Wednesday 27 September 2017

Don’t follow the traffic. Follow the signs.

I’m on the road as I write this, on the second stop of a five-city tour to learn first hand what’s going on with mindfulness in the world. It’s a great part of my job, catching up with old friends who’ve been leaders in the field for years, while also meeting new folks who are launching fresh, inspiring initiatives.

This is one of the ways we here at Mindful keep up with what’s happening, and it’s part of the unique role we play. We’re the ones whose job it is to see the overview. We learn about the wide range of initiatives, and from that patterns and themes emerge. Seeing those patterns helps Mindful figure out what stories to tell, what initiatives to focus on, and in general how best to help.

So far the themes I’m hearing on this trip aren’t particularly new, but they’re important. People are talking about how there’s lots of excitement about mindfulness practice in the beginning but it’s hard to get people to continue. Some folks are talking about “minimum effective dose” so it’s easier to get people into practice. Everyone agrees that apps are popular and easy to start with but the drop off in engagement is steep. And people are worried about that so many are overstating benefits from scientific research.

No big surprises here, but it’s good to be reminded about the questions and challenges we’re all working on. And, more importantly, the Mindful Foundation projects I mentioned in my first blog—like the Annual Survey and broadcast TV series—arise in response to the needs we’ve been hearing about from the field.

Take the Mindful Cities project, for example. We didn’t just make up the list of what makes one city more mindful than another—We just started responding to some of the great initiatives we learned about. The folks in Flint, Michigan started a mindfulness program to help build resilience in an American heartland town hard bitten by closing industries and the disastrous water crisis. The folks in Jackson, Wyoming are talking about a project to bring in mindfulness as one part of a robust civic leadership training program to ensure a flourishing city into the future.

It’s an honor to be the eyes and ears for all that’s happening in the mindfulness world nowadays, to figure out which trends to support and the best way to do so. And we get to help from some unlikely places. I’d like to share one from this trip.

Two days ago I was driving in five lanes of the heavy downtown traffic, heading home after a long day. My brain was processing all that I’d heard, looking for the patterns. What was the message here?

As I came to a stop just after turning the corner, I locked eyes with the motorcycle police across the street.

Just then I realized I missed the exit lane for the right turn I needed to make, winding up instead at a red light at the corner. The two cars ahead, obviously in the same boat, turned right at the light to rejoin the traffic, right in front of the “No Right Turn” sign. These are local folks, I figured, they know what they’re doing. So I followed them.

As I came to a stop just after turning the corner, I locked eyes with the motorcycle police across the street. He very slowly pulled closer, pointed his motorcycle right at me, and stopped just 10 feet from my door.

“Did you see the sign?” he asked in a thoroughly expressionless monotone. Fearing a ticket, I replied, “I just followed the traffic, officer. I’m from out of town, I figured these local folks were doing it.”

Without raising his voice or moving a muscle on his face, he looked at me and said, “Don’t follow the traffic, follow the signs.” Then, with an unwavering focus he repeated at least 5 times, “Don’t follow the traffic, follow the signs. Follow the signs. Follow the signs.”

Now, my friends will tell you that I don’t have much patience for the “message from the universe” stuff, but this event took on a whole ‘nuther significance, way beyond the usual warning from a traffic cop. It was a great reminder, and I’m doing my best to understand and integrate it. Maybe you’ll find it helpful too.

Don’t follow the traffic. Follow the signs.

Foundation

 

Inside Mindful: An Introduction

The post Don’t follow the traffic. Follow the signs. appeared first on Mindful.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/dont-follow-traffic-follow-signs/

Monday 25 September 2017

A 5-Minute Mindful Breathing Practice to Restore Your Attention

  1. Start by sitting comfortably on a cushion or in a chair. Close your eyes if you like, or leave them open and lower your gaze toward the floor.
  2. Just breathe. Breathe as you normally would. There’s nothing special to do, or make happen. And then draw your attention to the physical sensation of each breath. You might notice the rising and falling of your abdomen or chest. Or you might notice the air moving in and out through your nose or mouth. With each breath, guide attention as best as you’re able back to your breathing. Breathing in… and breathing out.
  3. Be kind to your busy mind. Almost immediately, and many times over, we’ll find ourselves distracted. Our attention will always wander—that’s what it does. That’s normal, and always going to be part of our experience—both in meditation, and in life. You might find that your attention wanders toward a sound, or a thought, or a sensation. Without giving yourself a hard time, return your attention back to the sensation of breathing.

    Our attention will always wander—that’s what it does. That’s normal, and always going to be part of our experience—both in meditation, and in life.

  4. When your mind wanders, gently return it to noticing your breathing. If something grabs your attention notice that happened, and then let it go as best as you’re able. Come back to the breath without expecting anything more. For a few moments, give yourself an opportunity to settle.
  5. There’s nothing to do or fix. Sometimes, our mind remains busy and caught up during meditation. Noticing that, practice patience. We cannot force our minds into stillness, and that’s never the intention. Right now, in this moment, there’s nothing to fix or do. Whether you find the experience pleasant, unpleasant, or otherwise, allow everything to be for a few moments.
  6. Return to the breath. Breathing in and breathing out, return your attention to the breath once again.
  7. When you’re ready, gently open your eyes. Pause for a moment, and then decide how you’d like to continue on with the rest of your day.

The post A 5-Minute Mindful Breathing Practice to Restore Your Attention appeared first on Mindful.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/5-minute-mindful-breathing-practice-restore-attention/

Friday 22 September 2017

From Dragons to Schmoos – Meeting Life with Compassionate Presence - Tara Brach

From Dragons to Schmoos – Meeting Life with Compassionate Presence –

The trance of unworthiness is sustained by our aversion to the dragons – the difficult emotions and related behaviors that are a deeply conditioned part of the human experience. In this talk we explore the awakening that is possible as we recognize our reactive patterns and instead of judgment, offer a loving and healing presence.

The post From Dragons to Schmoos – Meeting Life with Compassionate Presence appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/dragons-schmoos-compassionate-presence/

Thursday 21 September 2017

Meditation: Coming Home to Openhearted Awareness (19 min) - Tara Brach

Meditation: Coming Home to Openhearted Awareness ~

In daily life we often leave ourselves, get lost in thoughts, and cut off from a direct, openhearted experience of our life. This meditation reconnects by opening all the senses, turning towards the awareness that is here, and resting in the awakened heartspace that includes and tenderly holds our moment to moment experience (a special favorite from the archives).

