Remembering and Choosing Loving Presence (retreat talk) - Tara Brach

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Remembering and Choosing Loving Presence (retreat talk) ~

We are conditioned to go into a limbic trance—an emotional reactivity to life within and around us—that keeps us identified with a limited, separate sense of self. This talk helps us to identify the flags of trance, and to bring a healing attention that frees us to live our moments with creativity, wisdom and love. Includes the RAIN of Self-Compassion. (from the 2017 IMCW New Year’s Retreat)

photo: Suzanne Kulperger

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Meditation: Basic Body Scan (20 min.) - Tara Brach

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Meditation: Basic Body Scan ~

From the first morning of the IMCW 2017 New Year’s retreat, Tara offers an introductory meditation with a body scan, bringing focus to the breath, sounds, then resting in awareness.

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My Religion is Kindness – Part 2 - Tara Brach

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My Religion is Kindness – Part 2 ~

Authentic kindness must include the life within us. These two talks examine the movement from an armored to a free and loving heart. The first looks at how we can awaken from the trance of unworthiness and establish a genuinely caring relationship with our inner life. In the second we explore how self-kindness awakens us to the heartspace that naturally includes all of life.

This talk is dedicated especially to youthful listeners on this solstice evening.

Listen to My Religion is Kindness – Part 1.

photo: Jon McRay

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4 Reasons to Try Mindful Singing

Alexander deVaron teaches music theory and composition at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Recently he wondered what would happen if he gave himself permission to sing during formal meditation—This is what he discovered:

4 Reasons to Try Mindful Singing

Sometimes you need to break the rules. “I gave permission to break the rules a little bit. And during the practice of formal mindfulness I wondered what it would be like if I just let myself vocalize. I think the interesting thing about this is that it’s really a process of exploration, giving one’s self permission to explore. It still is mindfulness practice. It’s grounded in experiencing directly the sensations of present moments without judgment or interpretation.

Maybe it’s just that—A little bit of song that changes the experience of coming back to the present, because you’re no longer just here, you’re here and singing, and the game changer, I think.

Singing is a gesture of self-compassion. “The other thing that happens when we vocalize, which is important, is we’re really massaging our body from the inside out. So it really is a gesture of self-compassion. If you sit and sing, you can feel it in your chest, you can feel parts of your body vibrating, and it’s a pleasant feeling. It tends to help the muscles relax, and helps the tightness and the constriction we feel when we get a lot of anxiety or stress from tension. If you take a deep breath, and then sing on the exhale, you can feel a kind of relaxation taking place.”

You don’t have to sing a happy song. “So you come back [to the present moment], and you feel whatever it is you’re feeling in a complete way, you express that in song. So, if you’re sad, you can sing a sad song, if you’re happy, you sing a happy song. And it’s not a magnum opus, you know, maybe just a few notes. Maybe it’s just that—A little bit of song that changes the experience of coming back to the present, because you’re no longer just here, you’re here and singing, and the game changer, I think.”

Singing might help you want to meditate more. “Another thing about it, from the brain science point of view, which is interesting, is that singing stimulates what’s called the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center of the brain. So, you’re linking enjoyment of your life with coming back to the present. By linking [mindfulness]to pleasure, and by linking it to this deeply instinctual part of our brain, it’s then programming us to do it again. And one of the interesting things about mindfulness practice is we’re looking for ways to make mindfulness more of a habit, less of a thing that we have consciously and earnestly and kind of sometimes clumsily do and more of the very light-handed part of who we are.”

 

Tune In, Turn On

What Keeps You Coming Back

 

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Meditation: “Yes” to Life (13 min.) - Tara Brach

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Meditation: “Yes” to Life ~

This guided practice awakens a relaxed and friendly attention that rests in the breath and opens to whatever is arising. We deepen that presence with the intention to truly say “Yes” to experience, allowing life to be just as it is.

photo: Suzanne Kulperger

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A Time for Gratitude and Aspiration

Two of the main energies shaping this time of year, the winter solstice and the holidays, seem to be at odds. On one hand, we have the increased darkness of the shortened days, while, on the other, everywhere we see the colorful lights of the festive season. But what I really love about this mashup is how these energies combine to naturally turn our minds to two other important things that mark this season: all that we are grateful for and all that we aspire to.

In this last blog of 2017, I’d like to leave you with some of both. I’d like to emphasize the “some” because the two lists are way too long to detail here, and for everyone one that I include I’m sure I’ll leave another two out.

Our Gratitude

First and foremost, I’m grateful for the indomitable mindful spirit in us all—the intelligence that seeks insight and awareness, that yearns for a more inclusive way to see and a more healthy way to be—both alone and in relationship. We’ve seen in the many hardships of 2017 how people’s essential goodness shines through in even the most challenging situations.

In the world of mindfulness, we see this human spirit moving in both the big and the small, as I talked about in my last blog. We are grateful for the well-known champions and famous mindfulness leaders, thinkers, funders, strategists, all who impact the big picture and the critical leverage points. They give the talks, write the articles, and set the trends. We can’t do without them.

We’re equally thankful for all the local champions, so many of you in neighborhoods everywhere inspired to bring the benefits of mindfulness, kindness, and compassion practices to your communities. You’re too many to name but so inspiring to us, so we send along a shout out and thank you to you all.

I’m grateful for the indomitable mindful spirit in us all—the intelligence that seeks insight and awareness, that yearns for a more inclusive way to see and a more healthy way to be—both alone and in relationship.

