us fearful of doing anything that might incite bad luck. Living our life based on the principle of

fate-driven luck means that we’ll experience frustration when things don’t go as planned, or negative events will confirm what we’ve always believed: that nothing good ever comes our way.

Hick suggests mindfulness strategies to help address our predisposition to believe in good or bad luck. The first step is to identify objects in our awareness—perhaps these are internal body sensations and emotions, or events in our external world. Some people find it helpful to use generic labels for things that grab our attention, such as “thought,” “sound,” or “sensation.”

Once we notice these objects, the next step is to allow them to pass away without engaging with them or rejecting them. For example, a thought may arise about the car crash, which could lead to further rumination about why this unfortunate event happened or what we could have done to prevent it. To notice this rumination, without getting caught up in it, is “a practice of disengaging from our identification with our experience,” says Hick.

In the mindfulness community, this is called “choiceless awareness,” in that we choose not to sustain our attention on the objects we are noticing.

Hick says that even the most advanced meditator will still categorize and label experiences. However, when we are skilled in choiceless awareness, we can learn to relate to our experiences differently, and we can more clearly see which thoughts are worthy of our attention. →

August 2022 mindful 19

mindful living

CAN YOU MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK? While our belief in luck might contribute to our need to categorize and label our thoughts and experiences as either “good” or “bad,” what would happen if we let go of these labels?

Would there be any room for the concept of “luck” at all? There could be, but it might look a little different.

“Being able to increase or widen the scope of your attention [has] a tremendous benefit,” says Blatchley. “If you widen your attention… your brain is better able to predict what’s going to happen next, you may be better prepared, and maybe all of that is being ‘lucky’.”

One of our brain’s jobs, other than to categorize experiences, is to accurately predict the future—or at least several seconds into the future. This helps us to quickly assess a situation

20 mindful August 2022

and allow our bodies to prepare a response. In her book, Blatchley uses the example of a parent and child playing a game of catch.

Neuroscience has proven that our brain must respond milliseconds before our child throws the ball back to us, so that we can predict the trajectory of the ball and prepare our body to catch it.

What happens when our prediction is inaccurate, and we lunge to the left when our child throws the ball to the right? Our brain works to correct itself for the next time, and our child’s brain also recalibrates as it learns the skill of throwing a ball toward someone.

However, it can become exhausting if our brain is wrong a lot of the time. “If you’re making predictions and those predictions are not what come to pass, you start to doubt yourself and whether or not you have control,” says Blatchley. The

“When you can predict what’s going to happen next, the world is a less dangerous and uncertain place.”

Dr. Barbara Blatchley, Professor of psychology and neuroscience

illusion of control we get from predicting our experiences might help our brains respond to the world around us. When we’re mindfully tuned in to our lives, we gain perspective on where our agency really comes from—not from fate-driven luck, but from the quality of our awareness and what we choose to attend to.

Improving the clarity and scope of your attention through mindfulness might train your brain to be better skilled in predicting the future, but it could also make you better at seeing whatever is coming your way. A deepened awareness of your emotions and actions in the present moment would, just maybe, have allowed you to see that car a split second before it ran the stop sign, just in time to hit the brakes and avoid a collision. As luck would have it, your brain may be the one holding all the cards. ●

practice

Good, Bad… Who Knows?

By Elaine Smookler

Awaken the spirit of curiosity that helps you sweeten your luck.

Part of “getting lucky” is how we interpret whatever experiences come our way. Fortune might indeed smile upon you, if you let yourself relax and open up to seeing how the story unfolds.

1 2

Identify a situation where you would like to invite a greater feeling of good luck coming your way.

Start by taking three big breaths. Count as you breathe in for three, out for five, to help yourself relax.

3 4 5

Be curious about whatever comes—even if, at first, it doesn’t seem “lucky.”

As a way to broaden your view, engage the thought, Let me know more about this.

Take some time to contemplate, or write about, the following: • What do I currently believe about this experience? Have I already pigeon-holed it as either lucky or unlucky?

• What evidence am I using to prove that what’s happening is either lucky or unlucky?

6 PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRAGAN / ADOBESTOCK

Notice if you’ve related this experience to something from the past. If so, see if you can welcome a fresh view and take the attitude, I don’t know how this will work out—it’s still in play. Let yourself be curious and open to what’s happening now.

7 8

Notice how your mood affects whether you are feeling lucky or not.

Based on everything you noticed, what labels of “lucky” or “unlucky” could fit with what you’ve discovered about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?

August 2022 mindful 21

inner wisdom

ARE YOU

Happy Now?

by Elaine Smookler

When you don’t know what makes you happy, you can end up chasing illusions that only make you suffer. The secret to discovering happiness might be closer than you think.

Happiness is a slippery little devil. For some, happiness could be as uncomplicated as earning enough to feed your family, or as basic as clean drinking water or safe streets to walk down.

However, if you find yourself fortunate enough to have a stable home and hearth, you might be surprised when happiness feels elusive.

When we are no longer fighting to survive, our notions of happiness can become an endless search for the perfect dream vacation, or some gooey, delicious food. Or depending upon your appetites, happiness might be linked to high-octane sensual

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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PHOTOGRAPH BY THOUGHT CATALOG / UNSPLASH

PRACTICE

experiences that seem to have NOW, HERE COMES HAPPINESS stamped all over them. But disappointingly, after awhile, all of these things tend to leave us feeling empty, irritable, broke, and dissatisfied.

We might believe that it is our right to be happy, but most of us don’t have a clue what we really want and what happiness truly means for us. So maybe you assume that happiness can only be achieved with vast wealth or some tasty tootsie to bring you a three-ring circus of amazing orgasms.

Sure, why not? But based on the noted misery of lottery winners and the success of infidelity websites, it would seem that boredom, coupled with the unfortunate pull of gravity, makes it inevitable that focusing happiness on any externals is not going to lead to lasting joy.

This isn’t to say that it’s not wonderful to feel emotional, spiritual, and physical compatibility with other beings. It’s awesome! And who doesn’t love a comfy crib to cuddle up in? But if it’s happiness that interests you, can you notice what it is about any loving union that nourishes ongoing joy? Or what home might mean even if it’s a different address every night?

A thrill ride through the senses can be dazzling, but what is actually at the root of happiness? Since nothing in life is certain, what really keeps us buoyant when the chips are down?

Well, what do you feel when you’re seen and appreciated, even when life is difficult? What do you notice when you offer help to someone in need, even if you barely have enough yourself? Does it make you happy when you play with your children or your pet?

When it comes down to it, happiness usually comes from connection, feeling valued, and being part of meaningful pursuits, whether it’s planting a community garden or being on the giving or receiving end of a smile.

When we don’t examine what really makes us happy it’s easy to assume that food, sex, fancy houses, or fast cars will be the road to happiness-land. But anything external that we depend upon for happiness is probably going to let us down when boredom, expectation, and even the hope that we won’t get evicted is what we are using to tell ourselves that we are happy.

When we can appreciate everything that life brings us, because it’s going to come anyway—even the things we think we don’t want, like illness—then maybe that happiness thing won’t be so elusive after all.

It can be challenging, maybe even daunting, to ask yourself deep questions, like What makes you happy?

But when you can discover what happiness truly means for you, everything that comes your way can be welcomed. ●

3 Ways to Know if You’re Connecting to Happiness

1

When you say hello to yourself in the mirror, do you have full appreciation for the person who looks back at you? If not, happiness will be impossible to find. Enjoy being you, and notice how taking delight in yourself in all your gory-glory serves as the foundation for full-on happiness!

2

When you look at your life, exactly as it is, can you appreciate every experience? Even challenges bring you happiness when you can see how interesting everything is.

3

When you take care of yourself and others, notice how that can make you happy. You can be happy if you can be OK with whatever life serves up, knowing that life is a brief gift. We can be happy when we dive in and live it all fully!

August 2022 mindful 23

By Meredith Parfet

The global pandemic has brought millions of people in contact with loss, doula and hospice chaplain Meredith Parfet reflects on what she and likeminded experts have learned from their work with the dying.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY MAREK PIWNICKI / UNSPLASH

grief, and their own mortality. Death

mental health

Recently, while I was working a hospice shift at an inpatient care center, a tearful, grieving man, rumpled from a long night spent at his dying father’s bedside, emerged from the room and muttered, “Your job sucks.” He paused selfconsciously when a few of us—nurse, social worker, and myself, a hospice chaplain and death doula—all looked up with stunned chuckles. Backpedaling, he said, “I mean you’re amazing and all, but who would choose to do this?”

This is a common refrain when you tell people you work with the dying. To be fair, few of us feel amazing these days. We’re more careworn and stressed, standing in the shambles of our health-care system years into a pandemic.

Frankly, dying is often gritty and full of suffering. At the same time, death is a powerful teacher for the living.

“Death is a shift to the great unknown,” says Kelly Arora, professor and former co-director of the palliative care program at the University of Colorado Medical School. “A good death is when we feel like ‘I did my best—in that relationship, in that lifetime, I gave it my all and I got from it what I needed to move forward to what’s next.’” Life is a mystery. Death is a mystery.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Meredith Parfet is the founder and CEO of Ravenyard Group, a crisis management consultancy focused on the well-being of leaders and teams. She received her MBA from Northwestern University, is an end-of-life doula, and is currently a candidate for Chaplaincy.

Our job is to explore the full range of the experience. Many of us who work with the dying consider it an intensified form of spiritual practice, requiring concentration, attention, and presence.

In the transition from animate to inanimate, when a person’s final breath leaves their body, there is a moment of stillness and wonder. For those left behind, questions quickly crowd in: What is life?

Where does one’s essence go? What is the spark that makes us human? Death doulas and others who work with the existential aspects of death and dying teach presence and equanimity—with dying, with our individual mortality, with the dead. We teach the families we work with about turning toward suffering, about engaging with the process of dying in ways that bring greater connection and meaning, but we only teach those things because that is what death teaches all of us. The process of dying can be all-consuming, both for the person who is dying and for people who work with death—either in meditation or literally working with the dying. Death is the ultimate form of presentmindedness where each second is precious, and all emotions are in the now.

My own work in this space emerged decades ago after the sudden death of my 23-year-old sister. I was young, alone in graduate school, and completely adrift in the experience of grief. A few years later, I had my own near-death experience after a severed artery.

