Meditation – Cultivating a Relaxed Attention (22:22 min) - Tara Brach

Meditation: Cultivating a Relaxed Attention

In this meditation we engage a relaxed and alert attention by scanning through the body, opening to sound, and resting in the awareness that includes all the senses. This presence is stabilized with the use of a home base, for many the breath, and reminders to “relax back” when the mind naturally drifts.

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A 20-Minute Body Scan to Cultivate Attention

When doing this meditation, remember that, as always, there’s no need to strive to make anything happen. Simply observe what you find and practice letting things be for a while. When something uncomfortable grabs your attention, like pain or an itch, observe it first and see if it changes. If you find you need to address it, that’s fine. Noticing that, pause and make an adjustment. In this way, the body scan provides an opportunity to practice responsiveness.

1) Begin by lying down or sitting in a comfortable chair. If lying down, let your arms and legs relax and fall to the sides; if seated, find a balanced and stable position.

2) Take a few moments to notice sensations of breathing.

Expect your mind to wander, and when it does, return your attention to your feet without judging yourself or giving yourself a hard time.

3) Draw your attention to your feet. Notice the pressure of your feet against the floor or bed, the temperature, comfort or discomfort, itches, or anything else. Expect your mind to wander, and when it does, return your attention to your feet without judging yourself or giving yourself a hard time. Let your attention rest with your feet in this way for a few minutes.

3) Move attention to your lower legs. You might feel the touch of clothing or a blanket, and you might feel nothing at all. Sustain your attention without rigidly exhausting yourself. Whatever you experience, that’s what you’re supposed to feel right now.

4) After a few minutes, shift attention to your upper legs, observing them in the some way. Notice sensations, or maybe lack of sensation. That’s okay, too.

5) Pacing yourself, turn some kind of attention to your abdomen and then to your chest. Notice physical sensations, such as breathing, internal feelings like hunger or fullness, and the resonance of any emotions—physical manifestations of happiness, sadness, tension, anger, feeling open or closed, and so on.

6) Continue turning attention to the rest of your body in the some way, spending several minutes each on your bock, then your hands, then your arms. Then bring attention to your neck and shoulders, releasing tension when you’re able without fighting what remains.

7) Finally, bring attention to your face and head, noticing expressions and reflections of emotions that occur around your mouth and eyes in particular.

Whether you feel relaxed or tense, restless or invigorated, pause before concluding. Take a moment of stillness, and then, with intention, choose when to move on with your day.

Reprinted with permission: New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Copyright © 2015 by Mark Bertin, from Mindful Parenting for ADHD

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The Power and Pleasure of Intention

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

—Henry David Thoreau

Happy New Year!

Traditional New Year’s resolutions—losing weight, finding a relationship, or quitting a bad habit—are often ungrounded wishes that originate from our beliefs about what we think we should do, should have, or should be.

This year, consider setting intentions by focusing on what lights you up. Ask yourself, “What is my dream?”

We have so many reasons to believe in our ability to create sustainable, positive change in our lives based on research and practices taught by neuroscientists, esteemed mindfulness teachers, and New York Times best-selling authors in the field of personal transformation.

Mike Dooley, a former PricewaterhouseCoopers international tax consultant, is the New York Times best-selling author of Infinite Possibilities. His advice? Follow these two crucial steps.

1. Define what you want in terms of the end result. Mentally, in thought, imagine that you’ve already received, done, or become that which you now desire.
2. Show up, every day, moving in the direction of your dream. Physically, to any degree you can, do something. These are the baby steps. They always seem futile . . . Do it anyway. If you have absolutely no idea of which direction to move in, move in any direction.

By spending a few moments each day following these two steps, with patience and perseverance, you might be surprised by the ways in which your life starts moving in the direction you intended.

The truth is, when we decide to make a big change, it takes time, mental focus, and daily action. It is not always a linear path, and at times we might slip back into old mental or physical patterns.

Elisha Goldstein, PhD, cofounder of the Center for Mindful Living, advises that this is natural, “Whenever you fall prey to bad habits, you can expect the brain to default to voices of inadequacy and unworthiness. The best strategy is to forgive yourself for going astray—it’s expected.”

Along with forgiveness, gratitude plays an important role in navigating your way through setbacks.

“In over one hundred studies to date, researchers have found that people who have a daily gratitude practice consistently experience more positive emotions . . . [and]accomplish personal goals,” says Linda Graham, MFT, author of Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being.

One way to cultivate a daily gratitude practice is to keep a gratitude journal by your bed, and each night write about someone or something you are grateful for. Then, take a few deep breaths to release tension while allowing the feeling of gratitude to sink in.

And, remember, you are allowed (even encouraged) to enjoy the ride. As you move in the direction of your dreams, what would it feel like to smile now, to be grateful now, be celebratory now?

“Lasting happiness starts with one question,” says Michael Beckwith. “What can I celebrate?”