“Waking up from thoughts… coming back home to the senses…”

“…from this space of openhearted awareness, sense whatever blessing feels natural to offer to this human heart…
From this tender, vast heart space, sense whatever blessing feels natural to offer all beings…
May we recognize this awakened heart space as our deepest nature…
May all beings awaken and be free.”

 

The post Meditation: Coming Home to Openhearted Awareness (19 min) appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-openhearted-awareness/

Can Meditation Lead to Lasting Change?

Mindfulness meditation is everywhere these days. From the classroom to the board room, people are jumping on the mindfulness bandwagon, hoping to discover for themselves some of its promised benefits, like better focus, more harmonious relationships, and less stress.

I too have started a mindfulness meditation practice and have found it to be helpful in my everyday life. But, as a science writer, I still have to wonder: Is all of the hype around mindfulness running ahead of the science? What does the research really say about mindfulness?

To answer these questions, look no further than Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, a new book by journalist Daniel Goleman and prominent neuroscientist Richard Davidson. Putting their decades of research and knowledge together, Davidson and Goleman have written a highly readable book that helps readers separate the wheat from the chaff of mindfulness science. In the process, they make a cogent argument that meditation, in various forms, has the power to transform us not only in the moment, but in more profound, lasting ways.

Many people have been introduced to mindfulness meditation practices through the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. MBSR has been researched extensively and tied to many positive outcomes for medical patients. But while MBSR has helped a lot of people, it’s not always clear which aspects of the training—mindful breathing versus yoga versus loving-kindness meditation—are most helpful for particular issues facing people. Nor is it always clear that the impacts of MBSR training extend long beyond when the training ends.

Davidson and Goleman aim to unveil not just the temporary effects of mindfulness training, but how practicing various forms of meditation over time affects our general traits—more stable aspects of ourselves.

That’s where Davidson and Goleman come in. They aim to unveil not just the temporary effects of mindfulness training, but how practicing various forms of meditation over time affects our general traits—more stable aspects of ourselves. And they make the case that simpler forms of mindfulness training may have some benefits, but fall short when you are looking for lasting change.

According to the authors, there are four main ways that meditation—particularly when practiced consistently over time—can make a deeper impact on us.

1. Meditation improves our resiliency to stress

According to neuroscience research, mindfulness practices dampen activity in our amygdala and increase the connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, both of which help us to be less reactive to stressors and to recover better from stress when we experience it. “These changes are trait-like: they appear not simply during the explicit instruction to perceive the stressful stimuli mindfully, but even in the ‘baseline’ state’” for longer-term meditators, which supports the possibility that mindfulness changes our ability to handle stress in a better, more permanent way.

2. Meditation increases our compassionate concern for others

While many of us may espouse compassionate attitudes, we can also suffer when we see others suffering, which can create a state of paralysis or withdrawal. But studies have shown that practicing loving-kindness for others increases our willingness to take action to relieve suffering. It appears to do this by lessening amygdala activity in the presence of suffering, while also activating circuits in the brain that are connected to good feelings and love. “The cultivation of a loving concern for other people’s well-being has a surprising and unique benefit: the brain circuitry for happiness emerges, along with compassion,” write the authors.

3. Meditation augments our capacity to focus and pay attention

It’s not too surprising that meditation would affect attention, since many practices focus on this very skill. And, in fact, researchers have found that meditation helps to combat habituation—the tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment. Studies have shown that improved attention seems to last up to five years after mindfulness training, suggesting trait-like changes are possible. This outcome of meditation is particularly important, because it “undergirds a huge range of what makes us effective in the world—everything from learning, to realizing we’ve had a creative insight, to seeing a project through to its end.”

Researchers have found that meditation helps to combat habituation—the tendency to stop paying attention to new information in our environment.

4. Meditation helps us to feel lighter and less self-focused

Though related to compassion, this is a more specific finding about how mindfulness helps you to stop seeing yourself as the center of the universe. According to studies, activity in the “default network”—the part of our brains that, when not busy with focused activity, ruminates on thoughts, feelings, and experiences—quiets down in longtime meditators, suggesting less rumination about ourselves and our place in the world. Long-term meditators also seem to have a smaller nucleus accumbens—a part of the brain associated with pleasure, but also addiction. According to the authors, “These regions very likely underlie what traditional [Buddhist] texts see as the root causes of suffering: attachment and aversion, where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something that seems rewarding or getting rid of something unpleasant.”

Meditation leads to some improvements in markers of health. Many claims have been made about mindfulness and health; but sometimes these claims are hard to substantiate or may be mixed up with other effects. For example, when it comes to pain—where our psychology plays a clear role in our experience of pain—it’s now clear that meditation can lessen pain without directly addressing its physiological source. However, there is some good evidence that meditation affects physiological indices of health, too. For example, practicing meditation lessons the inflammatory response in people exposed to psychological stressors, particularly for long-term meditators. Also, meditators seem to have increased activity of telomerase—an enzyme implicated in longer cell life and, therefore, longevity.

The authors outline other possible benefits of meditation which have less robust findings. But, while the evidence for these can be fascinating, Davidson and Goleman dutifully report the counter evidence as well, trying to employ “the strictest experimental standards” to avoid making unfounded claims. They even question some of their own findings, such as Davidson’s research on changes in the brain for meditators, which they later decided didn’t have great experimental controls.

“The differences found [between meditators and non-meditators]could be due to factors like education or exercise, each of which has its own buffering effect on brains,” they write. “Then there’s self-selection: Perhaps people with the brain changes reported in these studies choose to stick with meditation while others do not.” In other words, use caution when championing results.

They even question some of their own findings, such as Davidson’s research on changes in the brain for meditators, which they later decided didn’t have great experimental controls.

In general, the authors lament the poor quality of many studies and the way these are used to justify mindfulness applications in many arenas. They worry that too many studies lack rigor or that some well-done studies are never published because they don’t have positive findings. These and many other caveats about the research affirm that we are in the hands of experts who know their stuff. The result is a book that both enlightens those interested in the topic and calms the skeptics. For those who may be on the fence about meditation, I suggest reading the book and coming to your own conclusions. Perhaps, it will do the same for you.

This article was adapted from Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. View the original article.

Your Wild, Wonderful Brain

Three Things We Still Don’t Know About Meditation

The post Can Meditation Lead to Lasting Change? appeared first on Mindful.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/can-meditation-lead-lasting-change/

Three Mindful Practices for the International Day of Peace

Tuesday 19 September 2017

The ABCs of STOP: Three Short Mindful Breaks for Your Day

The STOP acronym is one of the most well-known and cherished brief mindfulness practices to use during the day. It’s super simple:

S – Stop
T – Take a breath
O – Observe what’s going on
P – Proceed

This can be done any time during the day when you remember. You become aware of what’s going on around you or inside of you, you ground yourself with some conscious breaths, and then you proceed with more clarity and from a place of choice.