Life is a mystery. Death is a mystery. Our job is to explore the full range of the experience.

Like many people who discover mindfulness and also many people who end up working in hospice, my despair ultimately led me to my practice. I began asking all of the existential questions I now commonly hear with my hospice patients.

Turning Toward Our Suffering While people often revert to “bucket list thinking” when considering mortality (skydiving comes to mind), David Chernikoff, early leader in the US hospice movement, meditation teacher, and author of the recent book on aging, Life, Part Two, encourages us to seek meaning through inner experience. He uses the term “contemplative happiness” to describe a sense of awareness and contentment that doesn’t rely on external circumstances to make us feel happy. “The process of actualizing our potential for this contemplative happiness requires us to be willing to face the suffering in our lives and not turn away from it habitually,” he says. When we turn away from what’s difficult, “we shut down our capacity to come in contact

with the deeper wisdom, joy, love, and happiness that we’re talking about.”

We are enculturated to turn away from suffering by distracting ourselves on social media, bingeing shows, shopping, eating, drinking, gossiping—anything that mutes painful feelings. Those aspects of what Chernikoff calls “conventional happiness” are fleeting. Facing suffering offers an alternative, a path toward greater meaning. I like to picture myself turning around and looking at whatever it is that is making me suffer. It’s a cognitive trick that’s a bit like a science experiment. I imagine a magnifying glass that lets me pause and study the fear, pain, or unhappiness.

“Where we can transform is within those moments of murk and intensity,” says Francesca Arnoldy, program director of the Endof-Life Doula certificate program at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine. “It makes my heart more open to seeking and fully enjoying happiness. You don’t want to miss out on it, the wholehearted welcoming of it.”

“The continual contemplation of mortality is →

August 2022 mindful 25

m

A death doula shares questions to consider when thinking about your own dying process. mindful.org/ prompts

what must be sustained,” she says. “I think it teaches us to find awe in the moments we can’t even make sense of sometimes.”

Being With Dying People often ask me what the difference is between a “good” death and a “bad” death, and the only thing I can identify is connection.

26 mindful August 2022

People seem to have less angst when they feel connected both to something they are passionate about and to people in their life.

I once asked a dying man if he had any concerns he wanted to talk about and he said, “Life has been good.

I love my family and I love to fish.” So we sat and we talked about fishing (one of my favorite meditative activities too) for the next 25 minutes. He had done something he loved as often as he could, and that made his death a little easier.

If companioning the dying isn’t part of your mindfulness practice, there are many other ways to explore death in a meaningful way. An ancient technique, well represented across nearly every tradition and revealed for a modern audience in The Tibetan Book of Living and

PHOTOGRAPH BY MAREK PIWNICKI / UNSPLASH

PROMPTS Questions Death Doulas Ask

mental health

Dying, suggests we meditate on death every day. It says, “Our exploration necessarily begins with a direct reflection on what death means and the many facets of the truth of impermanence—the kind of reflection that can enable us to make rich use of this life while we still have time, and ensure that when we die it will be without remorse or self-recrimination at having wasted our lives.”

Roshi Joan Halifax, director of the Project on Being With Dying, trains clinicians in compassionate hospice care and has supported dying individuals for more than four decades. She says, “One of the things the realization of our own mortality brings to us is a sense of what is really important for us. Relationships, doing good in the world, benefiting others—all these are threads that make the cloth of happiness.”

Some approach this contemplation as a form of sitting practice, using the breath to raise awareness of life’s fragility and the unknowable mysteries of death. More physical forms of mindfulness around death and dying can be found in yoga. For example, yoga nidra is a deep relaxation process that roughly translates to “yoga of sleep,” which can involve Savasana, meaning “corpse pose.” The purpose of this practice is to ease stress and enhance feelings of rest, to attune one’s senses to a big-picture purpose for life beyond everyday distractions. Others use grief yoga as a way of processing death and loss by transmuting it into movement.

For Francesca Arnoldy, it takes the form of daily reflection. “It has taught me to say goodbye to each day before I go to bed and to think about this as one less in my grand tally. How did I live it? What am I carrying? What can I heal? Sometimes this work can be heavy but it’s so meaningful in its heaviness that it’s always worth it.”

These techniques not only offer anecdotal evidence for increased feelings of wellbeing when we use death as a teacher, but also have scientific support. C. Nathan DeWall, a professor at the University of Kentucky, studied people’s responses to thoughts about death and dying. His findings, which he describes as “counterintuitive,” suggest that thinking about death triggers a nonconscious coping response.

He writes that death is a psychologically threatening fact, but when people contemplate it, apparently the brain begins to search for happy thoughts.

For me, this contemplation leads me to desire more connection and more of the ordinary. It makes me think, Did I connect with my children?” and “How did I show up for my aging parents?

I smile when I think back to the grieving son who said, “Your job sucks.” In that moment, my colleague, a veteran hospice nurse, went to check on the dying man so his son could take a moment to cry. The social worker offered comfort and insights to the man’s wife about the dying process. I sat on the floor with the dying man’s eight-year-old grandson and silently colored for a bit. What we know is that this death work that we do is “the good stuff.” It’s what makes life matter. It’s hard but so worth it. ●

August 2022 mindful 27

brain science

28 mindful August 2022

brain science

WHY OUR BRAINS ARE

Designed to Forget

By Scott A. Small • Illustrations by Edmon de Haro

While many of us yearn to sharpen our memory, the science of sleep shows that, in fact, our brains are designed to forget—a process that unlocks the mind’s capacity to dream and think in creative ways.

As a memory specialist, all I hear about is forgetting. Who wouldn’t want to have a better memory? To perform better on exams; to remember with high fidelity books read or movies watched; to have more details at the tip of one’s tongue to win over minds in intellectual debates or hearts with fun facts and poetry?

That forgetting represents a glitch in our memory systems, or a nuisance at the very least, has always been the common scientific view.

However, recent research in neurobiology, psychology, medicine, and ABOUT THE AUTHOR Scott A. Small is a physician specializing in aging and dementia and a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, where he is the director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. He has run a National Institutes of Health– funded laboratory for over 20 years. Raised in Israel, he now lives in New York City.

computer science has contributed to a clear shift in our understanding.

We now know that forgetting is not just normal but beneficial in numerous ways. Our cognitive and creative abilities, for example, benefit from forgetting—and, perhaps counterintuitively, from sleeping.

The body’s need for sleep has remained one of biology’s great mysteries. Many hypotheses have been proposed in an attempt to explain why, despite the fact that conscious awareness of our surroundings increases our chances of survival, we are forced to dedicate hours a day to a slumbering oblivion in order to survive. One hypothesis, first proposed a quarter of a century ago, has slowly amassed circumstantial support.

Francis Crick, the scientific luminary who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for describing the double-helical structure of DNA,

shifted his focus later in his career.

In 1983, he published a theoretical paper that hypothesized about sleep’s biological purpose. He summarized his elaborate idea in one pithy and startling conclusion: “We dream in order to forget.”

Snoozing to Forget To understand Crick’s hypothesis, we need to know that the neuronal correlates of memory (that is, the brain mechanisms corresponding to memory) are dendritic spines: small protrusions from dendrites, which are branch-like extensions from neurons or nerve cells. The billions of neurons in our cortex each have thousands of dendritic spines, so the number of individual spines is truly astronomical. Their sole purpose is to modify their size, and the number of →

August 2022 mindful 29

brain science

neurotransmitter receptors contained within them, with experience. Each spine has the molecular machinery to sprout in response to experience, and each experience triggers vast fields of spine growth.

Imagine spending a day in your life wearing eyeglasses with a built-in mini-camera documenting, frame by frame, the thousands of images you experience. Viewing your daily odyssey as a slideshow later that evening, you would recognize many, if not most, of the experiences, reflecting the growth of millions of spines distributed across your cortex. Your recognition of them is psychological evidence that your brain must have grown, even if just microscopically, throughout the day. Now imagine that you’re taking a whirlwind tour of the world—filling your brain with thousands of distinctly vibrant memories, each fragment of memory a lawn’s worth of spine growth. Leaving aside the spatial problem—that your rigid skull prevents your brain from significantly expanding in size—such spine growth gone wild would cause cognitive havoc. Each spine can only grow so much, and sooner or later your cortical spines would fill to capacity. When this happened, like a saturated digital picture with no contrast across its pixels, memory snapshots of previous experiences would be whited out and left indistinguishable. Running out of spines, the cortex would eventually have no room left for new memories to form.

Crick first proposed that sleeping solves this problem by what has come to be called “smart forgetting,” an idea that has been modified and refined over the years by his students and other investigators. Based on the principles of neuronal plasticity, sleeping—particularly dreaming— should have a dual and opposing effect on the fields of new spines grown in response to our daily experiences.

Dreams are like those “previously seen” recaps in TV series, in which only the most important snippets are reshown. While we dream, the hippocampus stimulates and replays

30 mindful August 2022

fragments of our experiences, but not the full episode experienced in all of its elaborate intricacies. In so doing, the hippocampus persistently stimulates a few privileged cortical spines, stabilizing into a memory those few whose growth reflects the gist of our daily experiences. More sweepingly, however, the vast majority of new spines are left unstimulated while dreaming. These neglected spines should, according to the general hypothesis, wilt back down. After a good night’s sleep, we might expect to see some pockets of newly grown spines. But the net effect would be spine shrinkage—that is, the net effect of sleeping is forgetting.

While this hypothesis makes sense, only recently have studies empirically validated its key assumption. In 2017, using powerful new microscopes and other sophisticated techniques, researchers were at last able to investigate spine size across large swaths of cortex. The results were strikingly clear: The net effect of sleep is to cause wholesale spine shrinkage—to cause forgetting.

Conversely, when people are forced to go for days without sleep, they →

In 1983, Francis Crick published a theoretical paper that hypothesized about sleep’s biological purpose: “We dream in order to forget.”

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brain science

By lightening our minds, forgetting unmoors us from memories that weigh our minds down.

experience symptoms consistent with neurons that are overly excitable to sensory input, with cortical regions in sensory overload and overflow. The telltale symptoms of this lack of forgetting are distorted, deranged perceptions. Sleeplessness affects every part of the visual processing stream, even fleetingly causing us to hallucinate.