We’re grateful that people in all walks of life are asking the same important question: is there something in this mindfulness thing that can help us serve better, work better, cure better, teach better, learn better, parent better, innovate better, lead better, police better, and take better care of ourselves while doing so?

And we’re grateful that it’s happening everywhere, in really surprising and gratifying ways. it’s happening not just in suburbs like Marin and Brooklyn anymore, but in the Main Streets of Flint, Louisville, Baltimore, Wichita, Nashville, and Jackson Hole. And it’s happening with kids and teachers in the classroom; nurses, doctors and patients in our hospitals and clinics; supervisors and staff in the workplace; and all the administrators that support that work. It’s happening with mayors and council members, police and border patrol, soldiers and vets, neuroscientist and research funders. It’s kinda mind blowing.

With all this to be grateful for in 2017, our aspirations for 2018 arise naturally and clearly: let’s do all that we can to make more of this!

Our Aspirations

We aspire in 2018 to continue and deepen our work to support champions big and small, to create content that responds to your needs, and to keep important projects and ideas moving forward.

And in particular we aspire to bring the benefits of these practices to all parts of society, to all parts of the country, and into the most challenging situations. We had the aspiration for social innovation when we started the Foundation 6 years and we’re pleased that this work is coming to the forefront now.

A sneak peek into how these aspirations will turn into Mindful’s plans for 2018:

• A more robust mobile edition for the majority of our readers who follow us on your phones;
• An expanded web presence with more advance content and community news in mindful education and health care;
• Expanding our Foundation projects like Mindful Cities, and specific content for firefighters and native Spanish speakers.

We aspire to bring the benefits of these practices to all parts of society, to all parts of the country, and into the most challenging situations.

In the end, it always comes down to a few simple things:

We’re grateful to you all—our readers, subscribers, supporters, critics, and mindfulness activators. You make it possible for us to do what we do, and you’ve helped us grow in numbers and in understanding. Our gratitude to you.

So, join us in fulfilling our mutual aspirations for more mindfulness, kindness, awareness and compassion in 2018!

Thank you!

If you haven’t done so already, please consider supporting our work by making a donation. We’re grateful for your support.

Mindfulness Feeds the Roots

Leaning Into the Mindfulness Momentum

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Why a Grateful Brain Is a Giving One

When you think about gratitude and its place in our culture, you might not immediately think about morality—that is, matters of right and wrong.

Often, we make gratitude sound like it’s all about you. In the domain of self-help, we hear that gratitude is the single most important ingredient to living a successful and fulfilled life—or that when we are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.

In fact, research does support the idea that gratitude helps people who practice it. They report fewer physical symptoms of illness, more optimism, greater goal attainment, and decreased anxiety and depression, among other health benefits.

If you stop with feeling good, gratitude certainly seems more like a platitude than a moral emotion that motivates reciprocity and altruism. But here is where I think many of us get gratitude wrong.

There is a much older, pre-self-help conception of gratitude as an emotion with moral motivations. To first-century philosopher Cicero, gratitude was a matter of religious obligation “to the immortal gods.” Modern psychologists such as Michael McCullough and colleagues have systemized it this way: Gratitude is a “moral barometer”—an acknowledgement “that one has been the beneficiary of another person’s moral actions.” They go on to argue that gratitude is also a moral reinforcer, meaning that you’ll see a “thanks” from others as a reward that will lead you to give more in the future.

My own work has tried to map the relationship between gratitude and altruism in the brain. I am discovering that the neural connection between the two is very deep, and that cultivating gratitude may encourage us to feel more generous. We don’t say “thanks” for selfish reasons. Far from it: Gratitude, like giving, might be its own reward.

Neural rewards for giving

When we think about research on the relationship between gratitude and altruism, there are generally two main approaches.

First, we can ask whether people who seem to be more grateful are also more altruistic. Researchers use questionnaires to determine the degree to which someone is characteristically grateful. They ask other questions to determine the degree to which someone is generally giving. Finally, they use statistics to determine the extent to which someone’s altruism could be predicted from their gratitude.

Such studies are helpful for understanding the way gratitude could relate to altruism—in fact, the two do appear to go hand in hand—but of course, they depend on a person’s ability to judge their own gratitude and altruism. We can imagine someone touting himself as tremendously grateful, or the most generous person since Mother Theresa, but this could certainly be untrue. That’s why studies using these methods cannot explain why grateful people might behave prosocially. Perhaps they just feel guilty. Or perhaps altruistic people feel good when other people do well. How can we know?

At this point, we need to take an experimental approach. In one recent study, some colleagues of mine tried to understand the relationship between general prosocial tendencies and the way the brain responds to charitable donations. To start, the researchers assessed the prosocial tendencies of the participants using questionnaires. Then, they supplied participants with real money and put them in an MRI scanner that measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain.

In the scanner, the money could go to either the participants themselves or to a charity, such as a local food bank. Sometimes, these gifts were voluntary; sometimes not, so that it was more like a tax than a donation. This distinction was important, because in the tax-like condition, the participant doesn’t get to feel good about a charitable choice—only about the charity getting money. As the money transferred, my colleagues focused on reward centers of the brain—the regions that give us a dose of feel-good neurotransmitters—in order to compare the brain’s response to these various conditions.