Here are three wonderful ways to practice STOP in more depth: The ABCs of STOP—or practicing STOP for Awareness, Beauty, and Compassion:

STOP — A: STOP for awareness

Using the STOP practice to become fully aware of the present moment: What is going on in the body? The mind? The emotional field? Or asking yourself: What is out of my awareness right now? It can be as simple as noticing your brain is foggy after being on a conference call for two hours (and that you need a stretch break) or that you have been thinking about the upcoming teacher meeting all morning. Simply stop and take a breath.

STOP — B: STOP for beauty

Pause for a moment and notice something beautiful in your surroundings. It can literally be to “stop and smell the roses.” Use all of your senses to find something and then take it in for a breath or two. If that feels too big of a stretch you can ask yourself: “Ok, I know this is a stressful moment right now, but if there was something beautiful about it, what would it be?” Maybe then we notice the flowers on the table, which blend into the background when we are busy. Or the beautiful braids of the woman in front of us in the (long!) check out line at the grocery store.

Compassion is a natural, caring response to suffering, big and small, in ourselves and in others.

STOP — C: STOP for compassion

In a moment of stress or pain, practice STOP to open your heart to kindness and compassion. Compassion is a natural, caring response to suffering, big and small, in ourselves and in others. Sometimes the tug of compassion calls us to stop, at other times we need to stop and really take something in, so we can open the doors of the heart and invite compassion in. Maybe we are a little impatient with our child complaining at length about something that happened at recess. Maybe the adult brain doesn’t see it as hurtful but stopping and truly listening might allow us to connect with the truth of her hurt and allow our heart to melt a little.

I hope you enjoy these little gems and they help to bring more mindful moments to your day.

Stressing Out? S.T.O.P.

Being with Stressful Moments Rather Than Avoiding Them

The post The ABCs of STOP: Three Short Mindful Breaks for Your Day appeared first on Mindful.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/abcs-stop-three-short-mindful-breaks-day/

Reflection: Transforming Suffering and Awakening the Heart - Tara Brach


Reflection: Transforming Suffering and Awakening the Heart –

[Excerpt from Darkness of the Womb – Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering a talk given on January 25, 2017.]

[read the transcript: Darkness of the Womb: Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering – a transcription]


There is power and potential in a time of darkness to remind us of what we really cherish. In this reflection, we practice ways of paying attention that can help us transform suffering into freedom, in our own lives and in the world around us.

The reflection closes with a reading of “School Prayer” by Diane Ackerman:

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.[1]

[1] Ackerman, D. (2000). School Prayer. In I Praise My Destroyer (p. 3). New York, NY: Vintage Books.

The post Reflection: Transforming Suffering and Awakening the Heart appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/reflection-transforming-suffering/

Darkness of the Womb: Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering – a transcription - Tara Brach


~ a talk by Tara Brach presented on January 25, 2017

Listen and watch: Darkness of the Womb – Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering

Download transcript – now available in PDF.

Practice with the final Reflection: Transforming Suffering and Awakening the Heart.


Namaste and welcome.

I recently heard a story about a priest who was giving a children’s sermon, giving it to the whole congregation. He asked the children if any of them knew what the resurrection was. One very young little boy raised his hand and said, “I know that if you have a resurrection that lasts more than four hours, you are supposed to call the doctor.” And it took the congregation ten minutes to settle down so they could continue…

So I don’t have a great segue, but a sort of segue… which brings us really to our times right here. I hear a lot from people about the ups and downs of what their heart is experiencing during recent weeks and months. Many sensed a kind of a resurrection of energy and hope over the weekend with the Women’s March, and hopefully that hope and energy will last more than four hours. In seeing people from around the world, there was the sense of the global community of care and belonging that really was quite inspiring. Then, of course, the down again of just feeling the enormity of the intense suffering that is happening, especially in this country, around some of the policies that are moving forward.

One of the short talks that I heard at the march was from Van Jones, who has created what is called the Love Army in an effort to combat post-election hatred. I thought what he said was really powerful. He said that, before the march, he had felt like something really beautiful was dying. And then he said: “With this movement, I feel like something beautiful is being reborn.”[1] And that really resonated very closely to another talk I heard that was given by a Sikh woman, a lawyer and an activist, Valarie Kaur. She said that we need to stand up for all of our brothers and sisters who are deprived of rights, in whatever way, who are oppressed. And then she asked: “What if these times are not the darkness of the tomb, but they are the darkness of the womb?” [2]

And there was something in that – and very similar to what Van Jones is saying – that we can kind of sense, in a very deep intuitive way, that, whenever there is strong suffering, there is a dialectic. It’s the potential for times of darkness to be a kind of wake-up that really is a rebirthing. We can see it in our own lives, the times we hit the worst, most difficult pain — whether it was a divorce, or a biopsy that turned out malignant, the loss of somebody dear — also, in some way, opened us to another level of what we really cherished. It opened us to a new level of resilience or really sensing the mystery. So there is power and potential in a time of darkness. We can see it through evolution, that great stress requires adaptation and so on. We see it, that it can evolve us.

And I sometimes think the best metaphor is that of a cocoon. If we are in a cocoon, and we don’t keep evolving and developing, the very pressure from the size of the cocoon is suffering. Because we are meant to keep evolving. When we are suffering, it is a sign that we are believing limiting beliefs and we are acting in a way that isn’t aligned with the truth of our connectedness. And we have seen that suffering doesn’t always bring a new day. We have seen how we, in our lives, can get caught in the suffering of addiction or depression, and stay in that prison. And we can see how, in our larger society, there can be cycles of suffering and violence that just go and go and go.

So, I think that there is a really deep inquiry here: What are the conditions and the ways that we can pay attention, so that what is going on right now, whether it is in our personal lives or our broader society, can truly be the suffering of the womb? How can each of us be part of letting that be what unfolds — the awakening from suffering — in that way? That will be grounds of our reflection here. What I would like to do is to take four key ways of paying attention — kind of the inner to the outer — that, if we cultivate them, actually allow suffering to be transformative.

The first of the four key areas is to train ourselves not to believe thoughts that create hatred and separation — whatever beliefs or thoughts we are having. That doesn’t mean that there might not be some wise discrimination in them; but, if we are believing the thoughts and beliefs and they are creating separation and hatred, it will not serve us. That is the first one. The second one is to feel our feelings. The third one is to train ourselves to turn towards love, because we have conditioning, a negativity-bias, that causes us to contract. And the fourth is to act from the heart – act from the awakening heart.