Creative Connections The effects of sleep-induced forgetting also hold benefits for creative insight. Psychologists have pored over the introspections of individuals who are generally agreed to be highly creative—visual artists, poets, novelists, musicians, physicists, mathematicians, and exceptional biologists. A unifying thread among these testimonials has emerged. Colloquially, “to create” implies novelty or innovation; “to be creative” suggests a broader generative capacity. But the recurrent theme that epitomizes the creative process is not generating something brand new out of the blue. Rather, a creative spark occurs when unexpected associations among existing elements are suddenly forged—a sort of cognitive alchemy.

Psychologists set out to devise a behavioral task that captures this creative crucible. Consider the following three words: “elephant,” “lapse,” “vivid.” Think of a fourth word that relates to all three. The answer is “memory.” How about a word that is associated with another trio: “rat,” “blue,” “cottage”? If you answered “cheese,” you are right. Once you put the words together and come up with

32 mindful August 2022

or are shown the right answer, its accuracy is obvious, and you experience an ‘aha’ moment. There is no obvious route a mind must take, no formula for how to cognitively compute the right answer. It just happens. You know that rats eat cheese; you have eaten, or at least seen, blue cheese or cottage cheese. But if you were asked to free-associate to “rat” alone, “cheese” might not come first to your mind—unless you are a pest control expert, a ratcatcher who has experimented with various baits.

Similarly, only if you are a memory expert like me might the word “memory” be your response to “elephant,” “lapse,” and “vivid.” On the flip side, the strength of my association with words linked to “memory” can potentially constrain my creativity.

And this is exactly the point.

Creativity requires preexisting associations—requires memory—but the associations must remain loose and playful. The artists’ introspections teach us that creative abilities are forged by immersion in various elements and the establishment of associations between them, but only when the links are relaxed. All visual artists immerse themselves in visions, poets in words, scientists in facts and ideas. But what sets the great ones apart is that their associations are not set in stone.

Inspired by Sleep?

Loose associations, relaxed links, associations that are set in clay, not in stone: All are required for creativity, and all sound like forms of forgetting.

Evidence that forgetting is beneficial for creativity first came from studies in which psychologists used various ways to either strengthen or loosen associations between word pairs, like “blue– sky” or “cottage–house.” For example, by repeatedly exposing subjects to word pairs, researchers found that they formed tighter memories between those couplets and predictably initially performed worse on the creativity task. Subjects’ performance, however, gradually improved over the next few days—an improvement that tracked with forgetting’s known timeline.

Other evidence that links forgetting to creativity comes from sleep studies.

These studies show that our creativity benefits from a good night’s sleep and in particular from our dreaming.

Upon deeper examination, though, the benefit did not occur because sleeping is somehow restful, nor because dreaming happens to sharpen a few memory snippets. Most of the studies were performed before the definitive evidence validated Crick’s prediction that we sleep in order to forget much of our quotidian memories.

Nevertheless, with the benefit of scientific hindsight, the conclusion is that we are most creative when associations of what we do remember are kept loose and playful through sleep-induced forgetting. By lightening our minds, forgetting unmoors us from memories that weigh our minds down, allowing the flights of fancy that fuel creativity. ●

Adapted from FORGETTING copyright © 2021 by Scott Small. Used by permission of Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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meditation

SUMMER SELF-CARE

S AVO R T H E MOMENT Summer may no longer offer you the seemingly endless days it did when you were a child, when warm temperatures drew you outside to play, explore, and daydream. But there’s still plenty to savor in the joyful and mundane moments of your life, and summer offers the perfect invitation to notice more opportunities to slow down, be present, and appreciate the world around you. We’ve gathered tips and practices that will help you get started and find the PHOTOGRAPH BY BASHKATOV / ADOBESTOCK

richest bits to savor as the summer unfolds around you.

Introduction by Barry Boyce

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meditation

T

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.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY LEONID TIT / ADOBESTOCK

he word “savoring” crops up a lot in instructions for mindful eating, but why stop there? Inspired by that notion, I decided to challenge myself to a week of savoring things. As I started out, I began to see that I was automatically leaving lots of things out—things that were, well, unsavory—so the challenge had to undergo some immediate reengineering. It would have to become about savoring everything.

Yikes.

That immediately led me to the understanding that if I was going to savor the unsavory I would have to be thankful somehow for whatever came my way. I would have to embrace the artificially sweetened (but still valuable) “attitude of gratitude.” It was a bit of a revelation. What I was prepared for was taking time to really enjoy things, in the present moment.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how much it would challenge underlying attitudes and assumptions. When the week was over, I came to some conclusions about how savoring can reach into every area of life.

E V ERY DAY M ED I TAT I O N

5 WAYS TO SAVOR When things are good… savor the joy

When it’s unwieldy… savor the laughter

When things are good, it should be easy to savor them. But it took more effort to savor something I already appreciated than I would have imagined. Joy came in the sudden realization that the body is always in the present, no matter where my thoughts take me, and I can always return to that.

When things go haywire, the same tendency we have with hassles—to indulge in some “why me?” time—can easily take over. But, I’m starting to really appreciate the antidote that a meditation teacher friend of mine told me about: Just say “Why not me?”

When it’s every kind of bad…savor the resilience I can glimpse the fact that pain, whether physical or emotional, is something that lets us know we are alive. And as we try to manage it as best we can, we are humbled, we are vulnerable, we seek help. We find a way. We bounce back. And, as we savor the equanimity, we learn to take the good and the bad.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ONGAP / ADOBESTOCK

When it’s boring… savor the freedom As we all keep discovering in meditation, we don’t really need to keep ourselves occupied with extra thoughts. It’s peaceful to take a break from that. My savoring challenge helped me learn (once again) to savor the freedom from the need to entertain myself every minute of the day.

When you’re alone… savor the space In the right doses, being by ourselves can be deeply restorative. It can help us discover a deep reservoir of contentment that does not need to be chased after. That kind of space—a space of awe and wonder and simplicity—is well worth savoring. It may be the most savory treat of all.

When you’re with others… savor the companionship The sheer joy of a shared laugh. The moments of listening when you need to be heard. The shoulder to cry on. Someone to share ups and downs, without caring which it is. I’m blessed with friends all over the world, people I can connect with within minutes no matter how long it’s been.

Other human beings…what’s not to savor?

m AUDIO Guided Meditation For guided audio versions of all the meditations in this feature visit mindful.org/ summer-break

August 2022 mindful 37

CONNECT WITH PRESENCE

By Sharon Salzberg If we can practice savoring the present moment when we're sitting in formal meditation, we can also practice while standing in line at the grocery store, sitting anxiously in a doctor's waiting room, or sitting down for a meal in good company. A portable exercise in meditation is focusing on the sensations of the in- and out-breath.

If the breath is not a comfortable place for you, choose another object of attention like the sensation of your hands touching your knees. mindful.org/summer-break

I N T H E M O R N I N G • 5 M I N U T ES

Take One Breath This variation of breath meditation can be especially supportive if you feel restless or bored. Savor the freedom to simply let your mind be. It doesn't matter how many times your attention wanders or how long you may dwell in distraction. The practice is gently letting go and, with kindness toward yourself, beginning again.

3

1

Sit comfortably and relax. Let your attention settle on the feeling of the breath at the nostrils, chest, or abdomen. As you breathe in make the silent mental note “in,” and as you breathe out you can count “one.”

This becomes inhale “in,” exhale “one,” inhale “in,” exhale “two,” all the way up to ten.

When you get to ten you can begin again.

2

If your mind becomes distracted, and you lose touch with the breath—that's OK. You can begin again. Stay connected to the rhythm of the breath with the mental note and the number.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sharon Salzberg is a world-renowned meditation teacher and is the New York Times best-selling author of Real Love and Real Happiness, as well as Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World.

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See if your awareness of the breath can be full and complete. Your attention is wholehearted with “in, five,” “in, six,” “in, seven,” all the way through to ten.

Each breath is full and complete on its own—with the counting there to support you.

4

When you feel ready, you can move into the rest of your day.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEKSS / ADOBESTOCK

DAY 1

meditation I N T H E E V EN I N G • 5 M I N U T ES

Rest Your Attention Our habitual tendency is to grasp a thought or a feeling, to build an entire world around it, or push it away and struggle against it. It can be helpful to instead note what is painful, pleasant, or otherwise. Here we stay even, balanced, and calm, as we recognize what arises and bring our attention back, one breath at a time.

1

Sit comfortably or lie down.

Settle in to a comfortable position.

2

Center your attention on the sensations of the in- and out-breath, at the nostrils, chest, or abdomen. As you feel the sensations of the breath, you can make a mental note of “breath” with the in-breath and then again with the outbreath.

When a thought or feeling arises that's strong enough to take your attention away from the breath, note it silently as “not breath.” You don't have to judge yourself; you don't have to get lost in a thought or elaborate it. Recognize that it's simply not the breath.

3

Bring your attention back to the sensations of the breath. Some of your thoughts or feelings may be tender, caring, cruel, or hurtful, but they're not the breath. You can recognize them, let them go, and bring your attention back to the sensations of the breath.

4

When you feel ready, come back to your surroundings.

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CONNECT WITH YO U R S E LF

By Sebene Selassie Belonging is the sense of ease and joy we can savor when we are truly present. Often we don't feel like we belong because we're caught in feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and doubt. Feelings of not belonging are learned over time and lead us to think that there's something wrong with us, that we're not enough, that we don't belong— but we do. By the very nature of our existence, we belong. Mindfulness helps us remember this by allowing us to experience belonging in any moment. mindful.org/summer-break

I N T H E M O R N I N G • 5 M I N U T ES

Listen to Your Body Meditation can help us be more present to life, and mindfulness of body and breath help ground that presence. It's only when we're present with each moment that we can savor our experience. You can try grounding yourself throughout the day, feeling the body and using the inquiry, “What's happening in my body right now?”

1

Find a comfortable posture.

You don't have to do anything special, just make sure that you're relaxed and alert.

Lower your gaze and give yourself the opportunity to go inward.

2

Bring awareness to the sensations you notice while sitting.