The result? My colleagues found that the more prosocial participants felt far more inner reward when the money went to charity than to themselves. They found something else interesting: The older the participant, the larger this benevolent disposition—suggesting that, with age, your brain may reward you more when you see good in the world, rather than when you yourself get some benefit.

Stepping back from results like these, we are left to wonder about what makes someone grateful or altruistic in the first place. Is it a matter of the right dose of prosocial genes? Or is it a lifetime of experiences or family socialization that encourage both gratitude and giving?

My colleagues’ study answered some big questions, but also left some unanswered. One of these big questions involved the link between gratitude and altruism. Do they go hand in hand? Does gratitude actually encourage altruism?

Training the grateful brain

To start to find out, I conducted an experiment that was quite similar to the one in my colleagues’ study. The key difference? I asked participants about their gratitude levels as well as their altruism, with a leaner version of the giving task. After they performed their giving activity in the MRI machines, I compared the brain’s response for outcomes that benefitted charity vs. the self, just as in the previous study.

I found that the participants who reported more grateful and more altruistic traits had a stronger response in the reward regions of the brain to the charity benefitting, just as in the previous study. I was excited to find this result in a new group of people with a similar, but not identical, task.

There was another difference in our two studies: While their participants weren’t restricted by age, mine included only young women. My colleagues saw that the neural and behavioral measure of benevolence increased over the lifespan—but no one yet had shown that this measure could change over a shorter timespan in healthy young adults. This was another big question that needed to be answered. My hunch was that gratitude practice would lead to more altruistic tendencies in the brain.

So, in step two of the experiment, I randomly assigned half of my participants to write a gratitude journal entry every evening until another brain scan a few weeks later. The other half of the group wrote expressive journal entries, but the prompts for these entries were neutral rather than gratitude-focused. Neither group was told what the purpose of the study was, or what other people were doing.

At the end of the three weeks, participants came back for their second brain scan. Once again, the key measurement was the brain’s reward-response to where the money went—a charity versus themselves. Would it change more for the gratitude group than the control group? Indeed it did! The response in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a key region for reward processing in the brain, showed an increase in the pure altruism measure for the gratitude group, and a decrease in the control group.

Of course, many factors can influence the brain’s reward processing. We can imagine that receiving $5 could feel great…or could make you feel cheated if you were expecting more. It really depends. However, I found that after practicing gratitude for three weeks, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex increased the value it placed on benefits to others. And, remember, this is for the tax-like transfers, when participants don’t even get to congratulate themselves on making an altruistic choice. The computer did the choosing; they just observed the result. They lost five bucks, but the charity gained it—and their brains felt better about the outcome.

In a sense, gratitude seems to prepare the brain for generosity. Counting blessings is quite different than counting your cash, because gratitude, just as philosophers and psychologists predict, points us toward moral behaviors, reciprocity, and pay-it-forward motivations. Apparently, our brain literally makes us feel richer when others do well. Perhaps this is why researchers have observed that grateful people give more.

Gratitude might be good for us—but it is good for others as well.

 

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. View the original article.

 

What the Brain Reveals about Gratitude

Give a Power Boost to Your Gratitude Practice

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How to Create Space for Socially Intelligent Work Relationships

When it comes to work, getting the job done isn’t the only thing that matters. The way we relate to our coworkers is also crucial—without healthy workplace relationships, it’s hard to accomplish much of anything. So how can we cultivate a positive social environment while on the job?

In his bestselling book Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes how we’re biologically hardwired to “tune in” to one another. In fact, one of the central skills of social intelligence, he found, is attunement, which is our ability to build rapport with others by offering total attention and listening fully.

Building relationships at work is not just a matter of “knowing the right people” in order to get ahead.

Building relationships at work is not just a matter of “knowing the right people” in order to get ahead. Working well with colleagues elevates everyone’s experience, builds trust and mutual respect, fosters creative collaboration, and instills confidence that may even translate to greater professional opportunity.

The Role of Meditation

Science is exploring how mindfulness meditation strengthens our ability to attune to others—specifically, how it strengthens the part of our brain responsible for regulating emotions, heightening communication, and reducing anxiety.

What’s less measurable is how it helps us to see beyond our own filters. In work as in life, we tend to view people through mindsets that emphasize how we prefer them to fit into our world. For example, if we’re looking for a mate, we’ll filter their information for cues about the possibility of a relationship. Likewise, if we hope to make a business deal, we’re on the lookout for hints of opportunity.

While using social filters to discern such possibilities isn’t a problem, being unaware that we’re doing so is. Mindsets help us focus on what we need, but they also can blind us to what others may need from us. In other words, too often we unwittingly misread others, not appreciating them for who they truly are.

By bringing your attention to your immediate experience, instead of relating to others through a filter based on your assumptions or needs, you interact with the actual, fully dimensional person.

The Impatient Doctor

I once coached a research scientist who struggled to “tune in” to his colleagues. One had complained that she felt diminished and disrespected by his impatience. After several months, we had a breakthrough conversation:

“How did your meeting with your colleague go yesterday?” I asked.

“I think I am getting better,” he responded.

“Did you notice anything new about her?”

He hesitated. “She does seem a bit tired.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. Like she was maybe sad?”

“Like her heart is broken?” I gently suggested, hinting that I knew more about the circumstances than I had let on.

With a glance of recognition, it was clear he suddenly understood what it felt like to tune in.

“You’re right,” he said softly. “She is sad. Why? I don’t know. It feels like I haven’t actually seen her until now.”

