Gratitude: Entering Sacred Relationship

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Gratitude arises when we are in sacred relationship with life—present, open and receptive. This talk explores how central gratitude is to our physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and then looks at the ways we can directly gladden our minds with gratitude. We end with a guided meditation that includes sharings from the group, and a poem of blessing by John O’Donohue with a brief cut from Robert Gass – Om Namaha Shivaya.

A Blessing for Beauty

May the beauty of your life become more visible to you, that you may glimpse your wild divinity.

May the wonders of the earth call you forth from all your small, secret prisons and set your feet free in the pastures of possibilities.

May the light of dawn anoint your eyes that you may behold what a miracle a day is.

May the liturgy of twilight shelter all your fears and darkness within the circle of ease.

May the angel of memory surprise you in bleak times with new gifts from the harvest of your vanished days.

May you allow no dark hand to quench the candle of hope in your heart.

May you discover a new generosity towards yourself, and encourage yourself to engage your life as a great adventure.

May the outside voices of fear and despair find no echo in you.

May you always trust the urgency and wisdom of your own spirit.

May the shelter and nourishment of all the good you have done, the love you have shown, the suffering you have carried, awaken around you to bless your life a thousand times.

And when love finds the path to your door may you open like the earth to the dawn, and trust your every hidden color towards its nourishment of light.

May you find enough stillness and silence to savor the kiss of God on your soul and delight in the eternity that shaped you, that holds you and calls you.

And may you know that despite confusion, anxiety and emptiness, your name is written in Heaven.

And may you come to see your life as a quiet sacrament of service, which awakens around you a rhythm where doubt gives way to the grace of wonder, where what is awkward and strained can find elegance, and where crippled hope can find wings, and torment enter at last unto the grace of serenity.

May Divine Beauty bless you.

John O’Donohue, from Beauty – The Invisible Embrace

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Priming the Teenage Brain for Compassion

The adolescent period is absolutely amazing. People often give it a negative approach, saying it’s a time when adolescents are going to lose their mind, or it’s just immature, or raging hormones drive you crazy. These are not only wrong, but they’re myths that mislead us and actually disempower us. Whether we’re adults or adolescents, they actually give us the wrong message and they make it so there’s nothing we can do

So what is actually the truth? The truth is that instead of raging hormones what’s happening is we have remodelling in the brain in ways we never could have predicted. We now understand two big things are happening in the brain. Things you as an adult can support adolescents in developing well, and if you’re an adolescent, you actually can use this to help your brain grow in an optimal way.

Two Big Changes in the Adolescent Brain

What are those two things? Imagine that in childhood you’re growing like a tree, and establishing all these branches and all these leaves are growing. That means connections among the basic cell, the neuron, called synapses are being established, and you’re soaking in the knowledge of the world and that’s beautiful. The tree is just growing, growing, growing

But then what happens and surprised everyone is the brain begins to prune itself. You start carving away some of those leaves and the smallest branches, even some of the larger branches. And the reason for the pruning is to specialized the brain.

An adolescent is going to begin to find their passion, to actually find things they like, things they really love doing, and to drive their development in that way.

While the child is developing in ways that are really generalized, learning everything they can about everything they can, an adolescent is going to begin to find their passion, to actually find things they like, things they really love doing, and to drive their development in that way. Pruning is actually a use it or lose it principle that if you don’t use something you’re going to lose it. So if you like sports or like dance or like music, do those things so you continue to establish those circuits

The second thing that happens in the remodelling adolescent brain is milan formation. Milan is a healthy sheath that allows connective neurons to communicate with each other in a much more effective way, it’s a hundred times faster the signal that’s sent down a neuron and after it fires off it’s 30 times shorter the resting period that happens. Thirty times 100 is 3000, so when you put down milan you made your neurons communicate 3000 times more effectively. That’s a great thing

Now the great thing too is you as an adolescent can use the focus of your attention to be aware of your emotions, aware of other people, to be engaging in activities, doing things with your thoughts that actually reinforce the parts of your brain you want to hold onto.

Train the Brain for Compassion

The good news about the remodelling story is a field called neuro-plasticity, how the brain’s response to experience shows us that you do with your mind can change the activity and therefore the structure of your brain

If the ultimate goal of the brain remodelling is to make an integrated brain—to differentiate areas, and milanate them—when you increase differentiation and linkage, you make the brain more integrative, and an integrated brain is the pathway to well-being. When integration is made visible, it’s kindness and compassion.

So what we see through adolescent development is that our relationships become built on connections that are deep and filled with honouring each other’s vulnerability and supporting connections that are compassionate, filled with a sense of caring about other people and wanting to help them. This is the kind of world that we can build as we move through life and support each other in our development.

This video was originally posted on Random Acts of Kindness. View the original video.

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Meditation: Being Here (21:55 min.)

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This guided meditation is an invitation to rest in Hereness—the immediacy and aliveness of full presence. We arrive and quiet with a conscious long deep breath, relax our bodies, awaken our senses, and then bring our attention to relaxing with our moment-to-moment experience. The poem ends with a beautiful poem called “Interlude” by poet Danna Faulds.

When I grow intimate with the source of all that is,
drawn near to its energy and love,
there’s nothing left to do but rest.
In a life of must do’s and should’s,
this is a refuge, an interlude,
a chance to let the mystery enfold me.

~ Danna Faulds, “Interlude”

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Tame Feelings of Shame with this 10-Minute Practice

Becoming familiar with a difficult emotion means getting interested and curious about it, like you might do when visiting a new city. Take it slow, uncovering new “territory” a bit at a time instead of trying to get to know it all at once. As you do, you learn that you can sit with uncomfortable feelings, and that they will eventually pass. Over time, you develop resilience, self-knowledge, and trust in yourself—the best antidotes to the self-judgment that shame inspires.

Thoughts and feelings are larger and scarier when they’re left unexplored and kept in the shadows.

Whether you’re experiencing feelings of shame right now or have buried shame that you’ve been avoiding, are you willing to get to know it a bit better? Remember, thoughts and feelings are larger and scarier when they’re left unexplored and kept in the shadows.