It can take some time and practice to feel sensations in the body rather than think about them. Is there a sensation in the body that's particularly strong

40 mindful August 2022

4 or clamoring for attention? It’s OK if you don't notice anything. Just recognize your experience as it is and see if you can bring a sense of curiosity to it. You can ask yourself, “What's happening in my body right now?”

3

Whatever is happening, continue this inquiry. Notice the sensations that are present. When the mind starts to wander, gently bring your awareness back to the body. Again, ask yourself, “What's happening in my body right now?”

Bring the same curiosity to your breath. If the breath is not a comfortable place for you, continue grounding in sensations of the body. Otherwise, take a moment to connect to the natural rhythm of your breath.

Notice your belly rising and falling.

You can always ask yourself, “What's happening in my body right now?”

5

Know that you can come back to the body at any moment, as you come back to the space around you.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CANDY1812 / ADOBESTOCK

DAY 2

meditation I N T H E E V EN I N G • 5 M I N U T ES

Welcome Open Awareness Open awareness meditation is often associated with the metaphor of the mind being like an open sky. We can observe thoughts, sensations, sounds, but they simply pass like clouds in the sky, or they can flow like a river—savor the space between you and what drifts past. The sky is not bothered, the river is not changed, everything is carried by the current of awareness.

1

Find a comfortable posture.

If you like you can gaze down softly at a point in front of you. Allow your body to soften and rest. Feel the connection between your body and the floor or the chair beneath you.

4

2

Bring your awareness to the sensations of being right here, right now.

Begin to listen to the play of sounds around you. You can notice sounds that are loud or soft, far or near— just listening.

You don't need to name the sound, or follow the sound, just listen in a relaxed and open way. Notice how all sounds arise and vanish as you listen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

3

Sense that your awareness is expanding to be like the sky— open, clear, vast.

Allow your awareness to extend in every direction.

Sounds come and go, moving through the sky of your awareness, appearing and disappearing as you rest in this open awareness.

You might notice that thoughts and images also arise and vanish. You can let them come and go without resistance or grasping.

Allow the breath or sensations in the body to move like a breeze in this open sky of awareness. Notice that this awareness is naturally clear and spacious. Allow all sounds, thoughts, and sensations, feeling that spaciousness.

5

As you lift your gaze, pause for a moment to reorient to the space around you.

Sebene Selassie received a BA from McGill University and an MA from the New School, where she focused on Buddhism, Hinduism, cultural studies, and race. She is a mindfulness teacher and the author of You Belong: A Call for Connection. A native of Ethiopia, Selassie lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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CONNECT WITH E VERY THING

By Jessica Morey We tend to focus our minds on what is wrong or threatening or what could harm us so that we might be better protected through the vagaries of life. But if we allow that bias to run rampant, we risk missing out on what’s beautiful, joyful, and nourishing in our lives. Not to mention, we grow less equipped to cultivate beauty and joy and nourishment in ourselves.

mindful.org/summer-break

I N T H E M O R N I N G • 10 M I N U T ES

Appreciate Joy Perhaps it seems strange to investigate what we consider to be a positive emotion, but we often miss joy. We don’t pay a lot of attention to it and let it slip by without much notice. The good news is, there are practices to cultivate joy. It can be sparked by something enjoyable, or we can attend to and support joy in our felt experience. One of the great ways to do that is to savor— really stop and savor—what’s beautiful and good in life.

1

Take a seat or lie down if you’re in a place where you can do that.

Take a few deep breaths, lengthening your inhale and your exhale.

During these opening breaths, notice how you’re feeling. If you’re feeling tired or drowsy, emphasize the inhale. If you’re feeling agitated or restless, emphasize the exhale.

Then allow your breath to come to its natural rhythm.

2

Now bring to mind recent joyful moments.

Alternatively, you could reflect on things you’re grateful for in your life. Choose a few moments of joy and gratitude to focus on.

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3

Reflect on receiving the joy of these experiences. Bring your attention into your body. Notice how you experience joy in this moment.

Where do you feel it in your body?

The chest, the belly, the throat, the face? What do you notice? Is there a temperature to the joy?

Is there a flow or movement to the energy of joy in your body?

4

If you lose that felt sense of connection, just recall the images, people, or situations that bring you joy. Then return to savoring the felt sense of joy in your body. Breathe into it.

5

Take a moment to reflect on the people, places, or situations that bring you joy. What were the things that really inspired a felt sense of joy for you? How can you bring more of that into your life?

6

When you’re ready, bring your attention back to your environment. Take a deep breath. Orient yourself to the space around you and notice how you feel right now.

PHOTOGRAPH BY KOTKOA / ADOBESTOCK

DAY 3

meditation I N T H E E V EN I N G • 10 M I N U T ES

Explore What’s True Longing is a vulnerable emotion, but it’s also very important. It directs us toward what we want in the world—where we want to go, what we value, what we want to create. When we can stay with the emotion and get to know it on a deeper level, there’s a great deal of wisdom at our disposal.

If we can feel into it, be with it, and notice what’s underneath and inside of it, we can then better decide how we want to respond next.

1

Settle into a comfortable position. You may be seated, or you’re welcome to lie down. Wherever you are, take a few deep breaths. You can cast your gaze down and ahead.

2

Feel into your body and ask yourself: Is there anything I need right now? Is there anything I’m longing for in this moment? You may want something to be different, or you may be longing for a particular experience. Ask yourself: What do I want?

What do I need?

4 3

If nothing is emerging for you, bring to mind a recent experience when you really wanted something. Maybe you wanted to be seen or acknowledged; maybe you wanted to connect with a certain person, or you wanted someone to call you or attend to you.

Identify a recent experience you had of longing and consider the situation, the people, the place.

Turn your attention toward the felt sense of the wanting. Hold this feeling of wanting, and as you do, see if you can identify what it is that you want—below the particularities.

What universal need are you touching upon?

Maybe you want respect, ease, joy, or connection.

6

Take a few deep breaths. Feel your body on the chair or on the ground.

When you’re ready, lift your gaze. ●

5

Consider this question: How could I meet this need? Take a few moments to explore the creative ways this need could be met.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jessica Morey is a meditation teacher and coach.

She has been practicing meditation for almost three decades. She is also the cofounder and former executive director of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, a nonprofit organization bringing indepth mindfulness and compassion training to youth.

August 2022 mindful 43

leadership

MEET THE MOVEMENT

ILLUSTRATION BY BLOOMICON / ADOBESTOCK

BY AMBER TUCKER, AVA WHITNEY-COULTER, KYLEE ROSS, OYINDA LAGUNJU, AND STEPHANIE DOMET

10 powerful women leaders of the mindfulness movement share what they’ve learned about living a life of meaning and purpose and how cultivating happiness fits into the equation.

In every walk of life, women are broadening and deepening the definition of “power.” So-called “soft skills” like compassion, empathy, kindness, and forgiveness, once seen as feminine—read, weak—are being rewritten as essential ingredients for thriving, success, and even happiness. In our fourth annual Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement feature, we asked 10 women, chosen by their peers, to share with us what power looks like in their lives, and how happiness arises for them. Here, they share what they’ve learned about purpose, community, connection, and how mindfulness can change the world.

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Care for Everyone Meena Srinivasan “What kind of ancestor am I willing to be?” Meena Srinivasan credits her teacher Larry Ward with inviting her to contemplate this essential question. For Srinivasan, there’s immediate personal resonance— she has a young son. But she knows her role as an ancestor is broader than her family.

Srinivasan is the executive director of Transformative Educational Leadership, cofounded by Linda Lantieri (read more about her on page 49) and Daniel Rechtschaffen.

Like Lantieri, Srinivasan is an educator guided by the principles of Social Emotional Learning, and like Lantieri, she believes in the power of mindfulness to change lives—especially when leaders engage in deep practice with Larry Ward’s question in mind.

“If you’re not practicing mindfulness with that question at the core, you might de-stress a little, but you’re not going to actually

effect change.”

In the Oakland schools she worked in, Srinivasan saw firsthand the limits of social and emotional learning. “The implementation of social emotional learning was ultimately ineffective, if you didn’t have leaders who embodied these skills and competencies.” And Srinivasan knew that a casual mindfulness practice was not enough to help leaders keep their seat when times got tough.

“Is it baked in enough into who you are that you can draw upon it when you’re at the school board meeting and there is a really angry parent there?”

Srinivasan believes that when school leaders are supported on the path of mindfulness, they can begin “healing the separation, leading for belonging, letting our beloved community extend to the Earth.”

And that’s heart work, for Srinivasan. “For me, happiness is so deeply connected with purpose and meaning. The pandemic has invited us all to look deep into what really matters.

And for me, it’s definitely community where everyone is cared for.” – SD

PHOTOS COURTESTY OF MEENA SRINIVASAN, ADEN VAN NOPPEN, MICHELLE C. CHATMAN

M EN TO R , T E ACH ER , A N CES TO R

leadership

Allow Yourself to Heal Aden Van Noppen

ILLUSTRATION BY BLOOMICON / ADOBESTOCK

FO U N D ER A N D E X ECU T I V E D I R EC TO R , M O B I US Aden Van Noppen teetered between two worlds in her late twenties. She would go on a meditation retreat, return to the outside world only to get caught up in work, then back on retreat to feel connected to her practice again.

In the midst of it all, she had a major health crisis—a cerebral hemorrhage—and in the moment of finding out she had a massive brain bleed, her practice rose to the surface. “I was in a place of feeling grounded, of feeling a lot of acceptance, and in particular feeling a lot of gratitude for having been alive at all,” she says. “And it was clear to me that I didn’t want to live on that seesaw anymore.”

So, she made herself a promise. Once recovered from the hemorrhage and from brain surgery, she began to integrate her practice and her wellness into her work. She made the shift from senior advisor to the US Chief Technology Officer to resident fellow at Harvard Divinity School, where she worked at the intersection of technology, ethics, spirituality, and justice to explore how wisdom traditions could help influence the direction of modern tech. Her guiding question: How do we bridge across differences in the context of the digital age?

As Van Noppen experimented with bridging the gap between worlds, she connected with others in the mindfulness space who were thinking about how technology could increase compassion in the world.

Eventually, the community of teachers helped form what is now known as Mobius—a collective committed to creating a world where technology fosters liberation and thriving for all.

Between her work and personal life, Van Noppen says her practice has changed over the years.