“And you may not know,” I offered, “that she has recently divorced and is now a single mom of two small kids.”

Like so many of us, my client had blinded himself to his colleague and dulled his natural ability to really see the complete person. Rather than listening, he had dismissed; rather than opening, he had closed off.

Like so many of us, my client had blinded himself to his colleague and dulled his natural ability to really see the complete person. Rather than listening, he had dismissed; rather than opening, he had closed off.

Through mindful self-reflection and training, he reawakened his instinct to tune in. And today, his ability to build socially intelligent relationships has greatly improved.

No matter where we start, we don’t need to be blinded by our filters. Mindfulness teaches us how to offer our total attention and listen fully. Healthy workplace relationships are just one of many potential positive outcomes.

This article appeared in the October 2017 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

How to Avoid Confirmation Bias at Work

A 10-Minute Meditation to Help You Solve Conflicts at Work

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Curb Your Inner Critic Over the Holidays with Self-Compassion

‘Tis the season for self-judgment! During the holidays, the comparing mind kicks into high gear as we measure ourselves against our friends, family, colleagues, as well as the “ghosts” of past and future visions of ourselves and find that we are coming up short. In Charles Dickens’ famous Christmas Carol, the stodgy and stingy Ebenezer Scrooge learns to embrace gratitude and attunement for those around him. How about we take a page from Dickens’ book and not only attune to others this holiday season, but do so toward ourselves as well.

As a clinician, I’ve been trained to spot and address the unhealthy mental habit of repetitive and negatively-toned inner chatter that broils in our minds and bodies from the inside. Rumination (or repetitive and passive thinking about negative emotions) has been shown to predict the chronic nature of depressive disorders as well as anxiety symptoms. Another study suggested that people with a ruminative style of reacting to their low moods were more likely to later show higher levels of depression symptoms. When we ruminate about our shortcomings and failings, we spend too much time in our heads instead of living our lives. We focus on berating ourselves internally instead of actually enjoying that holiday party.

When we ruminate about our shortcomings, we spend too much time in our heads instead of living our lives. We focus on berating ourselves internally instead of actually enjoying that holiday party.

And it’s not just my patients who ruminate negatively about themselves—it could be me, for instance, telling myself over and over that I’m an “absolute failure” as a therapist for not paying attention to a patient for a split second during a session. Or eviscerating a future version of myself based on a minor faux pas last week. Rumination is the run-on self-talk of the mind that has agitated energy as both its fuel and its output. Ruminative thinking is toxic to our well-being and clarity of mind. 

So how do we work with rumination? One way forward is self-compassion. Self-compassion is far more than chasing rainbows and skipping after unicorns. According to psychologist and researcher Kristin Neff, self-compassion is self-kindness (versus self-judgment), combined with a sense of common humanity (versus being alone with what’s hard) and mindfulness (versus being over-identified with bad feelings). Self-compassion is seeing our pain as part of the larger, universal picture of being human, and seeing ourselves as worthy of kindness and care. And it’s not weak or passive, or narcissistic and self-indulgent. It takes guts to practice, and science shows that it can do much to lower anxiety, stress reactions, depression, and perfectionism. It can open you up to your life whereas your old patterns or reaction and self-judgment close you down.

In a 2010 study examining the levels of reported self-compassion, rumination, worry, anxiety, and depression in 271 non-clinical undergraduate students, results suggested that people with higher levels of reported self-compassion are less likely to report depression and anxiety. The data showed that self-compassion may play the role of buffering the effects of rumination. In some of the practices that follow, we learn how to unhook from rumination and cut ourselves (and others) the slack requisite for increasing clarity and ease of being.

Sidestep Self-Judgement: Three Mindful Practices for Self-Compassion

The following brief self-compassion practices are drawn from my co-authored card deck (along with clinicians and authors Chris Willard and Tim Desmond) “The Self-Compassion Deck” (PESI Publishing & Media). What follows are three cards from our deck laid out in a sequence that is intended to help you sidestep the self-judgment / ruminative cascade and build a foundation of self-compassionate, flexible space—something much needed this time of year!

As with many mindfulness practices, this one is best conducted in a quiet space, with your body in a comfortable, alert posture. Take in a few slow, deep breaths and then read these three cards in order. Pause for 30 seconds or more with each card.

Watch what arises in your body and mind as you come to rest on the words (and underlying meaning) of each practice. Just allow yourself to observe what shows up, and if your mind goes into its loops of rumination, just gently come back to the card and its self-compassionate intentions.

1) Send your past and present self kind wishes

Pause and take in what emerges for you about giving kind wishes to yourself at various stages of your life. At what points in your life is it easier / harder to conjure self-kindness?

2) Choose an act of self-care

Notice what ideas show up when you think of what might do to legitimately take care of yourself today. Does your ruminating mind immediately throw up any roadblocks? Any “well, but’s …”?  Are you willing to “thank” your mind for sharing these, and do the self-compassionate act anyway?

3) Keep track of how often you criticize yourself vs. encourage yourself

Perhaps your self-compassionate act for today would be to actually do what this last card suggests—keep track of how often you criticize versus encourage yourself.  I’m serious: perhaps you could keep track with tally marks on a scrap of paper or on a journal. Being honest and willing to pay attention this closely to yourself is itself a great act of self-compassion. We don’t often give ourselves this much time out of our busy lives. Instead of all the tally marks on holiday to-do lists, perhaps we can tally up our relationship with ourselves?