The first one really is challenging, because we have such a deep conditioning to live in this cocoon of very habitual thoughts. The negativity-bias that really comes from our more primitive fear ends up creating fear-thoughts and fear-beliefs that usually take the shape of something is wrong with me or something is wrong with you. That judgment then leads to distance and to hatred. It keeps our personal lives such that we have a hard time feeling real intimacy. And societally, it keeps us at war.

One master was asked to describe the world and his description was: Lost in thought. That is where we spend most of our time. If you look back through today and what it was like, you will probably notice that you were living many moments in a sort of inner dialogue — a kind of virtual reality. We spend a lot of time there and, especially when it is highlighted by a lot of judgment and angry or hateful thoughts, that is the whole biochemical mix we are existing in. One of the real effects of going around in these thoughts is that it blocks reality. And if you are entering your day or a situation or interaction with judgment or bias, it torques it. You can’t see what is really there.

Many of you might have seen the film Gorillas in the Mist, about field biologist, Dian Fossey. The film depicts how she follows in the footsteps of George Schaller, the most famous primate biologist in the world. Schaller returned from the wilds with more intimate and compelling information about gorillas than anybody in past generations had done. He was able to study their tribal structure, family life and mating behaviors, and he attributed it to one simple thing: He didn’t carry a gun. He engaged with a kind of respect for these remarkable creatures that they must have detected it, because they let him close enough to really begin to understand their social behavior. He didn’t carry a gun. In contrast, most of us habitually “carry a gun” whether we need it or not. In our minds, we have preconceptions and ideas about who and how people are, and we often have a slant that stops us from seeing who is really there.

Sometime last year, I shared a story from Maria Popova of Brainpickings.org. If you haven’t heard of the site, the articles are brilliant and insightful. I highly recommend it. In this piece, Maria shares an experience she had one spring day. She is biking and she can tell that another cyclist is coming up behind her. And then that person passes her. Some of you may have had this experience. Even though it might be a perfect stranger, on some level, all of a sudden there is competition. It happens when you are swimming, it happens when you are running, it happens when you are biking. Anyway, she felt that competition and when he overtook her, she felt strangely defeated. Here is what she writes:

“…But, as he cruised past me, I realized the guy was on an electric bike. I felt both a sort of redemption and a great sense of injustice — unfair motorized advantage, very demoralizing to the honest muscle-powered pedaler. But just as I was getting all self-righteously existential, I noticed something else — he had a restaurant’s name on his back. He was food delivery guy. He was rushing past me not because he was trying to slight me, or because he had some unfair competitive advantage in life, but because this was his daily strife — this is how this immigrant made his living.

My first response was to shame myself into gratitude for how fortunate I’ve been — because I too am an immigrant from a pretty poor country and it’s some miraculous confluence of choice and chance that has kept me from becoming a food delivery person on an electric bike in order to survive in New York City. And perhaps the guy has a more satisfying life than I do — perhaps he had a good mother and goes home to the love of his life and plays the violin at night. I don’t know, and I never will. But the point is that the second I begin comparing my pace to his, my life to his, I’m vacating my own experience of that spring day and ejecting myself into a sort of limbo of life that is neither mine nor his.” [3]

Beautiful.

Don’t believe the thoughts that create separation. They lock us into a dividedness and a separateness and, in a deep way, they fuel more violence. They keep us in that cocoon. This applies to thoughts about ourselves, about others that we know, and even others that we don’t know.

The expression that I love is: real but not true. What that means is, that thoughts are really happening. They are real representations in our mind. And we have real feelings, but they aren’t the truth any more than an idea of an apple tree is the living, breathing tree.

For example, you could have the thought: When I am angry and critical, my partner gets defensive and can’t hear my message. That is a real thought. It is not the living truth, but it is a useful thought. That is wise discrimination. But what if you have this thought instead: When I’m angry and critical, that proves that I am a bad person, that I will never change and I will always drive people away. Real but not true. It is not useful. It creates separation. All thoughts are real but not true, but some are worth using as a road map. If they create separation, anger, division, and more hatred, don’t believe them.

Gandhi says: “Our beliefs create our thoughts. Our thoughts create our emotions. Our emotions create our behaviors. Our behaviors create our character. And our character creates our destiny.”

If you keep believing your thoughts that create separation, you are basically solidifying the prison walls, staying in the cocoon.

So how do we let go? How do we not believe our thoughts?

The first step is to set your intention to let it matter — to know that, especially at this time in history, we can’t afford to be going around in our personal life and our societal life making enemies of ourselves and each other. We can’t afford it, too much is at stake.

Elizabeth Lesser writes, “My prayer to God every day is: Remove the veil so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears.” [4]

So, when thoughts come up and we sense that we are getting tight, we can ask ourselves: What am I believing? If you are suffering, you are believing something that is not true. If you have an argument against reality, you will always lose. You know, your belief is just a belief. So the inquiry is: What am I believing? What is it like to live in this belief? Is it possible that it is real but not true? Who might I be if I wasn’t living inside this belief?

So, the first key to transforming through suffering: Don’t believe beliefs that create hatred.

 The second is: Feel your feelings.

Of course, that is a nice thing to say. You know: What we resist persists. Or: Go ahead and feel your vulnerability. And it is really, really hard. When our feelings are difficult, we have a huge amount of conditioning to do anything but feel them. One friend was recently saying how powerful it was when his therapist asked him: What are you running away from? One sage put it this way: What are you unwilling to feel? We run away, and we have different ways of doing that. One common way for many of us to try to avoid vulnerability is to, in some way, simply ignore it or pretend that it is not there. And we get very habituated to that.

I heard a story about a woman who was a top-executive in a New York financial firm. She usually takes a limo to work, but due to bad weather, on this particular day, she decides she will take a bus and catch up on the news. As it turns out, she ends up listening to music instead. So, this woman has a problem — and this is really a vulnerable one — she has a lot of gas and she is not sure what to do about it. She is too embarrassed to release a fart on the crowded bus. But holding it in is really just impossible. The music is really loud, so she decides she is going to fart to the beat of the music so it will be drowned out by the music and no one will be able to hear it. But when she gets to her stop and is leaving the bus, she notices that everyone is looking at her. It was only then that she realized that she was wearing her headphones!

We have our ways of trying to protect ourselves.