“My practice has evolved to a practice that’s really grounded in what serves most in the moment. And there’s a fluidity to it,” Van Noppen says. “In my life, when I feel like day-to-day there is so much that I need to get done, what’s actually called for is releasing that energy and just being.” – KR

Encourage Freedom Michelle C. Chatman A N T H R O P O LO G IS T, A SSO CI AT E PR O FESSO R , SI N G ER

When Michelle Chatman was growing up in DC, she savored the time she spent hand-writing long letters to her maternal grandmother, Evelyn, who lived in New Jersey. Chatman loved the stories her mother told her and her siblings, capturing their imaginations, and in the summers, Chatman spent many days at the Smithsonian, the museum where her father worked. She was enraptured by the artifacts and histories housed there.

“That love of reading, writing, stories, and imagination really helped cultivate a mindful, still way of being,” she says.

Those moments of fullbody presence she experienced in her youth are part of what she brings to the students and faculty of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) in Washington where she teaches. She sometimes begins classes with music—John Coltrane is a favorite—inviting students to breathe deeply “and to think about the stories of our lives and our experiences,” she says. “Where have we been able to inhale and exhale with a sense of freedom and pleasure?”

She says music and storytelling are culturally relevant

ways to connect Black and brown students with mindfulness. “For me, it was listening to stories with my mom or hearing my grandmother’s voice in the letters she wrote to me. Our young people can connect to narratives in hip-hop music because they’re all just different forms of truthful storytelling. I think if we can bring our full selves to those stories, they can be really healing, powerful, and transformative for us.”

Chatman is currently working on launching The Mindfulness and Contemplative Action Lab at UDC, an experiential classroom and research lab for healing-centered mindfulness and contemplative approaches. She hopes the mindfulness community can become more aware of its shortcomings when it comes to true inclusion, so that everyone has more opportunities to breathe more deeply and freely.

“I have a sense of joy and satisfaction with the things I have been able to accomplish. I have a sense of wonder about the things that are yet to unfold. And a really deep sense of appreciation of the new people I meet and the new ways that my work is having an impact in the world.” – AWC

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Nurture the Next Generation Dr. Sará King On a bright afternoon in January, Dr. Sará King pauses and looks out her hotel room window. After a few moments, she says, “For me, happiness is not isolated.”

Instead, she says, it is most often found in connection—to her husband and teenage daughter, her community, and her environment. “I think that’s part of what has been so challenging about this pandemic, this restricted capacity to get out and connect with the world around us.”

At the center of her work is the question of how we can connect to ourselves, our circumstances, and one another in ways that begin to heal what she calls the global “epidemic of stress and trauma.” One of her priorities is finding vehicles for mindfulness education and exploration outside of retreat centers and yoga studios to help make awareness-building and healing skills more accessible.

“Even murals and street art are these beautiful repositories of beauty

and awe that can really engage us in our capacity to think outside of the concept of a very limited, separate, and alone self,” she says. In April, she launched the first awareness-based education program and study at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, available for free online.

She says tech can play a role in helping us find genuine connection that’s grounded in compassion, gratitude, loving-kindness, joy, and awe.

“I have a lot of hope in my heart right now about happiness and how the felt state of happiness can be enhanced and distributed equally across society,” she says.

A guiding principle for King is listening to her 14-year-old daughter and her daughter’s generation, who she believes has a real understanding of what is needed and urgent right now. To those with young people in their lives, she says, “Treat them like they’re a big deal, feel like they’re super-important because they are. I think that the more authentic care and compassion and loving-kindness we show to the younger generations, that is a very clear and easy path forward to creating the conditions for planetary health.” – AWC

ILLUSTRATION BY BLOOMICON / ADOBESTOCK, PHOTO COURTESTY OF SARÁ KING

N EU R OSCI EN T IS T, M ED I C A L A N T H R O P O LO G IS T, CR E AT I V E D I R EC TO R AT M O B I US

leadership

Align With Your Purpose Linda Lantieri

LINDA PHOTOGRAPH BY IGNACIO GIL

T E ACH ER , LE A D ER , EM ERG I N G ELD ER At an international peace conference at The Hague in 1991, Bishop Desmond Tutu leaned forward and looked down the row of his fellow panelists till his eyes rested on Linda Lantieri. “See that woman at the end?” Lantieri remembers him saying as he looked at her. “She’s dangerous.

If she continues to do this work, kids are going to grow up and none of them will want to put a gun in their hand, let alone press the switch that would cause a nuclear bomb.”

For Lantieri, it was confirmation that she was on the right path, and that her work would be recognized, not just by luminaries like Tutu, but by the people whose lives she was lucky enough to touch every day. Lantieri had been working as an educator for about 20 years by that point—she began teaching when she was barely 20 years old in East Harlem, New York, and began exploring meditation and mindfulness a few years later, eventually bringing together her mindfulness practice and her work as an educator. She became director at an alternative middle school where “meditation was very much a part of things. We had a meditation room where teachers came at 7:30 in the morning and meditated before school.”

Lantieri, who had always been an activist for peace, developed a curriculum with Educators for Social Responsibility. A pilot project called Resolving Conflict Creatively was rolled out to 500 schools across the country, and was the precursor to the work that led Lantieri to help grow

the field that would become Social Emotional Learning framework, as cofounder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

With a grant from the Centers for Disease Control, Lantieri and her colleagues measured the effect their Social Emotional Learning method was having on the 5,000 children who participated across the country.

“We found pro-social behavior and a decrease of anti-social behavior,” Lantieri says. “But also, developmentally both boys and girls move toward more negative attribution—which can lead to anti-social behavior including violence, and then it kind of evens itself off a bit, but for some kids it continues in that trajectory developmentally. And this study showed that we interrupted that trajectory.”

It was that outcome that led Bishop Tutu to call Lantieri a dangerous woman at that peace conference.

Lantieri is now turning her attention toward educators, knowing that she can reach more students by teaching their teachers. She’s a cofounder of Transformative Education Leadership, a year-long training process that brings together a “community of middle- to upper-level educational leaders who go through a deep process of growth at the inner level so they can do the outer action and service in the world that they wish to do.”

And for Lantieri, that’s the root of happiness: “It’s nurturing not only one’s mental, emotional, physical, but what I call spiritual dimension of who we are that gives us purpose.” – SD

m AUDIO Guided Practices Find a collection of meditations from the women featured in these pages. mindful.org/ powerfulwomen

August 2022 mindful 49

leadership

Renda Dionne Madrigal CLI N I C A L PSYCH O LO G IS T, U CL A CERT I FI ED M I N D F U LN ESS T E ACH ER , T U RT LE M O U N TA I N CH I PPE WA

Renda Dionne Madrigal first encountered mindfulness in graduate school. Over ensuing years, and with a decolonial lens, she incorporated mindfulness into her therapeutic work with Indigenous communities in Southern California. She also invented ways to share it with her two daughters. “My family was always sort of the guinea pigs,” she laughs. “They’ve been part of all the practices that we do.” This led to writing The Mindful Family Guidebook, published last spring.

Her husband, Luke Madrigal, a traditional Culture Bearer of the Cahuilla tribe, would also practice: “He really gravitated to the ‘hard’ practices, like loving-kindness.” It was mindfulness and story, she says, that helped her family through Luke’s unexpected death in early 2020. Dionne Madrigal finds strength in the worldview that “we’re here on this Earth for a relatively short time, but we have a connection to everybody that’s come before us, everybody we’ve loved.” There are ancient stories from the Chippewa and other Indigenous nations, teaching us how to keep our hearts open through grief.

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And she finds inspiration in strong women peacemakers. While taking Stanford’s Applied Compassion Training program, she says, “I started researching the old stories, and I kept finding these really powerful women who had gone through great tragedy, but that didn’t stop them from continuing on their path.”

As a clinical psychologist employing embodied mindfulness-based therapies, one thing she focuses on is helping clients cultivate happiness and joy. “When we go through hard things, it’s almost like we leave ourselves,” she says. Noticing sensations in the body “helps us build tolerance for having emotion, which is part of our human experience.” Likewise, by staying present for the joyful moments, we strengthen neural connections to positive memories and emotions, whether in solitude or with family and community. “The happiness within relationships is so important,” she says. “We need to be cultivating happiness in a group, being happy for other people and hoping for them to develop their talents. Because when more people develop their talents, it benefits the whole world.” – AT

Embrace Change Dr. Wendy Hasenkamp N EU R OSCI EN T IS T, P O D C A S T H OS T, I N T R OV ERT While studying neuroscience during her PhD program, Dr. Wendy Hasenkamp found herself focusing on everything that could go wrong with the human mind. So when she was introduced to the practice of mindfulness meditation and began to notice the changes taking place in her daily life, she began to wonder what it would be like to study what could go right with the human mind instead.

“I was immediately taken by this new experience of my own mind—a new perspective of being able to kind of step out and observe. And pretty quickly I noticed some changes in my life, that as a neuroscientist, I was like, What is going on in my brain?

Something is clearly changing and it’s just, I’m just sitting here watching my breath,” she says.

Change and transformation are recurring themes in Dr. Hasenkamp’s life. As a former gymnast, she is no stranger to taking big leaps, so shifting her field of research during a time when “mindfulness” and “meditation” were spoken in hushed tones within the scientific community was a change she happily embraced and even deemed necessary.

“Transformation is necessary to make the world a better place. There’s suffering and there’s pain in the world and I think part of our purpose, or perhaps our biggest purpose, is to try to reduce that,” she says.

Dr. Hasenkamp has gone through many more cycles of reinvention since those days. She’s now the science director at the Mind & Life Institute and the host of the Mind & Life podcast, a position she says surprises her, considering that she’s a huge introvert. However, her goals have remained the same: communicating science to the public in a way that’s accessible without being overly simplified.