Resources:

 Abblett, M., Willard, C. & Desmond, T. (2016).  The Self-Compassion Deck: Mindfulness-Based Practices.  PESI Publishing and Media.

 Germer, C. (2009). The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions. Guildford Press.

Neff, K. (2015) Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow Paperbacks.

Take Three Minutes to Bring More Mindfulness to the Holidays

Living with, and Loving, Your Imperfect Life

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Mindful’s Top 12 Posts of 2017

Here are the top 12 most popular stories from Mindful.org in 2017:

 Free Mindfulness Apps Worthy of Your Attention
Mindfulness apps are trending in a big way. Here are five we’re happy we downloaded.

 

Your Breath is Your Brain’s Remote Control
A new study has found evidence to show that there is actually a direct link between nasal breathing and our cognitive functions.

 

How to Fight Stress with Empathy
Psychologist Arthur Ciaramicoli argues that empathic listening may be the key to reducing stress in our lives.

 

Two Lessons on Blame from Brené Brown
An animation featuring Brené Brown sharing a story about why she identifies as a blamer, as well as research and insights about this toxic behavior.

 

Being with Stressful Moments Rather Than Avoiding Them
When we use mindfulness to get rid of stress, we’re no longer being mindful. Try this practice for being with and reimagining stressful moments

 

How to Practice Mindfulness
Becoming more aware of where you are and what you’re doing, without becoming overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around you.

 

What to Do When You Feel Stuck in Negative Emotions
According to a new book, the key is “emotional agility”: being less rigid and more flexible with our thoughts and feelings.

 

6 Books to Get You Unhooked from Bad Habits
Food cravings, telling off grumpy colleagues: some habits are hard to avoid even on our best days. We’ve rounded up these mindful books on the science and practice behind habit-formation.

 

How to Stop Your Stories From Running Your Life
Research suggest we not only have the capacity to pay attention to and stop the chatter of our stories, but we can also reduce our stress and reinvent our relationships by responding to them differently.

A Daily Mindful Walking Practice
Take a break and boost your mood with this 10-minute walking meditation.

 

ICYMI

In case you missed it: Stand-out pieces from the past year you might want to know about.

The Future of Education: Mindful Classrooms
Creating a safe place for our kids to learn might begin with creating some space for them to breathe. Here’s an in-depth look at the research and best practices for bringing mindfulness into schools.

 

Meditators Under the Microscope
The benefits of meditation have been hard to show in concrete terms. Today, however, as the scientific world delves into the study of mindfulness, the capacity of the brain to transform under its influence inspires nothing short of wonder.

10 Mindfulness Researchers You Should Know
Key insights from leading researchers spotlight what we know, what we don’t know, and what the future holds for the science of mindfulness.

Honorable mention: Getting Started with Mindfulness, for most visits per month.

 

Mindful’s Top 10 Guided Practices of 2017

Mindful’s Top 12 Posts of 2016

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Advertising Sales Assistant

The Mindful media team is seeking a colleague to join the advertising sales team. This is a permanent full-time position.

The Foundation for a Mindful Society (Mindful), an independent non-profit located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is dedicated to inspiring, guiding and connecting anyone who wants to explore mindfulness—to enjoy better health, more caring relationships, and a more compassionate society. We use our media and community building expertise as the publishers of Mindful magazine and mindful.org to accomplish this. We also undertake initiatives that help support the mindfulness field more broadly, and are increasingly branching out into projects that look at mindfulness in connection with various sectors and civic institutions.

Working under the direction of the Advertising Director, the Advertising Sales Assistant will broadly be responsible for:

• Print Ad Sales including:
  • Direct ad sales of Mindful Marketplace
  • Ad Trafficking for regular print magazines and special issues
• Print & Digital administrative responsibilities, including:
  • Ad Trafficking
  • Advertiser client customer service
  • Mindful Online Ad Directory
  • Interdepartmental coordination representing ad department
• Salesforce CRM sales support & reporting

In the post-close sales process, the ASA performs proactive customer service by requesting and tracking ad materials and ensuring customer ads and revisions for all channels are in place, on schedule–and for multiple insertions, version-correct. In addition, the ASA coordinates with the accounting department invoicing for the ad department and advertising-related reporting to the business.

Specific Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

• University or college degree in Business or Commerce or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated ability to convert inquiries into sales.
• General knowledge of sales principles, methods, practices, and techniques.
• Able to perform basic math and calculations.
• Experience with Trello, SendMyAd preferred.
• Experience with Salesforce and/or other customer relationship management (CRM) software.
• Good knowledge of MS Office suite of programs.
• Ability to relationship-build.
• Excellent listening skills.
• Strong written communication skills.
• Customer Focus.

Salary range is $27,000 to $30,000. Candidates must be eligible to work in Canada.

Deadline for Applications: January 19, 2018

Apply by email with “Advertising Sales Assistant” in the subject line and attaching covering letter and resume to Cindy Littlefair at cindy@mindful.org

 

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Mindful’s Top 10 Guided Practices of 2017

Here are the top 10 most popular guided mindfulness practices from Mindful.org in 2017. You can listen to the tracks embedded below, or follow the link in the title of each practice to see full transcriptions of practice instructions.

1) A 7-minute mindfulness practice to shift out of “doing” mode

Noticing self-perpetuating thought patterns is a core mindfulness skill. Take a moment to examine how it feels to disengage from a busy mind and shift into “being” mode with this practice from Zindel Segal, co-founder of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).