Big ways that we try to avoid vulnerability are aggression and judgment. When we feel bad, we try to blame it on something or someone. And this is wired into us for survival. We need to know the cause of what is making us feel bad, and so the cause becomes either “you are doing something wrong” or “I am doing something wrong.” We blame. We also try to dominate. We try to control things so we won’t feel vulnerable.

Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel peace prize winner, Cape Town, South Africa, writes: “There is a story, fairly well-known, about the missionaries when they came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray!’ and we dutifully shut our eyes. And when we opened them – now they had the land and we had the Bible.”

So, I smile, and it is also tragic. There is a tragedy that happens when we aren’t able to stay with our vulnerability — how we need to dominate and conquer and prove — and we create more separation and more violence.

The second piece is to stay with your feelings. We need to do this both individually and culturally. Why? A lot of people say, “If I am feeling bad, why stay with it?” Our emotions are intelligent and every one of them, if you listen, has a message for us. We need them. Our anger tells us there is an obstacle to something that really matters to us. Our fear tells us that there is something really threatening. Our grief tells us that there is a loss that we need to be able to touch into. They inform us of our unmet needs. Sometimes I think about a child in the womb and the pressure of contractions against the child during labor . . . the feelings the child has to feel. Those feelings are a message to work with those contractions and get out of there.

We need our emotions. They move us. By learning to stay resonant with our emotions, to feel them, we discover the presence — the awareness and space — that is large enough hold them and still have some balance and freedom. There is no way to learn to ride the inner weather-systems unless you practice presence with them. There is a really profound gift in that. In the moments of mindfully being with the emotions, a larger space opens up where you can rest with them. This is why I sometimes use the language of the fearless heart. It doesn’t mean there is no fear. It just means we have discovered the heart-space that is big enough for the fear. We don’t suffer from it. It is a current in a larger sea of our Being-ness.

So, we learn to practice with and discover that presence. And then, from that presence, we can respond intelligently to what is happening. A lot of our training and practice in these mindfulness and self-compassion classes has to do with being with the emotions we habitually run from. Being with the pain we contract against. One man described reading about this in my book, Radical Acceptance. He said: “Your book helped me a lot to cope with pain some days ago when I had a terrible renal colic due to a kidney stone. Once I expel it I will name the stone after you.” It was the greatest tribute I have ever received!

So, this is number two: to feel our feelings, to learn to stay, to have the intention to lean in and to be with, not to run away, to keep practicing coming back into our bodies and breathing with and bringing kindness to what is here.

The third key area of attention in transforming suffering is to turn towards love. Again, our primitive conditioning is to perceive ourselves as separate. As a separate organism, we try to control, grab on to love, or push others away. We don’t turn towards love with open hands because we feel too threatened. It can feel quite vulnerable and risky to take the chance to turn towards love in a really open, undefended way — to let the light and warmth really wash through us. And yet, the experience of connectedness undoes our conditioning. In those moments when we are with another person and everything falls away, we can just feel the good-heartedness. We can really be there for each other. It is the moments when we just delight in a child’s sense of wonder and think: Wow! This is what life is worth living for! It is the moments when someone helps us when we are in trouble, or we help them and we realize: Wow! We are in it together! We see the signs that say: “Build Love Not Walls” and there is a sense of an intelligence and humanity around this globe that we are a part of. We need to feel connection.

Anthony de Mello is a catholic theologian, teacher, writer — wonderful, inspiring guy. He describes how he spent decades hating himself . . . years of self-aversion. All of his colleagues and friends kept telling him ways he should change himself. Finally, one friend said, “It is okay. You don’t have to change. I love you just the way you are.” And then he started changing. He needed that radical acceptance — that radical, unconditional loving, that sense of connection, that mirroring — to say: You are basically okay. And then he was free to kind of shift and he didn’t have to keep playing out the old patterns. [5]

So, in our personal lives, we need to turn towards love. We turn towards love in a meditative way by bringing ourselves compassion and by remembering those who love us. And we activate it with others. In the Buddhist community, we have spiritual friends groups — small groups that meet every few weeks to share about practice and so on. Whether it is through a twelve-step group, or with our friends, or with healers . . . we need to feel connection.

In a personal way and in a societal way, this is the movement towards healing. Speaking about this growing, global movement of caring community, Van Jones put it this way:

“…real love is the strongest stuff in the universe. The Love Army and this movement is built on that mama bear love. That mama bear loves those cubs and that mama bear’s not going to let you mess with those cubs. This movement is not going to let you mess with the Muslims, this movement is not going to let you mess with the Dreamers. […] we are not going to let you mess with women, we are not going to let you mess with the earth, we are not going to let you mess with Black Lives Matter. This movement is based on that kind of love…[6]

We need belonging.

So back to our inquiry: How does this experience of suffering, instead of being the darkness of the tomb — something being imprisoned in the cocoon — really be the darkness of the womb — something we really can birth out of? We need to reverse the negativity-bias that has us contract and judge and, on purpose, choose to reflect on where love is. It needs to be part of our spiritual practice. These are the grounds.

I have had many conversations in these last weeks with different communities of care, and it is interesting how, in these transformational movements right now, those who have been activists for decades are, more and more, saying: “I need a way to ground this activism in spirit, in heart, in consciousness.” And those that have been sitting on the cushion, not as active, are saying, “I need to bring this heart and this spirit into action.” I think that this is where it becomes a suffering of the womb. It is in this merging of really grounding in spirit — not believing our beliefs, feeling our feelings, turning towards love — that we then reconnect and the act from that love.

So this takes us to the fourth strategy in terms of having suffering really bear fruit, which is to act from love — to feel our care and, in some way, act. There are many ways to act. A lot of people feel resistance. They think this means they are supposed to go to a march or write a letter or engage in whatever image they have in their mind about what social activism is. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about caring and then, from that caring, engaging in some way that helps to bring healing. It de-conditions the tendencies to act in ways that are more regressive, like being obsessed with making ourselves more comfortable, or with proving ourselves, or getting approval. I have seen some of the biggest changes in people who were really depressed because of that kind of self-centeredness — not self-care, that is not self-care — that comes from a feeling of something is wrong with me. And moving from self-centeredness to service was where the freedom and healing came. Lama Surya Das writes that he once received the following directive from the Dalai Lama:

“This is not an age where mere self-growth and development or faith or meditation is sufficient. Those must inevitably be balanced by active social engagement, compassionate actions. No one can do it alone. We need each other to become enlightened. We need each other for spiritual realization.” [7]

As we remember connectedness, it is natural to act from our hearts.

Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest and, in his book Tattoos on the Heart, he writes about the human tragedies that play out in gang infested neighborhoods in LA. One story he shares is of a woman named Soledad. The mother of four, she was very proud when her oldest son got a diploma and went to the Marines. He came back for a visit and went out to pick up some fast-food. She heard shots on the streets near their home and her son Ronnie died in her arms right outside the door. Soon after, her oldest son Angel pulled off something few in the ‘hood do. He graduated from high school. He helped Soledad pull through the hell she was living in and, six months after Ronnie’s death, he pled with her to put on some clothes with color, do her hair, and be a mom to her three remaining children. That afternoon while sitting eating a sandwich on their front porch Angel was shot up by kids from a rival gang. Gregory Boyle found Soledad later that day sobbing into a huge bath towel and he writes: “The few of us there found our arms too short to wrap around this kind of pain.”

So, Soledad was locked in this anguish of separation. Boyle spent a lot of time with her over the next couple of years, there with that anguish. At one meeting, he asked how she was doing and she said, “I love the two kids I have, I hurt for the two that are gone.” And then, crying, she admits, “The hurt wins. The hurt wins.”

Then, several months later, she was in the emergency room for some chest pains when a kid with multiple gunshot wounds was rushed in on a gurney to the spot next to her. No curtain was drawn and she witnessed him fighting for his life. She recognized him from the rival gang that killed her boys. She knew that her friends might say, “Pray that he dies.” But that is not what happened. She heard the doctors yelling, “We are losing him,” and something in her cracked open.

“‘I began to cry as I had never cried before,’ she said, ‘and started to pray the hardest I have ever prayed. Please, please don’t let him die. I don’t want his mom to go through what I have.’”

And he survived, as she did . . . and so did her capacity for loving. It got ripped open by the grief and, in time, became unimaginably vast. [8]

I love this story because, ultimately, I have this faith that anything that happens to us can be part of what wakes us up. It doesn’t mean that we want painful things to happen to us or anybody else. It just means that we can trust that, if we know how to be in relationship with our life, suffering can be a darkness of the womb.

In Buddhism, this is captured in the prayer of the Bodhisattva, or an awakening being: May whatever arises serve the awakening of heart and awareness.

Reflection: (listen and practice – link below and Reflection: Transforming Suffering and Awakening the Heart)

So, what I would like to do, right now, is just walk through these four steps and give you a chance to explore bringing them to a difficult place in your life — where you would like to see some transformation . . . for it to bear fruit in some way. A darkness of the womb. I invite you to take a moment to find a way to sit that is comfortable and to come into stillness and we will just practice together.

We have been moving back and forth between the personal and the societal. These are practices in which we need to train, each of us in our own lives, in order for it to really ripple out into our larger world. And they are practices that can also be explored in groups. For now, I invite you to take a scan of your personal life and sense where you feel like you are caught, in some way, in aversion, hatred or conflict — where there is some distance with another person, something painful going on, some suffering.

If you are not finding someone you know well, it can be more in the societal field. Wherever you feel a sense of conflict, of adversary, of enemy, then that is the place to attend to. And notice that, if you picked a place of conflict, the emotions of anger or fear . . . aversion.

The beginning of any of these practices is just to have the intention that this may be the darkness of the womb. And you might even try on the Bodhisattva prayer: Please, may these circumstances, may these feelings that I am having, may this experience serve to awaken my heart — serve to awaken compassion and wisdom. That prayer makes you available.

You might sense: What am I believing? What am I believing — about another person or myself or the world — that is creating or generating the hatred, the anger?” Sense how it feels to believe that. It may be a belief in badness or evil of another, the wrongness of another . . . may be a belief that you are being rejected, disrespected, misunderstood. It doesn’t mean there aren’t some accurate perceptions that are useful, it just means that, if there is aversion, you are creating the other into an enemy. How does it feel to believe this? Is it possible to sense that this is real but not true and sense whether it is useful?

Check under whatever you are believing or thinking and sense the real vulnerability or feelings that are there. Wherever there is conflict or aversion, what is under that? What is the unmet need? Is it a need for safety? Or concern for other’s safety? Is there fear? Is the unmet need one of wanting connection and feeling hurt?

Breathe with whatever you are feeling. Whatever is under there, whatever the expression of aversion, anger, fear, or grief is in your body — just to breathe with it. This is the step of feeling your feelings. There is a kind of willingness. If it helps, you can put your hand on your heart or your cheek, to keep company with what is here. This begins the next step of offering care and it can be very, very powerful. I often put two hands on my heart and just really feel that the most loving place in me is holding and bearing witness to the feelings that need attention. Actively turning towards love — contacting feelings and turning towards love.

And if it is hard to offer yourself love, you might imagine whatever loving beings in your life that you trust and are helpful to you. Imagine they are surrounding you, offering love and care to the place in you that feels most vulnerable. That love might be in the form of acceptance or forgiveness. I love you just as you are. Or I sometimes say to myself: It’s okay sweetheart. Sense that, in the larger community of care that you belong to — known and unknown — and throughout this world, there are hearts that are awakening, that are generous, that are concerned, that love and forgive and are willing to act.

Sensing your own most awake heart . . . the place in you that is holding the woundedness or vulnerability . . . what I sometimes call your future self — that what you are emerging into, becoming, your wisest self — so that you can now witness from your wisest, most loving-self, the situation that you have brought up. And sense the possibilities for creative action. How might you respond to this situation and have some new choices?

Again, just coming back to the starting place of feeling your sincerity. May this situation . . . may whatever arises . . . serve the awakening of this heart. And then, widening your view, sensing this heart-space that is including our whole world — so you can sense our country and all countries on the globe, the earth, all beings. Sense the challenges, the beauty, the mystery and the messiness, the hurt and the pain. Sensing it all in your heart, feel your prayer for all beings: May whatever darkness there is – the regressive tendencies, the mean-spiritedness, the hurt, the suffering – may it serve awakening. May this be the darkness of the womb. May there be a rebirthing into a world that is filled with compassion.

We close with a very simple prayer:

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.[9]

Namaste and thank you for your attention.

[1] Jones, V. (2017, January 21). Speech presented at The Women’s March on Washington, Washington DC.

[2] Kaur, V. (2016, December 31). Speech presented at National Moral Revival Poor People’s Campaign Watch Night Service in Metropolitan Church, Washington DC

[3] Popova, M. (2016, May 16). On the Soul-Sustaining Necessity of Resisting Self-Comparison and Fighting Cynicism: A Commencement Address [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/16/annenberg-commencement/

[4] Lesser, E. (2016). Marrow: A Love Story. New York, NY: Harper Wave.