“I continue to think that the mind is one of the most fascinating concepts that we can look at because it’s the foundation of all of our experience,” she says. “Understanding it from all the angles that we can is the key to learning our behaviors, the effects that we have on this planet and on each other, and moving toward a healthier society.” – OL

RENDA PHOTOGRAPH BY LORI BRYSTAN, WENDY PHOTOFRAPH COURTESY OF WENDY HASENKAMP

Be Happy for Each Other

Celebrate Intergenerational Wisdom

Rose Felix Cratsley

ILLUSTRATION BY BLOOMICON / ADOBESTOCK, PHOTO COURTESY OF ROSE FELIX CRATSLEY

T E ACH ER , LE A D ER , CH A N G E-AG EN T Rose Felix Cratsley considers her first mindfulness teachers to be her parents. Growing up in a family that had practiced mindfulness for generations, Cratsley feels extremely fortunate to have been given what she calls “the gift of mindfulness” early in life.

“My lens into mindfulness is firstly through my parents, who are my teachers, and also learning the value of both informal and formal practice.

Learning the importance of creating spaces for contemplation throughout our lives, not just seated formally, doing a guided practice or a shared practice, but one that also focuses on the value of the collective and the value of shared intergenerational practice.”

So in her graduate class at Harvard University when given the prompt, “If we wanted to bring positive psychology practices and mindfulness into the world in some way, in what way would that be?” it felt natural to her that her reply would be creating Ivy Child International.

“I think mindfulness is an essential and fundamental human right. We come into the world open and curious, but oftentimes self-judgment, criticism, fear, and anxiety come about later,” she says. So Ivy Child International, the nonprofit she created, addresses the often neglected needs of marginalized communities with mindfulness education for children,

adults, and families in these communities. With programs covering mindful movement, mindful eating and nutrition, and mindfulness for parents and caregivers, Ivy Child has positively impacted almost 300,000 children, families, and adults.

“So a big part of our work is how do we harness, celebrate, and strengthen the mindfulness that everyone is so innately born into this world with?”

Cratsley says. “And how do we do so in a manner that really broadens the impact and access, particularly for communities who would not be able to access them as a fundamental right, as well as a tool to navigate life and all of life’s seasons?” While she continues to provide others with the tools to access their innate mindfulness skills, she draws strength from these tools as well.

“I stand before you as an Asian woman of color who, while I’ve been given these amazing gifts by way of practice and heritage and values, I was also conditioned, as a young Asian woman, to cover my feelings,” she says. “And what I think Ivy Child and this work has allowed me to do is both to create the space, to elevate my voice, and amplify voices for others who have also been historically marginalized.” – OL

leadership

ER I CK A PH I L L I P S

Ericka Phillips T E ACH ER , O RGA N IZER , LI T ER A RY AG EN T

Ericka Phillips’ father taught her to meditate when she was 12 or 13.

“From the very beginning, meditation was inside of a liberatory framework for me,” she explains. Initially, it was a sense of personal liberation: “I realized I could cultivate an experiential sense of freedom, through my practice.” Now, as a meditation guide, community organizer, and mindfulness thought leader, she’s also experienced how mindfulness can support communal liberation. She describes working with a group organizing around gentrification and displacement in inner-city neighborhoods: “At one point, I looked around the room and I realized that many of us are descended from people and cultures who have been displaced violently for so many generations. I realized this experience that we were having right then was so much deeper for all of us.”

Mindfulness offered “a way of being together,

acknowledging all that’s in the room, and giving space for our collective healing.”

While the pandemic meant shifting her meditation-teaching work online, Phillips has also begun working as a literary agent with spiritual teachers who are women of color, Black women in particular. “When I stepped into this practice as an adult and was seeking out books and experiences from people whose lives I could relate to—there weren’t many,” she says. She’s uncovered joy and inspiration in having “conversations with teachers who I find incredibly inspiring, and supporting them on their path to publishing and making their voices…more accessible.”

Still, how Phillips relates to joy has changed in the last few years, during which she’s experienced immense personal losses. Navigating grief is a significant part of her practice. “One of the most profound lessons I’ve learned from this grieving is the importance of cultivating joy, seeking joy,” says Phillips, “and listening for that and seeing that takes for me a tremendous amount of stillness and patience.”

With familiar joys, like traveling and gatherings, off the table, she had to get creative: “I really learned that joy itself is the practice. Sometimes it feels like the grief, the things that are difficult or painful, somehow weigh more. But I think, through accessing that stillness and patience, I’ve been able to see how joy in and of itself is also an act of resistance, and an act of healing.” – AT

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ERICKA PHILLIPS AND RUIMIN ZHENG

“ONE OF THE M OS T PRO FO U N D LE SSO N S I ’ V E LE A R N E D F RO M T H I S GR I E V I N G I S T H E I M P O R TA N C E O F C U LT I VAT I N G A N D S E E K I N G J OY.”

Create Space for Joy

Share Your Practice Ruimin Zheng

ILLUSTRATION BY BLOOMICON / ADOBESTOCK

R ESE A RCH ER , D O C TO R , T E ACH ER Mindfulness is a part of Ruimin Zheng’s daily life. She practices on silent retreat at least once a year, while teaching Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP) courses, and often in quiet moments while traveling for work in her role as Deputy Director of Women’s Health Care at the National Center for Women and Children’s Health in China. This wasn’t always the case. When her work in obstetrics and gynecology crossed paths with mindfulness, Zheng saw herself as a researcher tasked with learning about the practice. She never thought she would be a mindfulness practitioner— or a teacher. “Mindfulness is like both salt and water,” Zheng says through an interpreter. “It’s like water because when you first encounter mindfulness, you don’t taste a lot of it.” The deeper you go, the more you can appreciate its different flavors.

Before establishing her own mindfulness practice, she worked in a clinical setting as an OB-GYN where she felt limited in her work with women. She thought she could do more by moving into preventive care, she says. When she was first introduced to mindfulness as a health intervention, she thought it would be valuable to

women’s well-being, because it was replicable and could be shared widely at a low cost in the public sector.

Her interest led her to the founder of MBCP, Nancy Bardacke. Zheng spent time studying with Bardacke in the US and brought everything she learned back with her to help expectant and birthing families through MBCP in hospitals and health centers throughout China. “There is a clarity because of her own personal experiences with practice,” Bardacke says.

“There’s authenticity and also there’s the visionary aspect. There’s tenacity.

There’s heart.”

“For a lot of women, not only in China but worldwide, I think that the fear of childbirth is still quite a big issue,” Zheng says. But with mindfulness, “these mothers and mothers-to-be learn how to take better care of themselves. And they can find their own happiness and joyfulness.”

– KR

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PHOTOGRAPH BY MILLES STUDIO / STOCKSY

PRACTICE

CULTIVATE AN OPEN HEART During times of crisis and uncertainty, touching into your groundedness while remaining open can help you find calm—and inspire others to do the same. Meena Srinivasan offers a practice for staying both rooted and open.

ILLUSTRATION BY BLOOMICON / ADOBESTOCK

Begin by bringing awareness to your breathing. Your own mother was breathing for you before you could breathe for yourself, just as her mother breathed for her. When we’re in the womb, we rely on our mother’s breathing to receive oxygen to our developing organs. Take a few deep conscious breaths in and out of your heart space.

And know that each breath connects you to your lineage.

Draw on the resilience of your ancestors. Think about those who have come before us and have gone through challenging times. I think of my paternal grandmother,

who was married off at the age of 13 and lived the majority of her life in pre-independence India. And I invite you to draw upon the resilience of your ancestors. They could be your blood ancestors, spiritual ancestors, land ancestors, or anyone who represents resilience for you. Ask for their presence to be here with you right now. Feel the presence of this being you brought to mind, embracing you, holding you up. Know that their strength is in you.

Cultivate a sense of rootedness and groundedness. Really feel yourself feeling rooted into the earth while you simultane-

ously open your heart.

You may want to physically have your hands out by your side as you expand your chest and root your feet into the earth—the simultaneous sense of being open and rooted. And trust that you have the capacity for rootedness and open-heartedness and know that you can act from a place and space of groundedness and compassion. And this is what the world needs now. You can always draw upon the strength of those who’ve come before us. They live on through us and are in us. Take a few more deep breaths, and hold this sense of rootedness and openness of the heart. ●

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PHOTOGRAAPH BY MARKO / STOCKSY, ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANATARTAN / ADOBESTOCK

Nkoula Badila grew up surrounded by plants and people. For her, cultivating and caring for plants is a way to connect not only with nature, but also with herself, those she loves, and her history. Over the pandemic, when her whole family gathered together to breathe new life into her childhood home and garden, she learned just how deep her roots grow—and what she needs in order to thrive.

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healing

In the midst of uncertainty, confusion, and heartbreak, knowing that I can take a healthy seed, drop it in soil, expose it to water and sunlight, and watch it grow

During the pandemic, I decided to name a plant after myself. I chose a Dracaena plant as my namesake, though we didn’t have a lot in common other than its spiky leaves bearing a slight resemblance to my hair. I recently discovered that I was eager to care for everyone but myself. I was quick to share a kind word with a friend, but I was my harshest critic. I was patient with my family, but I placed myself on the shortest leash. Caring for this plant was a way for me to start caring for myself.

Over time, as I checked on my plant’s health, presence, and location, I started to tap into its needs and desires. Slowly, this simple act of caring for a spiky plant helped me connect with myself and begin paying attention to my own needs.

I was able to understand that, sometimes, pruning is required in order to grow. That you need to expose the roots (sometimes quite literally) to see what is affecting the overall health of the plant.

It took some time, but eventually I was able to see how tender I am and to appreciate that I need to be seen and heard, felt, and catered to. I slowly began to uproot the stories written for me and began to remember that I had the power to write my own. And I think, in some way or another, this happens to all of us. We grow so accustomed to hearing our stories from other people, or maybe even ourselves, that we forget the impermanence of it all and our ability to rewrite those stories. →

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PHOTOGRAAPH BY RUTH BLACK / ADOBESTOCK, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MERFIN / ADOBESTOCK

has always brought me a sense of peace.

m VIDEO Mindful Garden Walk Explore the San Francisco Botanical Garden with master landscaper Peter Good and founding editor Barry Boyce. mindful.org/ garden

healing

PHOTOGRAAPH BY EUROBANKS / ADOBESTOCK, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MERFIN / ADOBESTOCK

grow at your own pace On average, it takes a flowering plant up to 100 days to complete its growth cycle. So as you begin to write your own story, be patient, and remember that any good story takes time.

Growing up, there were two things I always experienced in abundance: Plants and People.