A Guided Meditation to Let Go of Shame

Tame Feelings of Shame with this 10-Minute Practice

• 10:45

1. Take a comfortable meditation posture, eyes closed if comfortable. Begin by bringing attention to the body sitting. Attending to the base of the body as it makes contact with the surface you are resting on. Allowing the jaw to soften, shoulder blades sliding down the back and hands at rest in the lap or on your thighs.
2. Turn your attention to the sensations of breathing at the level of the belly. Attending to the in breath and the out breath, the rising and falling of the abdomen. Perhaps letting the breath move in and out of the body naturally, as best you can.
3. And now, gently bringing to mind an experience or memory, a time in which you felt shame. Maybe it was something you did or something that someone else said about you or to you. Whatever it is, turning toward this memory, experience, or situation gently, as best you can, checking in with what thoughts are present, what emotions, and what body sensations.
4. Without needing to change or fix anything, beginning to explore what is arising or what is here right now.If there are specific thoughts, as best you can experiencing them as sensations of the mind, as events that come and go.If there are emotions, naming or labeling them as they make themselves known. Saying to yourself shame is here or fear, anxiety or guilt, whatever it is and staying with these for a few moments.
5. And now, shifting your attention to any associated sensations in the body. Investigate these with friendly interest, getting curious about them, even if they’re unwanted or intense……really getting to know them if this is possible in this moment.
6. If the sensations are particularly intense or strong, saying to yourself, “this is a moment of difficulty. I can be with this, it’s already here.” If it is helpful breathing into the sensations, expanding on the in breath and softening on the out breath, staying with these sensations as long as they are capturing your attention.
7. If this is too difficult or feels overwhelming there is always the choice to return your attention to the breath at the belly or to open your eyes, letting go of this practice. Otherwise, continuing with this attention to the sensations in the body…
8. And now, returning to the sensations of breathing in the abdomen to the rising and falling of the belly with each breath, breathing in and breathing out…
9. And when you’re ready, bringing attention to the entire body, to any and all sensations, resting here in a more spacious awareness if this is available…
10. Then gently with this shameful experience in the background now, asking yourself:Can I let this be as it is? (It’s already here, after all.) Can I let it go? (It’s already happened.) Does it need addressing? Do I have to take an action? If so, what? Can I shift my attitude, bringing a different perspective to this experience?And then gently opening the eyes if they have been closed and letting go of this practice…

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Self-Compassion: The Often Missing Ingredient in Healthy Eating

During another tough day at work, Mary realizes she forgot to eat lunch. She’s starving. The salad she brought that day doesn’t appeal, especially when her office mate offers to share the pizza he ordered. Mary loves pizza so she takes a piece, eating it quickly because she is hungry but also feeling guilty over her choice. She takes another slice. And another. She finishes the meal feeling too full and starts berating herself for her lack of willpower. “I shouldn’t have eaten that. What’s wrong with me? Why do I always choose foods that I know I shouldn’t eat?”

Research shows the more understanding and forgiving we are of ourselves, the more motivated we are to do what we need to take care of ourselves, including eating well.

Does this scenario sound familiar? It’s one that’s repeated frequently by many who repeatedly try without success to eat more healthfully. What they don’t realize is that they’re missing a key ingredient in healthy eating. It’s self-compassion. And it has the power to make or break your success at eating well.

What is Self-Compassion?

According to researcher Kristin Neff, PhD, self-compassion consists of three main components:

1. Self-kindness: Being kind and understanding toward yourself in instances of pain or failure as opposed to harshly criticizing yourself.
2. Common humanity: Recognizing your experiences are part of the larger human experience. You are not alone.
3. Mindfulness:Holding painful thoughts and feelings in balanced awareness rather than overidentifying with them or trying to ignore them.

Research shows the more understanding and forgiving we are of ourselves, the more motivated we are to do what we need to take care of ourselves, including eating well. It also helps guard against emotional overeating, which often occurs when we feel as if we have failed in our efforts to eat well.

A lack of self-compassion closes the door to learning about our habits, patterns, triggers and needs when it comes to food. By adopting a forgiving and curious attitude instead, you can foster a healthy relationship with eating and food and yourself that can open the door to improved health and happiness.

How to Add a Healthy Dose of Self-Compassion to Your Meals

Step 1: Give up black-and-white thinking. Embrace the fact that healthy eating is flexible and can include a wide variety of foods, some of which are richer than others, such as a pizza. And sometimes the healthier choice may be the richer choice.

For example, which would be a healthier choice at a party: Pizza or salad? The salad is only healthier if that’s what you really want. Otherwise, you might feel deprived and end up overeating later. Enjoying pizza mindfully as part of a celebration allows for the many roles that food plays in our lives. We can often end up feeling satisfied with less when it does.

Step 2: Become aware of how you talk to yourself when eating. Does a tape start running in your head that admonishes you not to eat too much or not to eat certain types of foods? Or that you’re a failure if you do? Write down what you say to yourself.

Step 3: Write down responses to those thoughts that you can “turn on” when you hear yourself starting to go down the familiar road of negative self-talk.

Step 4: Practice those responses every time you hear yourself talking negatively to yourself about your eating. Try carrying around a small notebook with your new messages to refer to. Remember, the first time you do something differently is the hardest. Every time you do it thereafter, it gets easier.

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What is Ecoanxiety, and How Can Mindfulness Help?

About a year ago, a friend of mine mentioned to me that she was interested in attending a “climate change bereavement group” in our neighbourhood. I’d never heard of such a thing, but on reflection it really made sense. People are really upset about climate change and don’t know what to do about it. I’m seeing more and more clients show up with these concerns in my office. I’m seeing more and more news and social media stories about it. And I’ve even begun speaking about it in the media myself. The technical term for this upset feeling is “ecoanxiety” and it’s definitely a thing. 

How Climate Change is Affecting Mental Health

There’s a diverse set of mental health problems arising as the devastation caused by climate change increases. Superstorms, floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme climate events have disastrous consequences on people’s lives. Individuals are being killed, injured, or forced to leave their homes, devastating families and communities. Mass migrations are disrupting lives at a larger scale. 

Post-Traumatic Stress following extreme climate events is becoming more common, as are spikes in fear, anxiety, depression, and irritability. It is worth noting that climate change events are more likely to affect the lives of the vulnerable, such as the poor, and therefore these populations are more susceptible to the acute impact on mental health.

The Definition of Ecoanxiety

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines ecoanxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom” (report). As the definition suggests, ecoanxiety not a response to an acute event, but a state of mind that arises gradually as we watch the slow and frightening consequences of climate change unfold. Ecoanxiety can manifest in intense worry and rumination, generalized anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks, feelings of sadness, loss, guilt, hopelessness, and irritability – in other words, symptoms of anxiety and depression. 

The term has not made it into the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (2013), but it will surely be considered in future editions as the magnitude of the problem becomes clear. A 2018 Yale survey estimated that 70% of Americans are “worried” and 29% are “very worried” about climate change, while 51% feel “helpless.” While little data is available, ecoanxiety appears to affect younger generations (e.g. Millennials, Gen Z) more than older (e.g. Gen X, Baby boomers). The mental health community is increasingly engaged with the impacts of climate change: The APA assembled a task force in 2008 and published this 70 page report in 2017 to build awareness and educate professionals.

Fundamentally, ecoanxiety is a form of anxiety like any other. It is a psychophysiological response to a threat to our safety or well-being.