[5] de Mello, A. (1984) The Song of the Bird. New York: Image Reprints.

[6] Jones, 2017

[7] Das, S. (2015). Make Me One with Everything: Buddhist Meditations to Awaken from the Illusion of Separation. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

[8] Boyle, G. (2011). Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. New York, NY: Free Press.

[9] Ackerman, D. (2000). School Prayer. In I Praise My Destroyer (p. 3). New York, NY: Vintage Books.

 

The post Darkness of the Womb: Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering – a transcription appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/darkness-womb-transcription/

Friday 15 September 2017

Trusting Your Basic Goodness: Part 2 - Tara Brach


Trusting Your Basic Goodness – Part 2

This talk continues the exploration of what causes our distrust of ourselves, others and life, and the pathways to realizing and trusting who we are. We explore the steps of awakening from limiting beliefs, dissolving the resistance to direct embodied presence, and discovering the space and tenderness – the formless dimension – that is indivisible and whole.

“How can we trust basic goodness, what lets us trust?”

“…imagine how might your life change if you dedicated yourself to realizing and trusting this basic goodness sometimes called Buddha nature or loving presence that’s within.”

Enjoy Part 1: Basic Trust

photo: Shell Fischer – www.mindfulvalley.com

The post Trusting Your Basic Goodness: Part 2 appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/trusting-basic-goodness-part-2/

Thursday 14 September 2017

Meditation: Coming Home to Being (19:54 min) - Tara Brach

Meditation: Coming Home to Being –

“What it’s like to be here right now and listening to your heart… sensing the state of your heart? It might have been a while since you’ve really checked in with this simple inquiry… How is my heart right now?”

~ a favorite from the archives…

photo: Jon McRay

The post Meditation: Coming Home to Being (19:54 min) appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-coming-home/

The Future of Education: Mindful Classrooms

Click on the image above to read this special edition. 

The post The Future of Education: Mindful Classrooms appeared first on Mindful.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/future-education-mindful-classrooms/

Wednesday 13 September 2017

5 Common Workplace Obstacles that Impact Well-Being

A little quiz: What gives you energy at work? Odds are strong that an answer quickly sprang to mind. Maybe it’s collaboration, a new creative challenge, or an uninterrupted chunk of time to focus. Now consider, what drains your energy? Likely a mix of people, places, and scenarios come to mind, since there are so many things that sap our energy at work. Why does this matter? Because our creative and productive energy is what fuels our best thinking and makes us feel connected to our jobs. When that energy is diverted, blocked, or drained away, not only are we far less effective, we’re usually not very happy. Here are five common energy zappers in the workplace:

1) Drama

You might be attracted to it or you might create it—either way its purpose is to distract from and avoid unpleasant issues. As a way of dealing with fear or uncertainty (or putting off dealing with it), it’s common for people to invent “stories” to fill in missing details. For example, people create their own theories about why changes are happening in business strategy or personnel. The next time a little melodrama comes your way, try to see the story and return to the facts. Ask yourself, or the people involved, “Is this true?” This question can interrupt the downward drama spiral that can kill productivity and morale.

2) Perfection

This is the belief that there’s no room for mistakes. When people feel they’re working in an environment where their best is not good enough, it’s not only demoralizing, but it also limits innovation: no one wants to take a risk for fear of “doing it wrong.” The way to redirect this energy is to be honest about both what you know and don’t know and what your strengths and weaknesses are. For example, “I’m great with content, but I need help with images to communicate my words for presentations.” Letting go of the idea of perfection and being open to failure is how we learn.

Letting go of the idea of perfection and being open to failure is how we learn.

3) Glass-Half-Empty Outlook

When your focus is always on what’s going wrong, it’s downright exhausting. And if you linger in that mindset for too long, it can cause hypervigilance (and trust me, this is not a productive use of your energy!). Instead, make a daily effort to recognize and celebrate what is working. This doesn’t mean avoiding or ignoring the issues and challenges that need to be addressed. It means starting with the wins first.

When your focus is always on what’s going wrong, it’s downright exhausting.

4) No Boundaries

Without clear boundaries about what’s acceptable, comfortable, and tolerable in your worklife, there’s always going to be confusion (for you and for the people dealing with you). If you have a family commitment on a given day of the week, let the people you work with know, so they have context for why you’re not free that day. Setting and communicating boundaries—for yourself and for your team—lets everyone know what is and isn’t expected and permitted. It keeps the energy flowing in a positive direction.

5) Control

This shows up as a compulsive desire to know everything and control outcomes. (Hello, micromanaging!) When we rely on controlling behaviors, we are likely fearful—either of the outcome not going our way or of being “exposed” as not good enough—both of which can deplete your energy by focusing on incomplete or false data (aka drama). You can avoid this drain by allowing the action to occur as it would naturally, without your interference. Take a step back and reflect when you notice the urge to force an outcome to be what you want it to be. Releasing control doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you are able to see things from many points of view and assume everyone means well and is acting with the best of intentions.

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

4 Ways to Mindfully Prevent Office Burnout

Five Ways to Find Time to Pause

The post 5 Common Workplace Obstacles that Impact Well-Being appeared first on Mindful.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/running-on-empty/

Monday 11 September 2017

Make a Friend out of a Foe

I like to watch nature shows; there’s something very calming about seeing animals devouring one another.

No, but really: The wild kingdom offers us a glimpse of our animal nature in action. These shows are like metaphors for the dog-eat-dog competitive quality of daily life. But along with capturing what life looks like when you’re at the wrong end of the food chain, nature shows also depict animal communities whose behavior reminds us of our own species in other, less harrowing ways. Your friendly neighborhood meerkat, for example, relies on cooperation, agreement, and a kind of friendliness to survive. Like meerkats, humans are pack animals that derive pleasure and safety from social interactions. When we smile at each other we release natural painkillers, boost our immune system, and lower our blood pressure. By the same token, baring our teeth at one another floods our nervous system with cortisol, which is linked to heart disease, diabetes, and depression.

Even when unfriendly attitudes feel locked in place, friendliness and camaraderie can show up. Look at any sports event, for example, and you will find that people of all stripes bond together in a friendly way in their desire to root for the same team. At least for those moments, communists and conservatives, city-folk and outliers, millennials and senior citizens can lay down arms and cheer together. Go Team!