2) A 15-minute guided mindfulness meditation: Investigating difficulty

Sometimes our experience is painful and difficult. And there may be little or nothing we can do about the arising of the pain or difficulty. In these cases. We may be able to work with what’s happening skillfully by exploring our relationship to it, says mindfulness teacher and author Ed Halliwell.

3) A 10-minute meditation to work with difficult emotions

When we deny what’s difficult by putting our heads in the sand, we create more suffering, says meditation teacher Carley Hauck. Here’s a 10-minute meditation to reverse the tendency to start digging.

4) Calm the rush of panic in your emotions

Mediation can help you explore how panic affects you not only physically, but also in your emotions and feelings. Here is a 30-minute mindful inquiry practice to explore feelings of panic with Bob Stahl, mindfulness author and teacher.

5) A daily mindful walking practice

Walking meditation can be a formal practice, like watching the breath. Or it can be informal, bringing awareness to this everyday activity, whenever you need to travel from point A to point B. Explore this 10-minute practice from Mark Bertin, mindfulness author and developmental behavioral pediatrician.

6) How to meditate with noise: A 3-minute practice for anywhere

Meditation can’t always happen in blissful silence. Diana Winston, Research Director at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC), offers a practice for tuning in to the cacophony of everyday activity, so we can find a space to rest and settle the mind.

7) Guided loving-kindness meditation from Sharon Salzberg

Sharon Salzberg, who often teaches at the Insight Meditation Society, offers a “Guided Lovingkindness Meditation” — Sending loving-kindess to people we feel neutral towards as well as those we have difficult feelings towards.

8) Tame feelings of shame with this 10-minute practice

Exploring difficult emotions and experiences may be the key to loosening their hold over us. Try this mindfulness practice from Patricia Rockman, MD.

9) A mindfulness practice for preschoolers that connects kids to nature

A practice for teaching preschool children the basics of mindfulness by drawing on the elements of nature from Scott Rogers, co-founder of the UMindfulness, the University’s Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative.

10) A meditation for moving on

We can’t ignore the hard stuff. Here’s a 10-minute mindfulness practice for navigating—not resisting—everything life throws our way, from Patricia Rockman, MD.

A 5-Minute Mindful Breathing Practice to Restore Your Attention

5 Meditations from Mindful Retreats

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The Science of Mindfulness: A Healthy, Growing Baby

How do you know?

Since forever, this has been one of the hardest questions to answer. And until the scientific revolution, unless you had firsthand knowledge (“I tried meditation and it did this for me, but I can’t say what it will do for you”), you had to rely on others you trusted (“The One-Who-Knows-All says that this plant will cure your anxiety”). With the advent of scientific experimentation, the standard for knowledge began to shift, and nowadays with other kinds of authority in decline, the gold standard for knowledge is whether it has been tested in an experimental setting.

In particular, when it comes to health care and mental and physical well-being, we need some assurance that what’s being prescribed has been tried and there is evidence that at least suggests that it works and it’s safe. Many aspects of health have been extensively studied—what promotes heart health, diet, exercise, and so on—and the effects of medication generally need to be documented thoroughly over decades of study before they can be prescribed.

It’s hard enough to prove that a particular lifestyle choice reduces the risk of heart disease. To demonstrate the effects of a practice that works with the mind is quite a bit more difficult.

However, when it comes to the effects of meditation and related mindfulness practices, the body of research is growing rapidly but is still small by comparison with other areas of research. According to the American Mindfulness Research Association, the number of papers on mindfulness published in journals rose from 10 in the year 2000 to almost 700 in 2016—a phenomenal increase. At the same time, according to PubMed, 42,245 papers were published in 2016 on heart disease alone. The study of mindfulness is in its infancy.

It’s a healthy baby, though. Lots of pilot studies and a number of full-fledged studies show encouraging results. Yet it’s important to use words like “proven” cautiously. It’s hard enough to prove that a particular lifestyle choice reduces the risk of heart disease. To demonstrate the effects of a practice that works with the mind is quite a bit more difficult.

And when any study says that meditation accomplishes a given outcome, you have to ask for whom, compared to whom, for how long, and under what circumstances—not to mention who funded and conducted the study. When it comes to scientific research, there’s lots of fine print. For example, it’s important to know how mindfulness was defined, what instructions participants received, who instructed them, and how the outcomes were measured.

At Mindful, we celebrate the mindfulness research revolution not because we long for the final word on the efficacy of mindfulness. We celebrate it because as researchers continue to make better guesses at what’s happening when people practice mindfulness, a continual process of discovery takes place. And that’s a key aspect of mindfulness: Instead of trying to nail something down once and for all, we keep inquiring, probing, and testing. In the end, after evaluating what others say—including in scientific journals—people and organizations will give mindfulness a try, see for themselves, and tell others what they found. That will be their answer for How do you know?

 

This article appeared in the December 2017 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

Meditators Under the Microscope

Which Style of Meditation is Best for You?

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My Religion is Kindness – Part1 - Tara Brach

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My Religion is Kindness – Part 1 ~

Authentic kindness must include the life within us. These two talks examine the movement from an armored to a free and loving heart. The first looks at how we can awaken from the trance of unworthiness and establish a genuinely caring relationship with our inner life. In the second we explore how self-kindness awakens us to the heartspace that naturally includes all of life.

photo: Sherry Craft

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Meditation: Boundless, Loving Awareness (21:06 min.) - Tara Brach

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Meditation: Boundless, Loving Awareness –

Learning how to recognize and rest in spaciousness, allows us to discover the love and wakefulness that is our source. This meditation guides us to discover interior space, exterior space, and then the continuous space that is suffused with awareness. We then explore how that awareness is experienced as heartspace—vast, illuminated and tender.