The emergence of the term ecoanxiety has been met with some resistance. Some skeptics roll their eyes at yet another buzzword for navel-gazing complainers. Others object to medicalizing a very real and appropriate feeling. As someone who counsels clients with ecoanxiety, let me tell you that it is real and causing a lot of suffering. I also believe that—whether there is a diagnostic term for it or not—anxiety is a perfectly rational response to a real threat to our way of life on this planet. And labeling the response with a diagnostic term should not invalidate or diminish the scope of the problem nor the person suffering. All of that said, we need to learn how to cope with it and get on with the job of finding solutions. 

Fundamentally, ecoanxiety is a form of anxiety like any other. It is a psychophysiological response to a threat to our safety or well-being. While fear involves a specific reaction to an imminent threat, anxiety is a diffuse response to a non-specific or uncertain threat. So if you’re an antelope in Africa and a lion jumps out at you from the bush, you feel fear. If you have health anxiety (aka hypochondriasis), you worry about aches and pains being signs of serious or fatal health problems. In ecoanxiety, the threat is broad and abstract and therefore hard to contain and resolve. It is somewhat similar to the anxiety many people felt in the 60s when they believed the world was on the brink of nuclear war. The content of anxious thoughts may vary, but the underlying mechanisms and emotions are the same. And that’s good news because many of the same coping strategies are helpful.

Three Ways Mindfulness Can Help You Cope with EcoAnxiety

The key to coping with ecoanxiety is to build psychological resilience. That is to say climate change is happening right now and it is affecting people all over the world. We all need to find a way to be with the difficult emotions that arise in consequence and continue to be engaged with the process of finding a solution. Here’s a suggestion for how to get there:

1. Learn how to unhook from a “worry loop”

Because climate change is an abstract threat, whether you experience ecoanxiety or not will depend on how you think about it. Unfortunately, it is also complex, multi-faceted, and highly technical, which means it’s difficult to get your thoughts straight about it. Our brains prefer information that is packaged in simple, concrete narratives and therefore rely on heuristics and shortcuts to cope with complexity. This pragmatic bias can be helpful – necessary even – for surviving and getting things done. But it can also create biases and distortions in our thinking, especially in the face of threat. People fall victim to a number of classic Cognitive Distortions when stuck in an ecoanxiety worry loop, such as catastrophizing, black and white thinking, and emotional reasoning. For example, I worked with a client who became very preoccupied with death following the release of a major climate change report last year. We were able to get him unstuck by unpacking all of the automatic appraisals he made of the danger. It’s not that there isn’t any danger, it just that the danger needs to be appropriately contextualized. 

Unfortunately, the news and social media are not necessarily helping in this respect. Our screens are perpetually showing us provocative content about climate change. Sometimes the information is accurate, but often it is distorted – one way or another – by some hidden agenda and designed to hijack our attention. So it’s important to manage your “information diet,” by assuring an intake of high-quality, nourishing content. 

Climate change is stressful enough; you don’t need your brain piling on exaggerated or false beliefs about what’s actually going on in the world. So, you need to become an expert at catching and correcting these cognitive errors. If books such as “Mind Over Mood” and “Cognitive Behavior Therapy” aren’t sufficient, a direct plan of action with a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist can help. Once these patterns of negative thoughts become familiar to you, mindfulness can be a useful tool for letting go of the unhelpful ruminations churning in the background of awareness. Mindfulness can also help with cultivating the clarity and focus required to make sense of all the news, social media, and chatter on the topic and then engage actively with what matters most to you. Check out The Mindful Way Through Anxiety or attend a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy workshop near you.

2. Notice (and shift out of) the urge to isolate yourself

Humans are social animals. We don’t have big teeth, strong muscles, or speedy legs. It’s our capacity to cooperate with others at a large scale that allowed us to adapt to basically every niche on the planet. As such, evolution has made us highly dependent on one-another for a sense of safety and well-being. This is especially true when we are upset. Nothing helps calm our nervous system more reliably and sustainably than a safe and secure connection with another human. 

Unfortunately, withdrawal and avoidance are common features of anxiety and mood disorders. This is one of the cruel realities of the mood feedback loop. When we feel down or worried, we often turn our attention inward and seek refuge, rather than searching for a solution outside of ourselves. This internal shift pulls us away from others and we spend more time alone in our heads, ruminating and worrying. Overtime, our energy and motivation decline and the whole thing snowballs. 

Coping effectively with ecoanxiety requires that we reach out to others for support. Do not suffer alone. The emergence of ecoanxiety in public discourse is raising awareness and helping people build a common vocabulary, which should make it that much easier to support one another. The appearance of support groups all over the world and the internet is a really good sign.

3. Align your actions with your values

Recall that anxiety is our body’s reaction to a threat. It’s essential to understand that all that uncomfortable activity that arises in our bodies and minds in the face of threat – increased heart-rate, muscle tension, surge of energy, hyperfocus, etc. – actually serves an important function: to help us rise to the challenge. If we stay home and worry all day, we just stew in our own restlessness. On the other hand, if we can find a way to leverage that energy and actively meet the threat, we’ll feel much better. This effect is not just about releasing some pent up energy. We may actually be able to solve some problems and enjoy a greater sense of self-efficacy. The benefits of taking action can go even deeper than that. When our actions are aligned with our emotions and our core values and sense of purpose, we gain access to a profound sense of meaning, wholeness, and peace.

Purpose-based coping is an ideal fit for ecoanxiety. In addition to reducing anxiety nerves, it also nurtures more prosocial values. Many of us feel compelled to help with climate change out of compassion. Taking action in this way aligns our nervous and compassionate energies, which really charges up our motivation. All of that said, it is important to balance a desire to do good in the world, with self-care and equanimity. There is only so much we can accomplish in any given day and a burnt-out activist is not going to be much help.

So, in addition to getting your thoughts straight and staying connected to others, here are some things you can actively do that most climate experts agree will contribute to our collective effort to combat climate change – and mitigate eco-anxiety.

• Vote in elections and make your voice heard at the local and national level 
• Reduce your consumption in whatever ways make sense to you: refuse, re-use, repair, revalue, and recycle
• Do more physical commuting (walking, biking, jogging, etc.) when you can
• Choose public transit over your car when you can
• Educate yourself on the many different ways you can help combat climate change. (And remember that no one can do them all!)

Do your best to channel all of the energy stimulated by ecoanxiety into solution-oriented action. In this way, we can feel empowered and aligned and together, as a global community, we will be on our way to righting the climate ship. That outcome is incredibly inspiring to me and I hope you share my excitement.

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An Introduction to Mindful Gratitude

Living your life with gratitude helps you notice the little wins — like the bus showing up right on time, a stranger holding the door for you, or the sun shining through your window when you wake up in the morning. Each of these small moments strings together to create a web of well-being that, over time, strengthens your ability to notice the good.