My father immigrated to America from Congo, where he was deeply connected to plant medicine, so I had the fortunate experience of not only seeing plants as a source of food but as allies. And while my love of gardening started with my parents, it wasn’t until I started volunteering at an organic farm that I realized that I had the ability to grow my own food on a scale that allowed me to provide for those around us.

Growing up in a family with nine siblings, we were like our own little sports team, and through arguments and disagreements, we each found our way to shower one another with love.

After traveling and studying farming techniques from all over the world, I realized that plants are my unique way of showing people I care.

Like many families, my siblings and I grew up and migrated away from the nest. We chased dreams, started families, and embarked on

our own explorations. And over time, our childhood home aged with us, as the garden I had started when I was younger slowly wilted away.

But as we all slowed down during the pandemic, our family team found itself at home base. The pandemic created a unique opportunity for my entire family, now with the addition of 13 nieces and nephews, to be together under one roof. We came together to renovate our home and breathe new life into it. And as we stripped our home down to the beams and weeded the garden, we were able to rebuild and create a safe space that served as an oasis in the midst of the uncertainty of a global pandemic.

In that safe space, I was able to engage in some self-reflection. As I sit on our newly built deck in the garden and meditate, what arises is delicate, tender, and magnificently refreshing. Oftentimes, you plant a seed not knowing what is going to emerge from the soil. Sure, the packet of seeds you picked up at the supermarket might say kale, but you never really know until it starts to sprout.

With plants, we don’t have to give too much or more than what’s needed; we just need to take the time to pay attention to their needs. The same is true with us. And as we reflect, we can begin to discover. As we take the time to pay attention, to engage in a moment of self-discovery, we can begin to write our stories with authenticity and patience. →

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healing

growing as a community I teach gardening to young people, and I have learned that growth is an act of love, resistance, and community. Each day I witness the magic in their eyes when they see the seeds they planted transform into juicy fruit they can enjoy. They begin to see that miracles are possible and that love can produce glorious expressions.

They are more tender with this fruit they grow, with each other, and with themselves. The respect grows, and the nurturer grows. This enriches not only their lives but also the entire community. And community is an essential part of our well-being.

In the midst of the collective grief we experienced these past few years, the pandemic also gave us space for communion, organizing, empathy, understanding, and reflection. In a world where many of us were constantly on the go, we were forced to slow down (and I literally took the time to smell the roses). We also began to understand that we are not as separate as we may have believed.

Even plants talk to each other, according to scientific study. And

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when certain plants brush up against another plant’s leaves or branches, according to scientists, they alter their growth strategy; they actually rein in their growth to avoid competing with one another. Another study found that dying trees will reallocate resources to nearby plants. So as we emerge from this experience, it’s essential to remember that as we grieved together—grieved the loss of loved ones, milestones, and experiences—we can also heal together.

As a teacher, I have learned that it’s important to trust your heart. Plants teach us our sensitivity is a way of communicating too. Vibes don’t lie and honesty is respectable. Be true to who you are and you will always be supported by the plant world around you.

Wherever you find your healing, make sure it’s filled with self-love, care, and kindness…and maybe a few Dracaenas along the way. ●

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nkoula Badila is an artist, gardener, and community activist from Hudson Valley, New York.

She is also the founder of Grow Black Hudson, a new project to educate Black and Brown Hudson community members about the importance of growing food. A strong advocate for sustainable living, Badila has farmed in Mexico, Belize, Haiti, and California.

PHOTOGRAAPH BY OLGA MOREIRA / STOCKSY, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MERFIN / ADOBESTOCK

m VIDEO COURSE Nature Meditations Step away from the screen and reconnect with nature, using downloadable practices you can take anywhere. mindful.org/ naturemeditations

PRACTICE

Three garden experts share how they connect with nature and offer some tips on how you can bring a little greenery into your life.

PHOTOGRAAPH BY BITS AND SPLITS / ADOBESTOCK, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MERFIN / ADOBESTOCK

BY CARSTEN KNOX Can you see a tree from where you’re sitting right now? How about a plant? Anything living, besides other people? Can you open the window and take a big breath of fresh air?

If your answer to these questions is no, if you’re one of those people who spends all day breathing the lifeless output of a building-ventilation system, then you may be encountering a nature deficit. And it’s making your life less enjoyable, less healthy, and more stressed.

We know intuitively that we need green. Here are three ways to reconnect with nature in the midst of a busy modern life.

Make a Relationship “I have a daily practice where I sit in silence for 20 minutes and watch my breath,” says biologist David Haskell.

By painstakingly observing—every day for 12 months, sometimes for hours at a time—the trees, bushes, flowers, birds, and animals of one patch of forest, Haskell broke down the all-too-common perception that nature and humanity are separate.

We don’t have to take it to the lengths he did, but Haskell believes everyone can benefit from the practice of connecting with a natural phenomenon of our choice. “Pick something and give it your attention, repeatedly, for a year,” he suggests. “Trees, a park, flocks of pigeons. Most people don’t have the time to spend hundreds of hours looking at a forest. But it can be a short practice, just committing a few minutes each day.”

Restore Yourself Landscape architect David Kamp was part of a team that created a channel garden at New York City’s Rockefeller Center. “It’s right in the middle of Manhattan, one of the busiest tourist spots in the city,” says Kamp. “We tried to create a place with intimacy, where someone could pause in their busy day, where you could just stop for a minute. Sometimes if you just pause, your frame of mind changes.”

Get Dirty The folks who urban-garden love the food they grow, but they love something else just as much. “They get a chance to be outside, to have a break from their indoor lives, their computer lives,” says Brooke Budner, one of the operators of Little City Gardens in San Francisco.

“Digging in the dirt is in our DNA,” says landscape designer Peter Goode.

“It’s harder to do that in the urban environments most of us live in now, but it’s not all that hard. Get out there on a sunny weekend, plant a seed, and take a kid with you. You’ll love it.”

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BOOKMARK THIS read…listen…stream

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

BITTERSWEET How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole Susan Cain • Crown

Susan Cain wants to know if we can transform the way we love, lead, parent, talk about death, and understand each other by embracing the “hidden riches of sorrow and longing.” In looking for the answer, Cain turns to philosophers (past and present), researchers, songs, poems, and anecdotes and weaves them together in nine chapters.

We’re never given a single answer to what is possible when we embrace the bitter in bittersweet emotions, partly because each of us gets to choose how and when to let sorrow in.

(And if you’re not sure what that means in your life, Cain developed a “Bittersweet Quiz” to gauge whether you inhabit a bittersweet state instinctively.) Instead, we follow Cain on an exploration of the wisdom in sadness throughout history. With a hodgepodge of examples of turning toward difficult emotions laid out for us, we’re able to consider committed action to move from bitter to sweet, from loss to love, without shying away from the former in each of those options. “Bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul.”

The truth, Cain writes, is that pain, sadness, and longing are rooted in care, “therefore the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring.” The coda, How to Go Home, shares practical applications of embracing sadness. We’re presented with questions that can help us understand what role sorrow and longing play in our lives with the light encouragement to turn often painful emotions into “a constructive force of your choosing.” – KR

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MINDFUL MIXOLOGY A Comprehensive Guide to No- and Low-Alcohol Cocktails Derek Brown • Rizzoli

“If mindful drinking is about weighing your options,” Derek Brown writes, “then mindful mixology is an extension of that.” In this beautiful book of no- and low-alcohol cocktail recipes, you’ll learn the skills to enjoy a well-crafted drink of your choosing. With over 20 years of experience in mixology, Brown offers a look at the ingredients and flavors commonly found in cocktails and

discusses the wide range of non-alcoholic substitutes. He cleverly weaves in the voices of others in the (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) spirits industry to explore why having a cocktail is about much more than a sip of alcohol. It’s about being in the atmosphere where cocktails are served, appreciating good company, and savoring flavors that match your palate. – KR

EVERYTHING, BEAUTIFUL Ella Frances Sanders • Penguin Random House

Our society’s narrow view of beauty often leaves us in what Sanders calls a “beauty drought.” She encourages us to find new definitions of beauty “that allow us to be fully ourselves, powerfully noticing, and expansively human.”

Part meditation, part self-help guide, and part interactive journal, Everything, Beautiful explores our evolving ideas about beauty and how to

uncover it in our everyday lives.

By taking a moment to pause, we might savor the elegance of a dandelion or the earliest blue hours of the morning.

Filled with captivating stories, prompts, hand-lettered quotes, and illustrations, Sanders’ book expands our perspective to include those imperfect, messy, and even heartbreaking moments in this new definition of beauty. – OL

read, listen, stream

TUNE IN TO

WORK PRAY CODE When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley Carolyn Chen • Princeton University Press

Work Pray Code is about the relationships between work, religion, mindfulness, and ourselves. It’s a sociological case study in Silicon Valley, where Carolyn Chen, who is associate professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley and codirector of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, finds that for some workers, the sorts of needs traditionally met by religion—for belonging, identity, purpose—are now being met at and by work. Corporate meditation programs, popularized by Google and LinkedIn, are part of what’s “reconfiguring the lives of high-paid skilled workers in late capitalism,” Chen writes. She clearly understands that in a work context, meditation is usually treated as a secular wellness practice. Given that reality, she seeks “to unearth the assumptions about the religious and the secular that become clear when meditation crosses the threshold between them.”

Silicon Valley is an ideal location to study these assumptions. As 14- to 18-hour workdays and a feverishly competitive environment edge out community and self-care outside work, workplace mindfulness programs do seem to provide well-being and connection to self. Yet, Chen asks, what does it mean for mindfulness to play the kind of role traditionally found in religious communities? Drawing from hundreds of interviews, she unspools the causes and effects of “finding our souls at work.” Is there a difference between cultivating “equanimity, compassion, and a clear mind” because they are virtues and cultivating them “because we want to optimize our performance”?

However distant Silicon Valley may feel from our own practice, Chen demonstrates how all of us can bring the light touch of beginner’s mind to whatever our context for meditating is. In a workaholic society, where there’s more noise about mindfulness than there is genuinely mindful behavior, there’s an intrinsic (not monetary) value to reclaiming our off-the-clock sources of meaning and wholeness. – AT

mindful Visit mindful.org for featured meditations from Steve Hickman, Elaine Smookler, and Sebene Selassie 3 GUIDED PRACTICES TO FILL YOUR HEART WITH JOY 1

Cultivate Gratitude for Small Things with Steve Hickman

Whether it’s the first bite of a fresh berry or feeling the sun beaming down on you, we can all find something to be grateful for when we take a moment to tap into the present. In this guided meditation practice, Steve Hickman invites us to let go of needing anything to be any different in this moment, and to open up to what’s actually here that may bring us joy.