Free download of Tara’s 10 min meditation:
“Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease”
when you join her email list.

photo: geralt/pixabay.com

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The Importance of Inquiry

Welcome to Mindful’s Point of View. I’m Barry Boyce, Editor in chief of Mindful. I’m talking today with Patricia Rockman M.D., director of education and clinical services for the Center for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto.

Barry Boyce: The main mission of the Center for Mindfulness Studies could be summed up as mindfulness for mental health. Would that be fair to say?

Patricia Rockman: Absolutely, that would be and say.

Barry Boyce: Mindfulness means a lot of things to a lot of people these days, as it’s become very popular. Why is mindfulness for mental health important in your view?

Patricia Rockman: Well, I think for a few reasons. I mean, we can think of the use of mindfulness for mental health from the standpoint of prevention. So, teaching people to work with their attention, to be able to work to regulate their emotions, and their mood. We can also use it for treatment as we see with mindfulness-based programs such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, mindfulness-based relapse prevention for addictions, and so on. I mean, it’s being offered for people with bipolar, and so on. So that would be more from the treatment end, although you know, with respect to things like depression, more of the evidence is around preventing relapse. But there is increasing evidence to support its use for acute care as well, as long as it’s not too severe.

Within the context of treatment, we’re looking at interrupting or disrupting things like rumination or obsessive thinking. We can think of certain mental health problems as being thought-disordered behaviors, if you like. We can think of thoughts as behaviors or we can think of them as sensations, but when we get stuck in patterns of thinking or even stuck in difficult emotional states or impulsive behavioral states, mindfulness can be used to disrupt these.

Barry Boyce: One of the concerns that sometimes gets expressed is that mindfulness is touted or understood by some people as a replacement a kind of panacea or cure all. How do you see mindfulness fitiing into the full armamentarium, as they say, of treatments and interventions?

Patricia Rockman: Well I definitely don’t think it’s a panacea. I think it’s one of the, I don’t really like this word, but I think it’s one of the tools that we can use for working with mental disorders. In the CANMAT guidelines it’s used for depression as an adjunct treatment. It’s something we use in addition to but not necessarily replacing. The evidence for its use right now in terms of, say, working with preventing depressive relapses is that it’s equivalent to maintenance antidepressant use and there there’s some early work that’s showing that it’s equal to CBT for preventing relapse. But this doesn’t mean it’s good for everything and there are definitely some at least relative contra indications, although the research isn’t so great around that right now. But there are people I definitely wouldn’t use it for. And I don’t think it’s any better than medication. But what we can say is it can be a useful alternative for people who don’t want to take meds.

Barry Boyce: Some people get concerned that people who need medication will be persuaded to get off their medication. That they can “just do mindfulness.” Some people have said that’s dangerous.

Patricia Rockman: Well I think that’s true. I mean the work that we do, we have no desire to persuade people to get off medication. And when they come to our groups, such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or in mindfulness-based risk reduction, we tell people not to go off their medication without instruction from their health care provider. Because, A, if they do that and something goes wrong or if something changes, we don’t know what caused it. And B, they may really need it. And I think that medication, for a lot of people they have ideas that they’re weak if they take medication, so they would prefer not to. But there are definitely times when people need to be taking medication and it can be difficult to know when that is. But definitely, it has its place as does mindfulness. But neither are panacea.

The latter weeks of the program are about learning to turn toward difficulty to be able to build the stress tolerance for difficulty versus engaging in the kind of avoidance strategies that we tend to use when we’re faced with things we don’t like

Barry Boyce: Can you say a bit about that the center does? I know you teach clinicians as well as the general public, and also front line mental health workers. Can you say a little bit about that?

Patricia Rockman: So we our work has really three arms: The heart of the center is to bring mindfulness-based programs to those with mental health problems as well as to those with affordability and access issues. We have a community program in which we serve those who are quite disadvantaged, people who are homeless, people who may have other difficulties around access and that program is donation based and grant based. We’ve been working in a lot of areas of the city and we also have a project in the Philippines. We work with an organization called Parkdale Activity and Recreation center for the homeless. And within the context of that program we’ve done service delivery and we’ve also trained frontline workers, both to manage their own stress through mindfulness and to deliver to their peers. And we then also received a grant from The trillion Foundation to teach frontline workers how to do mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.

We also have a separate arm in which we deliver services to the public who can afford to pay and which we have clinicians delivering Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and now more recently mindful self-compassion. And we stream people into those different programs depending upon need.

And then what we’re also very involved in is the training of healthcare providers. We have a certification program and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and more recently in mindfulness-based stress reduction, in which we have some reciprocity with the University of California San Diego, because they also have a professional institute. And we have recently, with the mindfulness-based stress reduction certificate, adopted the protocol developed by Susan Woods and we use Zindel Segal’s, and his cohorts’, protocol for training and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and that’s been going very well. We offer a lot of training in that area.

Barry Boyce: So a lot of clinicians have trained in the various mindfulness-based interventions at the Center.

Patricia Rockman: Yeah.