The Power of Gratitude

Most of us know it’s important to express thanks to the people who help us, or silently acknowledge the things we are grateful for in life. Research has linked gratitude with a wide range of benefits, including strengthening your immune system and improving sleep patterns, feeling optimistic and experiencing more joy and pleasure, being more helpful and generous, and feeling less lonely and isolated. 

Here are three ways that gratitude can be a game-changer: 

1. Its boosts your mental health.  A study from 2017 found that those who write letters of gratitude reported significantly better mental health four weeks and 12 weeks after their writing exercise ended. While not conclusive, this finding suggests that practicing gratitude may help train the brain to be more sensitive to the experience of gratitude down the line, and this could contribute to improved mental health over time.
2. It helps you accept change. When we are comfortable with the way things already are, it can be difficult to accept when things change—let alone feel grateful for that difference. But when we make it a habit to notice the good change brings, we can become more flexible and accepting. Here are four ways to practice gratitude when change arises. 
3. It can relieve stress. The regions associated with gratitude are part of the neural networks that light up when we socialize and experience pleasure. These regions are also heavily connected to the parts of the brain that control basic emotion regulation, such as heart rate, and are associated with stress relief and thus pain reduction. Feeling grateful and recognizing help from others creates a more relaxed body state and allows the subsequent benefits of lowered stress to wash over us.

more research on gratitude

Well-Being

Why a Grateful Brain Is a Giving One 

The neural connection between gratitude and altruism is very deep, suggests new research. Read More 

• Christina Karns
• December 21, 2017

Meditation

A Simple Mindful Gratitude Exercise 

Science suggests that expressing true gratitude boosts your health and spreads happiness. Here are a few simple exercises to help you build your capacity for gratitude. Read More 

• Stephanie Domet
• November 13, 2018

10 Ways to Practice Daily Gratitude 

As Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.” Saying thank you, holding the door for someone, these little moments can change the tone of your whole day.

One of the most powerful ways to rewire your brain for more joy and less stress is to focus on gratitude. Here are 10 simple ways to become more grateful:

1. Keep a Gratitude Journal. Establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of the gifts, grace, benefits, and good things you enjoy. Recalling moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life gives you the potential to interweave a sustainable theme of gratefulness into your life.
2. Remember the Bad. To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.
3. Ask Yourself Three Questions. Meditate on you relationships with parents, friends, siblings, work associates, children, and partners using these three questions: “What have I received from __?”, “What have I given to __?”, and “What troubles and difficulty have I caused?”
4. Share Your Gratitude with Others. Research has found that expressing gratitude can strengthen relationships. So the next time your partner, friend or family member does something you appreciate, be sure to let them know.
5. Come to Your Senses. Through our senses—the ability to touch, see, smell, taste, and hear—we gain an appreciation of what it means to be human and of what an incredible miracle it is to be alive. Seen through the lens of gratitude, the human body is not only a miraculous construction, but also a gift.
6. Use Visual Reminders. Because the two primary obstacles to gratefulness are forgetfulness and a lack of mindful awareness, visual reminders can serve as cues to trigger thoughts of gratitude. Often times, the best visual reminders are other people.
7. Make a Vow to Practice Gratitude. Research shows that making an oath to perform a behavior increases the likelihood that the action will be executed. Therefore, write your own gratitude vow, which could be as simple as “I vow to count my blessings each day,” and post it somewhere where you will be reminded of it every day.
8. Watch Your Language. Grateful people have a particular linguistic style that uses the language of gifts, givers, blessings, blessed, fortune, fortunate, and abundance. In gratitude, you should not focus on how inherently good you are, but rather on the inherently good things that others have done on your behalf.
9. Go Through the Motions. Grateful motions include smiling, saying thank you, and writing letters of gratitude. By “going through grateful motions,” you’ll trigger the emotion of gratitude more often.
10. Think Outside the Box. If you want to make the most out of opportunities to flex your gratitude muscles, you must look creatively for new situations and circumstances in which to feel grateful. Please share the creative ways you’ve found to help you practice gratitude.

Discover Daily Gratitude

Well-Being

Four Ways to Wire Your Brain for Gratitude 

Gratitude can have a last impact on your well-being. Here’s how to foster it all day long. Read More 

• Najma Khorrami
• November 1, 2019

Well-Being

How to Be Grateful for Your Morning Cup of Coffee 

Writer AJ Jacobs explores what happens once you decide to thank everyone responsible for your morning coffee. Read More 

• Nicole Bayes-Fleming
• January 18, 2019

Try This Five-Minute Gratitude Meditation

Finding something simple to be thankful for each day can help boost your resilience and overall sense of well-being. Follow this five-minute gratitude practice from Elaine Smookler to notice and appreciate the little things.

A Simple Gratitude Meditation

• 5:00

Use the breath to anchor yourself in the present moment. Our minds are always so easily pulled to busyness. Bring particular attention to feeling the breath, or something in the body, as you bring your shoulders down and orient your attention toward gratitude.

1. Next, bring to mind a sight you are grateful for. Move through your senses, and find one thing to start with that you appreciate that comes to you from the world of sight, if you have this available. It could be a color…a shadow…a shape…a movement. Remember, it will never be like this again. What do you see right now, and can you feel grateful that you get to see this, whatever it is?
2. Now, shift to a scent you appreciate. As you continue to work with your senses, now take time to tune in with appreciation to an aroma. What do you notice? What about that glorious or interesting or subtle smell is making you smile? It could be gratitude for something familiar: a scent that brings comfort, upliftment; or maybe it’s something you’ve never smelled before, and it just piques your curiosity, ignites you, enlivens you.
3. Moving on, tune into any sounds around you. Allowing the world of smell to gently recede into the background, on an in-breath, shift your attention to your ears and the world of sound. Maybe notice what it feels like to really listen. How many sounds can you notice, and can you feel grateful that you’re able to experience sound, if you are? What can you notice about these sounds—far away? close? Perhaps you could play a piece of music that brings you joy, and have gratitude that it’s so available? Or maybe it’s the sound of children laughing, the sound of loved ones breathing, the sound of the beating of your own heart.
4. The world of touch and texture beckons us next. We find so much to be grateful for in touch! If there’s someone near who you can hug or who can hug you, notice how this makes you feel filled with gratitude for the joy of human contact. Or perhaps you have a beautiful pet that you can stroke and cuddle, or some lovely material with a texture that feels warm to the touch, soft, evocative. Let your senses ignite your gratitude! There’s so much to be appreciative of.
5. Shift to noticing and appreciating objects around you. Now take a moment to look around: Look down, look up, and from side to side. Appreciate how much effort must have gone into anything at all you own or use. Someone conceived of the need and many people worked on the details of the design. Much care even went into the packaging to deliver your item to you safely. What do you feel when you let yourself be grateful that all that talent went into making your life a little easier?
6. As you end this practice, carry this attitude of gratitude with you. One last little grateful tip: Why not offer your thanks to each person who does anything at all for you today? Even if it is their job to help you? When you’re grateful, when you let your heart open up and be filled with appreciation, notice how being grateful makes you feel.
7. Close with gratitude. I’m so grateful that you tuned in to this gratitude practice, and I appreciate your time, your effort, and your energy to be present, awake, and alive to your precious life. Have a beautiful day.