Outside the stadium, though, being friendly can feel like a tremendously brave act. What if others don’t smile back? Once you start to courageously cultivate friendliness, you will discover that friendliness is its own reward—regardless of what comes back. Not to mention that when your habit is to be on the watch for the negative, you may forget to open yourself to the many benefits of being on the watch for the positive. Warm and even neutral moments are also a key part of everyday life, even if we don’t always notice them. Taking time to register that things are often OK can have a tremendous impact on your brain. Way back in 1949, Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebb succinctly said, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” This means that when we return to certain ideas or repeat behaviors and reactions over and over, the brain creates a fast-track response called “automatic pilot.” Autopilot is a two-edged sword. It can cause us to mindlessly repeat harmful behaviors or lose attention to what’s important. But if you can build a habit of seeing the good in others, and of approaching people with warmth and openness, over time your whole outlook could shift. Then you can relax into the adventure of being in this interconnected world.

What might it look like to be friendlier to “Me”?

Friendliness toward yourself could be as ordinary as remembering to carry a bit of food with you to keep you and your blood sugar on friendly terms. Or it might look like giving yourself a break from email for an hour, or scheduling some regular time to sit and do absolutely nothing.

What does it look like to cultivate friendliness toward a friend, family member, or kind stranger?

Remember: This person will only be with you for a limited time, and that makes your time together far richer and more poignant. Interactions between people bring depth, color, and joy to life. When you actively relate to the world in a friendlier way, you open up opportunities to bring warmth and curiosity to each and every encounter.

Remember: This person will only be with you for a limited time, and that makes your time together far richer and more poignant.

What does it look like to be friendly to someone who scares or angers the hell out of you?

You believe you are right. Who doesn’t? Remembering that we all have inherent biases can help us soften our approach to others. We don’t have to like a person’s opinion (or even their personality) in order to be friendly; we can choose to be respectful and appreciative regardless of our own preferences. Friendliness can become the common ground that brings us all—yes, all—a little closer together.

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

Could You Connect More?

The Power of Empathy (and One Surefire Way to Know If You’re Missing It)

The post Make a Friend out of a Foe appeared first on Mindful.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/make-friend-foe/

Friday 8 September 2017

Inside Mindful: Blog #1 – An Introduction

Welcome to the first post of Inside Mindful, the new blog about what we’re up to here at the Mindful Foundation. You might know about us from Mindful magazine and Mindful.org, our flagship publications. Equally important, though far well less known, the Mindful Foundation works quietly behind the scenes supporting the champions in the field and the work they’re doing to bring mindfulness into society. In this blog I’ll be bringing more of that work to light, but first I want to tell you about why I decided to start it and my vision for it.

Inside Mindful is an opportunity to peek inside the mindfulness field, and inside the Mindful Foundation.

No, it won’t be a first-hand “reality blog” account of the food fights around the office and everyone’s missed mindfulness sessions. (Well, maybe we’ll have the occasional expose, and certainly a lot of mini-rants about the dumb stuff going on in the mindfulness world. I mean, let’s get real.) This blog will be a deep dive into how this grand mindfulness adventure is going, a glimpse at some of the conversations I have while I’m on the road, and how we can do more to bring about change in our society through advocating for mindfulness.

I want you all to know more about what the Mindful Foundation is doing, what concerns we think our projects are addressing, and how the work we do delivers benefit to you and the many others working to bring mindfulness into your lives, families, workplaces, and society. I want you to see us.

A few basics:

Before we get into that juicier stuff, though, let’s get a few basics in place. I won’t repeat all of our Mindful Foundation values or our theory of change here —you can take a look at the slide deck for those. But it will be helpful to outline a few things we do:

  • The Mindful Foundation isn’t just a media operation; we use our media expertise as the means to activate social innovation.
  • Our fundamental work is promoting authentic mindfulness to foster enduring social change—in people, their relationships and in society.
  • The time is now! Mindfulness is entering the mainstream, it’s scalable, and it brings its own benefits as well as activating a slate of good health practices—The Mindful Foundation is the voice of the movement.
  • Our goal is to help create a world that fosters resilience, better health, more caring relationships, and a more compassionate and caring society

The Mindful Foundation does this by being an activator of projects that help enhance mindfulness in society at critical leverage points. We are the trusted, credible voice of the movement—gatekeeper and curator presenting high-integrity content.

What the future holds:

In five years, Mindful has reached millions of people with Mindful magazine and Mindful.org, and worked closely with field champions and leading organizations as a key activator of the mindfulness revolution. But there’s so much more to do.

Here are some of the projects on the horizon:

  • The Mindful Cities Project
  • A Mindful TV series
  • The Annual Mindfulness in America survey
  • Mindfulness in Translation (Spanish, Syrian, etc.)
  • And many more emerging projects…

I look forward to getting into the details of some of these projects over the next few months.

But right now, I’m sorry, I can’t talk. I have to get back to the weekly office food fight.

Jim

Questions or suggestions? Send them to Insidemindful@mindful.org

 

 

 

 

The post Inside Mindful: Blog #1 – An Introduction appeared first on Mindful.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.mindful.org/inside-mindful/

Basic Trust – Part 1 - Tara Brach

Basic Trust – Part 1 –

One of the expressions of an awakened heart-mind is a basic trust in reality. These talks explore the severed belonging that gives rise to mistrust, and two primary pathways to realizing and trusting the indivisible field of loving awareness that is our source (a favorite from the archives).

“To love without holding back – to really sense with the wisdom, the reality, that it’s right here – to live from wholeness. We have this capacity.”

“Who would you be if you trusted the basic goodness and beauty is living through you? How would your life be different if you trusted that spirit, love, awareness is what you are?”

photo: Janet

The post Basic Trust – Part 1 appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/basic-trust-part-1/

Thursday 7 September 2017

Meditation: Choosing Living Presence (22:40 min) - Tara Brach


Meditation: Choosing Living Presence –

A meditation on being present with our living, breathing life (includes chanting the Om’s – a favorite from Tara’s Wednesday night archives).

photo: Janet

The post Meditation: Choosing Living Presence (22:40 min) appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/meditation-choosing-presence/

Friday 1 September 2017

True Resilience – Part 2: Awakening through All Circumstances - Tara Brach

True Resilience – Awakening through All Circumstances – Part 2

Spiritual resilience enables us to deepen compassion and wisdom as we navigate life’s difficulties. In this two part series, we will look at the conditions that incline us towards or away from True Resilience, and explore practical and powerful practices that nourish this precious capacity.

The post True Resilience – Part 2: Awakening through All Circumstances appeared first on Tara Brach.



from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8196908 https://www.tarabrach.com/true-resilience-part-2/