Barry Boyce: Parkdale is a large diverse neighborhood in West Toronto. Would say that over time the work there can become a test bed for bringing mindfulness coping skills into the street, as it were?

Patricia Rockman: Yeah, absolutely. We have programs that have been going on there for a few years now and our clinicians have done quite a bit of work in this area, working with various groups and peer groups. And there’s an ongoing group at the Parkdale activity and recreation center and I know that one of the founders of this center has been involved in developing a Collective Impact Program in the area of mental health, and that’s very much involved with the community, so I would say Yes absolutely that’s one of the intentions.

Barry Boyce: I know that MBCT includes a significant component of inquiry.

Patricia Rockman: It does.

Barry Boyce: Could you say what that means and why is that important in terms of mental health for people who are diagnosed, perhaps, but also for those who are undiagnosed. I mean we all have mental health issues of one kind or another.

Patricia Rockman: So, I think, this gets back to thinking about what are the intentions of working with mindfulness as a modality in this area, or working with mindfulness generally. And, while there is no question that relaxation is a component of mindfulness, I would say that within the context of working with mental health or mental disorders what we’re more concerned with are a few things: One is awareness, increasing awareness; intentionally working with attention to learn how to direct attention, to explore experience, and to be able to shift attention when necessary; we’re also working to regulate emotions; and we’re also trying to learn to regulate our behavior. All in the service of increased health, and I would say, increased compassion for self and others and increased functioning.

Inquiry is a dialogue—An interactive process, a reflective process, on an experience that has just occurred…what we’re trying to do in these programs is enhance people’s ability to be with their direct experience

So, within the context of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, per se, the first few weeks of the program are about awareness building and training attention, to work with the body as well as thoughts and emotions. So really getting to know the full nature of your experience. And then the latter weeks of the program are about learning to turn toward difficulty to be able to build the stress tolerance for difficulty versus engaging in the kind of avoidance strategies that we tend to use when we’re faced with things we don’t like, or maladaptive coping responses. So we’re trying to increase choice about how we might skillfully respond to difficulty rather than reacting automatically or engaging in habitual automatic patterns that may be harmful or at least not helpful to us.

So inquiry, then, is part of that process. The guidance of the meditative practices and the cognitive exercises entail guiding people to work with their attention in a variety of ways and also to begin to separate or parse their experience into its components of thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, or impulses to act. And by doing so, we begin to make difficult situations that are often overwhelming more manageable because we can learn to intervene with mindfulness into various aspects of our experience.

So, for example let’s say you’re driving in your car and somebody cuts you off in traffic. And you might normally get really angry, get all of your sympathetic nervous system fired up, start banging on the horn. And you don’t even realize that you’ve done this and then you’re in a bad mood for the rest of the day. So, mindfulness is really working to try to help people to recognize when this whole kind of cycle might start up and how they might begin to interrupt that, and then what they might do next. So it’s not really, in my opinion, to get rid of reactivity, or a bad mood or low mood or anxiety, but rather what do you do when these things start to show up? And to learn to recognize early warning signs or symptoms or signs before they take hold so you have more options about what to do next. So, it’s a long-winded way of then getting to the inquiry.

So, inquiry is a dialogue— An interactive process, a reflective process, on an experience that has just occurred. If we understand that what we’re trying to do in these programs is enhance people’s ability to be with their direct experience versus what we normally do, which is we immediately have interpretations, ideas, conclusions, judgments about our experience—We move very fast away from the direct experience. If mindfulness is trying to help us get close to this, then inquiry is partly designed to help people to be able to enhance their capacity to reflect on the unfolding nature of experience and learn to track that experience without running off into storytelling or narrative or other ideas and conclusions. So we’re trying to enhance people’s ability to develop a language of experience, a vocabulary of experience—Whether that’s describing their sensations, being able to describe their thoughts versus analyzing them, being able to name emotions in an attempt to manage them better and make them less overwhelming, and to begin to see how the body is a source of information and a place that holds this sensorial correlates of emotion.

So, we’re not so locked up in our thinking but rather we are getting access to our moment-to-moment experience.

Barry Boyce: So when you say the sensorial correlates of emotion, you mean something like, you begin to notice your chest tightening, rather than that just saying, “Oh, I’m pissed off.

Patricia Rockman: Yes exactly. Exactly. So, maybe that’s the first thing you notice is chest tightening, or maybe the first thing you notice are your thoughts, or maybe you the first thing you notice is the naming of the emotion. But if you begin to identify the physical components of the experience you can then begin to learn to bring your attention here and begin to explore this. So, inquiry is designed to help people begin to understand the how, what, where, and when of experience, but not the why. Because the why pitches up into cognition and into thinking about and narrating our experience. And this is not to say that these are bad things, because without our prefrontal cortex an ability to judge and to plan and to have a sense of self we would just be really chaotic. But if we’re too focused in this way of being in the world, what Zindel and others called “doing mode,” then we can become really rigid. So by learning to attend to our moment-by-moment experience. We have another place from which to witness experience and also act upon it. But if you were only focused on your moment to moment experience you’d never get anything done, you’d just be super chaotic.

Also in this podcast:

• The hype surrounding mindfulness today
• Who should and shouldn’t use mindfulness-based interventions
• Why mindfulness teachers need to take some kind of Hippocratic Oath
• The difference between your discerning mind and your judgmental mind
• Training our attention to be open and receptive

 

Let’s Get Curious!

A 7-Minute Mindfulness Practice to Shift out of “Doing” Mode

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