Meditations on gratitude

Three Meditations to Foster Deep Gratitude 

Open yourself up to the benefits of gratitude with these guided meditations. Read More 

• Nicole Bayes-Fleming
• October 22, 2019

Well-Being

Rewire Your Brain for Joy With A Simple Gratitude Practice 

What are you grateful for? Take a few minutes to try this gratitude practice. Read More 

• Elisha Goldstein
• November 15, 2019

How Gratitude Boosts Relationships

Our closest relationships enrich our lives in ways that may not always be noticeable. When we pause to consider all they’ve brought us, we begin to realize that so much of what we have is built on the people who love us—from the coffee your partner brewed for you this morning, to your overall sense of identity and contentment.

Can a Lack of Gratitude Kill Relationships?

Strengthening your relationship with someone doesn’t require an elaborate date or weekend-long outing. Small gestures—like making eye contact, or following through on plans—can be just as impactful over time.

As a study from Florida State University found grateful partners typically make our lives better, but we might not benefit as much if we’re not also grateful. People with more grateful partners tended to start out more satisfied with their marriages and still be more satisfied three years later—but only if they were high in gratitude

Five Ways Gratitude Can Make Parenting Easier

By Carla Naumburg

Gratitude has become one of my go-to responses to difficult parenting situations, and not just during mundane or unpleasant tasks. Here are few other times:

1. When I’m completely exhausted and just can’t deal. Whenever this happens, I am at high risk of throwing my own private pity party, which doesn’t help anything. A moment of gratitude shuts that party down so I can get clear on what I need to do and get through the rest of the day.
2. Whenever my girls get sick or injured, my thoughts start spinning. I waver between worrying about their health and stressing about the work I won’t get done. Reminding myself of all I have to be grateful for—that they aren’t sicker, that we have access to pediatric emergency rooms, skilled doctors, and health insurance—halts my mind’s cycle of rumination (which only augments stress and worry) and helps me get steady on my feet again so I can do what’s needed—not just stress in circles.
3. When I’m anxious about the future. My daughter’s health is just one of the many issues that trigger my anxiety—the full list could fill a library. Anxiety thrives in future thinking—gratitude lives in the present. When I focus on everything there is to appreciate in the here and now, my anxiety decreases dramatically.
4. When I can’t help but imagine the worst. I have an incredible ability to catastrophize my way through almost any experience, even the positive ones. It’s as if I’m in constant Cinderella mode—the more beautiful the shoe is, the more I worry about the other one dropping. Focusing on all that I have to be grateful for helps me savor the best moments of parenting, rather than getting caught up in imagining the worst.
5. When I’m distracted. I try to stay as present as I can for my kids, but sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard because parenting can be boring or infuriating or confusing or downright gross. Sometimes I can bring myself back with a few deep breaths, but other times I need a stronger anchor. Gratitude is that anchor.

share gratitude with others

Mindfulness Research

Can Gratitude Help Couples Through Hard Times? 

New research suggests that thanking our partners for supporting us through hardship may increase their joy and satisfaction in giving. Read More 

• Jill Suttie
• May 29, 2018

Kids

Four Ways to Foster Gratitude in Children 

Children who learn to practice gratitude are happier and more optimistic in the long run. Try this four-step practice to foster gratitude with your child. Read More 

• Greater Good Science Center
• July 19, 2019

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Listening to the Song – Part 2 – “Removing the Fluff”

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Listening is our gateway to intimacy with our inner life, each other, our earth and spirit. These two talks look at the ways that listening gets blocked and the teachings and practices that help us cultivate the gift of a deep and healing listening presence.

When Someone Deeply Listens to You

When someone deeply listens to you
it is like holding out a dented cup
you’ve had since childhood
and watching it fill up with
cold, fresh water.
When it balances on top of the brim,
you are understood.
When it overflows and touches your skin,
You are loved.

When someone deeply listens to you,
the room where you stay
starts a new life
and the place where you wrote
your first poem
begins to glow in your mind’s eye.
It is as if gold has been discovered!

When someone deeply listens to you,
your bare feet are on the earth
and a beloved land that seemed distant
is now at home within you.

by John Fox in Finding What You Didn’t Lose

Enjoy Listening to the Song, Part 1

Other resources on Listening here.

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How to Test Your Emotional Maturity

Some people are better able to control and understand their emotions than others. And even the most emotionally intelligent among us get caught up in moments of emotional immaturity. 

That’s because one size does not fit all when it comes to our response to conflict, betrayal, and other relationship challenges. Our upbringing, life experiences, and our natural disposition all shape the way we respond to difficult situations. 

In this video from The School of Life, author and philosopher Alain de Botton explores the three common signs of emotional immaturity, and how we can learn to see our more immature reactions for what they are—unexplored areas of necessary emotional development.

How to Test Your Emotional Maturity

In order to access your level of emotional development, or emotional age, ask yourself this question, says De Botton: “When someone on whom we depend emotionally let’s us down, disappoints us, or leaves us hanging in uncertainty, what is our characteristic way of responding?”

There are three methods of responding that indicate emotional immaturity (you can rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 for each of these options):

1) Deciding to Sulk 

When we become upset with someone we’re close to, our first reaction is often to deny there’s anything wrong—choosing instead to hint passive aggressively that something’s wrong. But when we withhold the reason for why we’re mad at someone, we prevent the conflict from ever being solved. 

“We hope against hope that another person might simply magically understand what they have done and fix it without us needing to speak,” says de Botton. “Rather as an infant who hasn’t yet mastered language might hope a parent would spontaneously enter their minds and guess what was ailing them. 

The Emotionally Mature Solution: Practice clear communication

Instead of acting passive, make an effort to mindfully communicate to your friend, partner or family member what it is that they’ve done to upset you, and why your feelings were hurt. 

“With a bit of luck, we will find the words to make ourselves understood by someone whom we can remember, deep down, even at this moment of stress, is not our enemy,” de Botton says.

2. Reacting with Rage

Sometimes when we’re angry at someone or something, we explode at the first person we come into contact with. Yelling and creating a scene may make us feel powerful in the moment, but at the root of this kind of outburst is fear of losing control and usually a whole lot of unexplored pain. 