2

Savor the Moment

with Elaine Smookler

When things don’t go our way, it can be easy for us to think that life will always be disappointing. What would happen, though, if we shifted our focus to things that do go our way? Elaine Smookler shares how tapping into her senses helped her uncover the beauty in everyday tasks and offers a meditation practice to cultivate gratitude through your sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.

3

Reclaim Your Joy

with Sebene Selassie

We all get caught up in feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and doubt. Oftentimes, it can feel like the voice of our inner critic is louder than anything else, and we can begin to feel like we’re not enough. As Sebene Selassie reminds us, “By the very nature of our birth and our existence, we are enough and we all belong.” She shares a quick guided meditation to help us experience the ease and joy of truly belonging at any moment. – OL

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read, listen, stream

PODCAST

reviews BURNOUT Episode 1: “We Can’t Live Like This Anymore” “Close your eyes and think of the word ‘burnout,’” says Connor Franta, host of Burnout. You may picture an office worker exhausted after a full week, a grocery clerk on the second leg of a double shift, or you when you’re feeling burnt out. This debut episode, produced in collaboration with (you guessed it!)

Mindful, explores the physiology and history of burnout—

and why it creeps into our lives. We hear from experts who break down research, personal experience, and ways to be OK. And when the topic gets heavy, (our very own founding editor) Barry Boyce offers a few moments of practice to check in with yourself. For guided meditations curated to pair with each episode, visit mindful. org/burnout. – KR

WORKWELL BY DELOITTE Episode: “The Science of Happiness” Jen Fisher, Chief Well-Being Officer for Deloitte, hosts this buoying conversation with Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, a prolific author, professor, and expert on leadership and happiness.

They discuss topics as varied as the usefulness of measuring GNH (Gross National Happiness), the hard work of healing perfectionism, and the very practical question of

how we “create rituals” that feed our well-being, “whether it’s appreciation, regular exercise, kindness, generosity,” or giving “our undivided attention when we are with other people,” says Ben-Shahar. Prioritizing happiness, he says, can be as simple—and, to be sure, as difficult—as consistently making these choices for ourselves. – AT

SPEAKING OF PSYCHOLOGY Episode: “Ambiguous Loss and ‘the myth of closure’” Pauline Boss, PhD, author of The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change, joins host Kim Mills to talk about why closure may be an appropriate term for the end of a business deal, but not for thinking about life after loss. Boss coined the term “ambiguous loss”—a loved one who’s missing, or ill with dementia, say—in the 1970s. Here, she extends it to

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our pandemic losses—loved ones, lost opportunities, jobs, ceremonies, celebrations.

Boss makes generous space for the continued attachment we naturally feel for who and what we love. “‘Getting over it’ is an artificial idea put upon the people who are grieving in a culture that has no patience for suffering,” she tells Mills. “We might be that culture.” – SD

“This ‘modest’ emotion, as Hampton styles it, is intrinsically linked with community.”

CHEERFULNESS A Literary and Cultural History Timothy Hampton • Zone Books

This scholarly examination charts the progress of cheerfulness across five centuries, its meaning becoming more layered as it travels through every sector of human experience. From its earliest medieval understanding of cheer as friendly hospitality, spiritual uplift, and even sustenance, this “modest” emotion, as Hampton styles it, is intrinsically linked with community.

Hampton writes: “Cheerful charity was the manifestation of a link between self and other that already existed…what’s mine is yours already, even before I give it to you.” Later, when John Calvin gets his hands on it, cheerfulness becomes a condition of full membership in the community, a sign of “proper spiritual practice.”

For medical thinkers in early modern Europe, it is both a legible sign of the inner self and a technique—a tool for self-management. Shakespeare explores it as a political tool in emerging court societies. From Jane Austen to the smileyface emoji, from Erasmus to Louis Armstrong, Hampton says, cheerfulness has shaped and changed the way we relate to ourselves, and to each other, in art, music, society, politics, medicine, and spiritual life.

He leaves us with a powerful case for this often misunderstood emotion: “Even in its modern iteration, cheerfulness may be one of the forms of emotional power that should not be overlooked. It is not the ‘hope’ of the messianic, or the ‘optimism’ of the cheap politician.

It makes more modest promises—to get you through the next few hours, to connect you to a neighbor. You can’t build a politics on it. But you probably can’t rebuild a world without it.” – SD

read, listen, stream

TEACHING SELF-COMPASSION TO TEENS Lorraine Hobbs and Niina Tamura • Guilford Press

This science-based guidebook for those who work with teens and want to introduce and include self-compassion practices in that work offers a practical roadmap for counselors, teachers, and even parents looking to help teens and young adults navigate the often-rocky years of adolescence (a period that ends when one has arrived at a “stable, independent role in society”).

In addition to basic information about adolescent brain development, Hobbs and Tamura give a solid background in self-compassion practice, with nods to seminal work in

the field by Chris Germer and Kristin Neff (Hobbs, along with Karen Bluth, officially adapted Germer and Neff’s Mindful Self-Compassion course to develop the MSC for Teens course). Besides covering some of the trickier aspects of teaching this—or any—material to teens (behavioral disruption, disinterest and disengagement), this book offers advice for teachers to deepen their own self-compassion work, with mini-practices around patience, letting go, lovingkindness for a difficult teen, and compassion for one’s own teenaged self. – SD

MINDFUL MEDICINE Jan Chozen Bays, MD • Shambhala

Healing the burnout epidemic in health care will require systemic change, along with pragmatic, research-backed tools for self-care that can meet healthcare workers where they are now. To that end, physician and meditation teacher Jan Chozen Bays offers a wise, timely, and compassionate book’s worth of simple exercises that healthcare professionals (and all frontline workers) can use to mitigate stress and to restore their sense of presence, purpose, and flow in their chosen career.

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

“Obstructions always arise, of course,” she writes, “but once we have trained ourselves in how to enter the full experience of the present moment, we are able to flow, like water, around or over potential difficulties, and even penetrate straight in to their heart.” Included are techniques for connecting with yourself and with clients throughout the day; guided meditations, with audio online; mini “rescue remedy” practices for high-stress times; and tips for mindfulness practice groups and retreats. – AT ●

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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.

Essential reading for parents of grade-schoolers through teens experiencing bullying, social exclusion, and teasing—with uplifting stories from young adults who have navigated those experiences and reclaimed a sense of their own power and inner resiliency.

Break out of “creator’s block” and unleash your creativity with 62 open-ended watercolor prompts from the bestselling author of A Field Guide to Color. This deck will help you find inspiration and creativity in all areas of life.

Healers need healing, too—now, more than ever. Mindful Medicine shares simple mindfulness practices to help health care professionals of all kinds reconnect with themselves and their patients, find joy, and build resilience, from Jan Chozen Bays.

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August 2021 mindful 71

point of view

DROPPING OUR ILLUSIONS

by BARRY BOYCE, FOUNDING EDITOR

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72 mindful August 2022

look at what was really going on has re-disillusioned me, if you can say that. The Camelot myth of the Kennedy era was, of course, just that. Nefarious dealings in Vietnam—propping up a corrupt regime and then looking the other way as a coup and assassination plot unfolded—easily shatter the myth of benevolence and peace. The vibrant new pope trying to reform an ossified institution was fighting a losing battle, and many children were hurt when reform never happened.

In what would turn out to be his final book, Martin Luther King

Disillusion is ultimately a good thing. How could the removal of an illusion be anything but? We’re human.

We use narratives that spin illusory stories to make life bearable, to get up in the morning, to live a noble lie.

But they cannot last. They are flimsy dwellings, and they will fall apart, and as Pema Chödrön and many other teachers suggest, that’s good news.

When our main illusions—believing we know more than we do, that things will not change, and that what we want is what we will get—turn out to not be true, the first response may be disappointment and denial, but if we

We are afraid if we drop our illusions, we will not survive.

But when we do drop our illusions, and we look around for a moment, we will realize we already have survived. came to have wistful regret about his “dream.” In many ways, it was turning into a nightmare, he said, and White America was living “a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.” Not long after, an assassin’s bullet cut him down.

Learning that people have behaved in profoundly disappointing and dispiriting ways is an outward-looking form of disillusionment. Just the same, one can easily become dismayed when the lens turns inward. I look upon so many things I did and believed in as if I’m looking at someone else, asking, How could they do that? How could they see things that way? That can’t be me. How could I have overlooked others’ pain, when it was right in front of me, so focused on my own screenplay of how great things are?

Having our illusions stripped away is a gritty emotional experience. And yet…

let it, the bracing fresh air of reality can help us embrace the power and joy that come from getting real.

We are afraid if we drop our illusions, we will not survive. But when we do drop our illusions, and we look around for a moment, we will realize we already have survived—this time in the real world. We might also realize that we can appreciate people, including ourselves, without having to make up a myth about them. We don’t appreciate them for the bad things they do or have done. We hold them to account. Yet we appreciate them for the possibility they have within—and that we have within—to be real. That’s a more durable kind of hope. ● 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

The early ’60s, when I was very young, was a time of tremendous hope for many. The president of the United States was young and seemingly vigorous; in his inaugural address he uttered a couplet that would be repeated for years: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The new Pope, John XXIII, son of a sharecropper, made humbleness and equality his watchwords and sought to upend a church noted more for self-regard than charity, proclaiming, “We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.” Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his rousing “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to a quarter-million people crowded onto the National Mall. For a while, young people, particularly young Irish Catholics like me, were fed a steady diet of hope: Good people were doing good things.

Mass disillusionment followed.

The president assassinated, the pope dead too early, the Vietnam War taking center COURSE stage. I remember Come As the pervasive You Are atmosphere of Barry Boyce disappointment, leads a 7-day of hopes dashed. self-paced It was my mindfulness first taste of retreat. disillusionment.

It would not be mindful.org/ my last. diy-retreat I’ve been reading a lot about that period lately, and the up-close