“Our insults and viciousness are, in their coded ways, admissions of terror and defencelessness,” de Botton notes.

The Emotionally Mature Solution: Learn to trust

Rather than giving in to your first hot-tempered instinct, pause and consider what you really need in the moment. Often, what we need most is the time and space to vent to a supportive friend. Working through our anger more slowly allows us to resolve it reasonably, and gives other people involved a chance to be heard. 

An emotionally mature person has, “the confidence not to need to shout immediately, to give others the benefit of every doubt and not to assume the worst and then hit back with undue force,” de Botton explains. 

3. Going Cold 

When someone hurts our feelings or does us wrong in some way, it’s tempting to ice them out and pretend our relationship with them never meant anything to us. Who amongst us hasn’t sent a call from someone we’re mad at straight to voicemail? 

“It takes a lot of courage to admit to someone who has hurt us that we care, that they have a power over us, that a key bit of our life is in their hands,” de Botton says. “It may be a lot easier to put up a strenuous wall of indifference.”

The Emotionally Mature Solution: Embrace your vulnerability 

In order to fully trust and develop intimate relationships we others, we have to find the strength within ourselves to be vulnerable.

“The mature know, and have made their peace with the idea that being close to anyone will open them up to being hurt,” de Botton concludes.

Many Adults Never Learn The Language of Emotional Maturity

Communication, trust, and vulnerability can be learned as a child, growing up in a supportive and nourishing emotionally aware home. But at least half of us weren’t brought up in the land of emotional literacy and will have to learn it ourselves, says De Botton.

“This is akin to the difference between growing up speaking a foreign language and having to learn it over many months as an adult,” he explains. “There is nothing to be ashamed of about our possible ignorance. We may never have heard adults around us speaking an emotional dialect. So we may need to go back to school and spend 5 to 10 thousand hours learning the beautiful and complex language of emotional adulthood.”

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Meditation: Coming Home to Natural Presence (20:57 min.)

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This meditation awakens our senses through a body scan and listening to sound, and then invites us to rest in the presence that spontaneously knows the changing stream of experience.  Relaxing back and letting everything be just as it is, reveals the natural presence that is our true home.

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Meditation: The RAIN of Compassion (30:00 min)

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The acronym RAIN (Recognize-Allow-Investigate-Nurture) is one of the most powerful tools I know for working with difficult emotions and discovering the freedom of an awake, compassionate presence.

The 4-steps of RAIN are:

• Recognize what is happening;
• Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
• Investigate with interest and care;
• Nurture with self-compassion.

In the moments “After the RAIN,” it’s important to simply notice your own presence and rest in that open, tender space of awareness. When we are no longer identified with passing states like fear or anger, we begin to realize the vastness and mystery of our natural Being.

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Meditation: Calling on Loving Presence (18:18 min)

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Often, when we’re really struggling, the only way to find compassion for ourselves is by reaching out to a larger source of love. We might for instance take refuge by calling on the Buddha, Divine Mother, God, Jesus, Great Spirit, Shiva, or Allah – reaching towards a loving awareness that is great enough to offer comfort and safety to our wounded self.

When we feel held by a caring presence, by something larger than our small frightened self, we begin to find space in our heart for the difficult currents of our life, and for the lives of others. The suffering that might have seemed “too much” can now awaken us to the sweetness of compassion.

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Mindfulness at School Improves Critical Learning Skills

More and more young, developing children are showing signs of stress when they enter school, making it more important than ever to teach young students the tools of emotional resilience. New research out of Australia finds that mindfulness education during the school day may be of benefit to elementary school students, building skills that help them thrive in the classroom and beyond.  

There are three critical skills that develop in early childhood: paying attention and remembering information, shifting back and forth between tasks, and behaving appropriately with others. These abilities are known as executive functions and they are essential for more advanced tasks like planning, reasoning, problem solving, and positive social relationships.

Most of what we know about the effects of mindfulness practice on the mind, emotions, and behavior comes from studies with adults. Although we know that mindfulness-based interventions in schools can be helpful for children, we know little about how these interventions affect executive function. Researchers at Australia’s Griffith University decided to find out.

The Effects of Mindfulness on the Mind, Emotions, and Behavior of Children

In the study, 91 kindergarten- to 2^nd– grade students participated in a classroom mindfulness program. Roughly two thirds of the children were offered lessons during the first part of the study, and the other third, who were part of the control group, were placed on a waitlist and received instruction later. At the end of the semester, researchers compared the children who initially received mindfulness training to the control group students.

The mindfulness program was designed to boost the development of executive function skills by building on what teachers are already doing in the classroom. Each day, teachers performed a “core practice” (listening to the sound of a chime) at the start of the day, after morning recess, and after lunch for the duration of the school term. They were also free to supplement lessons in typical academic subjects like reading or math with a variety of mindfulness-based activities to help kids keep calm, like taking mindful moments, reading books like “Mindful Monkey, Happy Panda”, drawing pictures, and making puppets. Students also practiced breathing and body scan exercises, and had their own mindfulness diaries. 

Students in the mindfulness classrooms were better able to pay attention, regulate their behavior, shift between tasks, plan, organize, and monitor their responses

Teachers in the study had little or no prior experience delivering mindfulness lessons. They received a half-day training session, weekly consultation, and a mindfulness program manual that included scripts and materials for teaching mindfulness to young children.

Students in both groups underwent a series of computerized tests before and after the semester to see if they differed in their executive functioning abilities. These tests included attention tasks, where children looked at a fish in the middle of a screen and had to say whether the other fish presented were pointing in the same or opposite direction. They also had to sort images on cards by shape or color. Lastly, teachers were asked to fill out questionnaires about students’ behavior, emotional wellness, relationships with peers, attention, and prosocial behavior.

Mindfulness Helps Kids Pay Attention, Regulate Behavior, Plan, and Organize

Results of the study showed that students in the mindfulness classrooms were better able to pay attention, regulate their behavior, shift between tasks, plan, organize, and monitor their responses than control group children. The students in the mindfulness program were also rated by their teachers as having greater attention and concentration skills, as well as more prosocial behavior. No significant differences were found between the groups on teacher reports of emotion or conduct problems, or peer relationship difficulties. 

These results are particularly important in light of the fact that early childhood is a critical time for developing executive functioning abilities, which are key to academic and social thriving. They also show that school teachers can effectively integrate mindfulness practices into classroom activities throughout the school day with very little training. School-based delivery may allow children who might not otherwise receive mindfulness instruction to benefit from its effects.

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10 Ways to Become More Grateful

One of the most powerful ways to rewire your brain for more joy and less stress is to focus on gratitude. Here are 10 simple ways to become more grateful.

1. Keep a Gratitude Journal. Establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of the gifts, grace, benefits, and good things you enjoy. Recalling moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life gives you the potential to interweave a sustainable theme of gratefulness into your life.

2. Remember the Bad. To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.

3. Ask Yourself Three Questions. Meditate on you relationships with parents, friends, siblings, work associates, children, and partners using these three questions: “What have I received from __?”, “What have I given to __?”, and “What troubles and difficulty have I caused?”

4. Share your gratitude with others. Research has found that expressing gratitude can strengthen relationships. So the next time your partner, friend or family member does something you appreciate, be sure to let them know.

5. Come to Your Senses. Through our senses—the ability to touch, see, smell, taste, and hear—we gain an appreciation of what it means to be human and of what an incredible miracle it is to be alive. Seen through the lens of gratitude, the human body is not only a miraculous construction, but also a gift.

Recalling moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life gives you the potential to interweave a sustainable theme of gratefulness into your life.

6. Use Visual Reminders. Because the two primary obstacles to gratefulness are forgetfulness and a lack of mindful awareness, visual reminders can serve as cues to trigger thoughts of gratitude. Often times, the best visual reminders are other people.

7. Make a Vow to Practice Gratitude. Research shows that making an oath to perform a behavior increases the likelihood that the action will be executed. Therefore, write your own gratitude vow, which could be as simple as “I vow to count my blessings each day,” and post it somewhere where you will be reminded of it every day.

8. Watch your Language. Grateful people have a particular linguistic style that uses the language of gifts, givers, blessings, blessed, fortune, fortunate, and abundance. In gratitude, you should not focus on how inherently good you are, but rather on the inherently good things that others have done on your behalf.

9. Go Through the Motions. Grateful motions include smiling, saying thank you, and writing letters of gratitude. By “going through grateful motions,” you’ll trigger the emotion of gratitude more often.

10. Think Outside the Box. If you want to make the most out of opportunities to flex your gratitude muscles, you must look creatively for new situations and circumstances in which to feel grateful. Please share the creative ways you’ve found to help you practice gratitude.

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.

Read More

Three Meditations to Foster Deep Gratitude 

Open yourself up to the benefits of gratitude with these guided meditations. Read More 

• Nicole Bayes-Fleming
• October 22, 2019

Relationships

How a Lack of Gratitude Kills Relationships 

A new study suggests that couples who express gratitude are more satisfied with their relationship. Read More 

• Kira M. Newman
• September 30, 2019

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Free Mindfulness Apps Worthy of Your Attention

There’s no shortage of mindfulness and meditation apps these days, promising to help you combat anxiety, sleep better, hone your focus, and more. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports that more than 2,000 new meditation apps launched between 2015 and 2018. We scoured the app stores to find the most valuable and easy-to-use mindfulness apps that are available for free. Two on this list are completely free, while the rest include a free version with the option to upgrade to premium content and features.

1) Insight Timer

Available for iOS and Android

Entry price: Free. But you have to navigate around the subscription screen with the button that says “Start 7 Day Trial. Once you scroll past that, you can access the free content. 

Insight Timer has an insanely huge library of content: over 25,000 guided meditations from around 3,000 teachers on topics like stress, relationships, creativity, and more.

Right from the beginning, the app feels like a community—the home screen announces, “420,065 meditations today, 5,059 meditating right now.” In fact, Insight Timer has attracted more than 6 million meditators from around the world. After you finish a meditation, you’ll learn exactly how many people were meditating “with you” during that time—and by setting your location, you can even see meditators nearby and what tracks they’re listening to.

Once you find a teacher you enjoy—like Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, or Sharon Salzberg—you can follow them to make sure you don’t miss any new content. If you prefer a quieter meditation, you can always set a timer and meditate to intermittent bells or calming ambient noise.

You can also tune in to 2,000 free talks and podcasts for life advice and inspiration, and music tracks to soothe your mind or help you sleep.

Depending on your preferences, Insight Timer’s extensive collection can be either a blessing or a curse—an endless list of choices that leave you overwhelmed or a buffet of tempting options to sink your teeth into.

Paid option: For $59.99 per year, you get access to courses with well-known teachers, a new daily meditation for anxiety and stress, and the ability to download meditations, listen offline, and fast forward and rewind.

2) Smiling Mind

Available for iOS, Android, and web

Entry price: Free

Smiling Mind hits the sweet spot for a free mindfulness app in so many ways. 

The app features hundreds of meditations, enough to keep you engaged without overwhelming you with choice. They are organized into structured programs like Mindful Foundations (42 sessions), Sleep (6 sessions), Relationships (13 sessions), and Workplace (41 sessions), but you have the flexibility to choose where to start and to easily jump between programs. Most meditations are in the five- to fifteen-minute range, with a few practices up to 45 minutes for advanced meditators. 

Downloaded by over 4 million people, the app also has a variety of specialized programs for educators (including curricula they can use in the classroom); for children and teens of various ages; all developed with the help of psychologists and health professionals.

While you could use a meditation app as a temporary break from your hectic life, Smiling Mind wants you to take your mindfulness practice off the cushion and into the other 23 hours of your day. Interspersed with the meditations are audio instructions for “activities” with catchy names like Are You Really Listening?, A Legal Alien, and Finding Your Inner Master. In Are You Really Listening?, for example, you learn to treat other people’s speech as an object of meditation, focusing on what they are saying and bringing your attention back when it wanders to your own thoughts. 

Created by a nonprofit by the same name, Smiling Mind is entirely free—so you don’t have the distraction of paid content that’s inaccessible to you as a free user. The app wants to put a “smile on your mind”—and it might just succeed. 

Paid option: None

3) Stop, Breathe & Think

Available for iOS and Android

Entry price: Free. If you explore “All Sessions” you can access the free meditations all in one place and also take a peek at what the upgrade to a paid plan offers.

If other apps expect you to dive right in, Stop, Breathe & Think wants to create a more deliberate, intentional experience. A section called Learn to Meditate explains what mindfulness is and why it’s beneficial, including some of the neuroscience and physiology behind it. Each day when you open the app, you’re asked “How are you?” and invited to check in with yourself—to rate your mind and body on a scale of “rough” to “great,” and note up to five emotions you’re feeling. Then, Stop, Breathe & Think will recommend meditations, mindful walks, and even acupressure videos tailored to how you feel. 

Meditations based on how you feel

The app features around 30 free sessions. For many of them, you can choose between different lengths and either a friendly male voice (Grecco) or a calming female voice (Jamie) as your meditation guide. Most of the meditations are short, up to 11 minutes, and feature simple introductory practices like Body Scan, Forgiving Yourself, and Joy. You can also simply set a timer and sit in silence, learn different breathing techniques, or listen to relaxing forest sounds.

A progress page keeps track of how your mind and body have been feeling over time, and your most common emotions (before and after meditating, when the app invites you to check in again). Plus, you can earn cute stickers: As a newbie, I’ve collected “Good Start” and “Trio of Tranquility.” Stop, Breathe & Think is ideal if you need to understand why you’re meditating and see how it’s benefitting you in order to keep up the habit.

Paid option: For $58.99 per year, you get longer versions of the existing meditations (up to 30 minutes), 100 premium meditations, new voices, more yoga and accupressure, and the ability to journal on the app.

4) UCLA Mindful

Available for iOS and Android

Entry price: Free

If all the research on mindfulness has persuaded you that you need to meditate, the UCLA Mindful app could be a good place to start. 

Developed by the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the app features about a dozen meditations of different types in English and Spanish. You can learn to focus on your breath, your body, or sounds; work with difficult emotions; and cultivate loving-kindness in sessions ranging from 3 to 19 minutes long. 

If you’re new to mindfulness, you might choose to take advantage of their Getting Started section, which offers information on what mindfulness is, how to choose a meditation, which posture is best for your practice, and what research-backed benefits you might expect from it.

As a bonus, the app also offers longer meditations that it calls “podcasts.” These are half-hour audio recordings of lunchtime meditations that take place weekly on the UCLA campus, including comments before and after the meditation as well as plenty of silent practice time. 

UCLA Mindful was released just this spring, and users report that they’re still working out the kinks, at least on the Android version (and Getting Started wouldn’t load for us on iOS, either). But if you’re looking for an app that is heavily grounded in the science of mindfulness, you can put your trust in UCLA Mindful.

Paid option: None

5) 10% Happier

Available for iOS and Android

Entry price: Free

The tagline for 10% Happier tells you the most important thing you need to know about the app. It’s “meditation for fidgety skeptics”—a relatable, no-nonsense way to learn mindfulness for people whose goals veer more toward sharpening their brains than befriending their souls.

Unlike some other mindfulness apps, 10% Happier comes with a tour guide. Dan Harris is a news anchor who famously had a panic attack on live TV, an experience that eventually led him to pursue meditation. 

Authoritative conversations about meditation

There’s really only one 7-day free offering on 10% Happier, and we hesitated to include it in this list, but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in accessibility, authority, and unique perspective. What’s free is The Basics series, a one-week orientation to mindfulness. Each day features an introductory video by Harris (often in conversation with instructor Joseph Goldstein), and a meditation by Goldstein.

Harris uses his journalistic chops to take these seven conversations with Goldstein to the heart of the most pressing questions new meditators have—like how to know you’re doing it right and how to deal with boredom. Goldstein, who is a seasoned meditator, offers wise insights based on his decades of experience.

Harris also hosts the 10% Happier podcast for free (outside the app), featuring conversations with people from Richard Davidson to Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arianna Huffington to the Dalai Lama. If other mindfulness apps don’t speak your language, 10% Happier might be the app for you.

Paid option: For $99.99 per year, you get access to over 350 guided meditations, the ability to download meditations for offline listening, and courses on stress, focus, performance, relationships, and more.

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Listening to the Song – Part 1

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Listening is our gateway to intimacy with our inner life, each other, our earth and spirit. These two talks look at the ways that listening gets blocked and the teachings and practices that help us cultivate the gift of a deep and healing listening presence.

To listen is to lean in softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
~ Mark Nepo

Choose one low hanging leaf
Heart-shaped
Still attached to Mother Birch
and listen to all it has to say.
The sound its slender veins make turning light to sugar.
The exaltation of wind.
Water sipped through straws of branches of the roots.
How it and its sisters communicate with birds
and how it refracts the sun in your eyes
searching for the right thing to say and when.
The queue will be obvious when it’s your turn to speak
It’s palm will fall upon yours face down.
Blind sentences touching the breath of your hand
then whispering the language that green understands.

Birch ~ by Ann Emerson

Enjoy the meditation given before the talk:
The Silence that is Listening

Other resources on Listening here.

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Rewire Your Brain for Joy With A Simple Gratitude Practice

The number one bad habit that most people have can be surprising—it’s our auto-pilot thinking.

In the moment before we fall into any kind of negative addictive behavior, like procrastination, stress eating, isolation, or endlessly scrolling through our phones, here’s a thought. The thought, whether fully formed or not, is usually something like, I need to get away from this uncomfortable feeling, or even, I want this good feeling that’s here to last.

It’s human nature to want to distance ourselves from what’s uncomfortable and seek more of what feels good. But it’s our auto-pilot thoughts and reactions that can take us places we would rather not go—that take away our choice for how we’d like to show up in the world. With a little practice, we can build our awareness muscles so that those auto-pilot thoughts don’t slip by unnoticed. And better yet, we can re-wire our brains to prefer to linger on moments of joy and happiness rather than seek out distractions and addictive avoidance behaviors.

One of the most powerful ways I have found to shift the atmosphere of the mind towards more focused awareness is a very simple gratitude practice—but with a power boost.

How Gratitude Gets Us Unstuck

Now, before your eyes roll, consider this: if you’re thinking something along the lines of, Not this gratitude stuff again, I’ve read this in a thousand places, ask yourself, what is the net effect of this thought here? Does it incline you to move toward this practice that you’ve heard about a thousand times, or away from it?

The answer is most likely that it inclines you away from it.

If we know gratitude is a supportive practice, why does the mind want to push us away? Because the brain is wired to habituate to things. This is the classic top-down processing in effect. You read the words gratitude practice, your brain reaches back into its memory bank to find the reference for it, it sees many references and it spits out the computation, “Unimportant, move on.” Little do we often know, this computation is exactly what keeps us stuck in life. What’s called for is a moment of curiosity.

By making the decision to embrace gratitude with curiosity, you rewire your brain to accept all the benefits gratitude has to offer.

A Simple Gratitude Practice

Try to commit to a daily gratitude practice for just one week by keeping a mindful gratitude journal. Each day, mindfully and actively reflect on five to ten things you’re grateful for.

When you sit down to consider what you’re actually grateful for, take a moment to picture each one in your mind and ask yourself, why are you grateful for this? Can you feel the experience of that gratitude in your body?

Not only will practicing gratitude feel good in the moment, but studies have found that doing so can strengthen your relationships and your mental health in the long run. Remember, neurons that fire together wire together, so let all that somatic feeling of gratitude linger for a few moments, and then move onto the next one. This lights up more areas of your brain and gives a power boost to the impact of your gratitude practice.

If you have a few minutes right now before moving onto the next thing, try this out with even just one thing you’re grateful for. Bring a curious mind to it and see what you notice. You may just begin to uncover a little happiness right now.

Set a daily reminder for this week, and report back what you’ve noticed.

Adapted from Mindfulness & Psychotherapy

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