The power and pleasure of intention are a means by which we can shape our life experience. New Year’s intentions that begin with our thoughts can become reality through practices of nurturing our vision and taking steps to support it day by day.

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3 Ways to Get Better at Dealing With Change

Between a stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Viktor Frankl

How you respond to the issue…is the issue. —Frankie Perez

When I worked in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, I would park my car in Golden Gate Park and walk the two blocks to my office, something I could easily do on automatic pilot.

One day, more distracted than usual by mulling over something I was worried about, I wasn’t paying enough attention to where I was walking and blithely stepped into a sidewalk of freshly laid wet cement—up to my ankles.

The cascade of critical thoughts erupted immediately. “You stupid klutz! Look what you’ve done! You’ve ruined your shoes! Now you’ll be late to work. You’ll have to cancel clients today. You’ll probably lose clients over this. How could you!” An instant slide into a deep rabbit hole of shaming-blaming-catastrophizing.

Fortunately, by then I had enough mindfulness and self-compassion practices under my belt to catch up to myself. “Whoa! Wait a minute! I need to do this differently! I’m not the only person on the planet who made a mistake today just because they weren’t paying attention. This is probably not the only mistake I’m going to make today. I need to slow down here, collect myself, try to be a little kinder to myself right here, right now. I need to step out of this sidewalk, and deal.”

With that shift in attitude and shift in response, I gently picked my feet up out of my shoes and picked my shoes up out of the cement.

There happened to be an apartment building with an outdoor water faucet just a few steps away. As I washed off my shoes, I began to think a little more clearly. “This happened. Other than my own embarrassment and my own inner critic wailing the hide out of me, there’s no catastrophe here. Shit happens. I’m dealing with it as best as I can. This is going to be OK.”

When an on-site construction worker came over to me with some paper towels to wipe off my shoes (I’m grateful to this day for his kindness—no teasing or taunting, no further embarrassment), I began to have some hope that I could save my shoes. I also began to have a little pride and a lot of gratitude that I was coping as well as I was.

Then came the big shift. “Yeah, shit happens, but shift happens, too. If I can shift my attitude in this moment, I can shift my attitude in any moment.”

Then came the big shift. “Yeah, shit happens, but shift happens, too. If I can shift my attitude in this moment, I can shift my attitude in any moment.”

Bouncing back from disappointment, difficulty, even disaster, simply means using the response flexibility innate in our brains to shift gears, shift perspectives, see options that we couldn’t see before. Response flexibility allows us to shift out of our very automatic, habitual, and quick reactivity into a more skillful responsiveness.

By shifting our response, we become more resilient; we learn and grow; we recover our well-being.

We strengthen our capacity to create a shift in our responses to challenging life events, even potential crises, by mindfully, compassionately paying attention to our reactivity.

Watch Your Reactivity

I was working in my San Francisco office one day, seeing the individuals and couples I counsel in my psychotherapy practice. On a long break, I was sitting there, quietly meditating, but I had left the ringer of my phone on because I was expecting a phone call with the results of my most recent mammogram. When the call came with the results—“There’s a slight abnormality on the x-ray. Could you come in and have the mammogram done again?”—my anxiety went right through the roof. Thoughts immediately sprang to mind of two friends who’d recently had surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy for their breast cancer.

Because I had been meditating just the moment before, I had enough calm and clarity to watch my anxiety soar, to watch those thoughts rapidly spill over each other. I could see my reactivity. I could see my reactivity to my reactivity. My hand went to my heart immediately. I even said to the nurse on the phone, “I’m breathing. I’m b-r-e-a-t-h-i-n-g.” Then I scheduled the second appointment and sat back down to meditate again.

Being compassionate to myself as the experiencer of the fear, opening out to my connection to others, my common humanity, I thought, “I’m not alone. I’m not the only one.” I also appreciated the resources I would need medically and emotionally and that I would be able to access. Appreciating these resources and connections counteracts the tendency to see oneself as a lone victim of circumstances.

The results of the second mammogram later were fine. My practice allowed me to return to a sense of presence and equanimity even before I knew those results, and had they been worse, I would have been in a better position to deal with that.

The Hand on Heart practice provides a means to shift back to being present when you start spiralling into fear, self-doubt, and self-criticism.

Be Kind to Yourself

Last winter a huge thunderstorm blew out the power transformer on my block—no electricity for 36 hours—no heat, no lights, no refrigerator, no stove, no phones, no internet.

I managed to handle things fairly well, staying calm and creative in my coping, until the morning of the second day when I automatically wanted to check emails on my computer. I was aware of my rising frustration and my deepening contraction around the frustration. I was losing my clarity, becoming more reactive and angry when I walked through the kitchen and noticed a magnet on my refrigerator with the words: “May I give myself the compassion I need.” Right. I teach this stuff. So I stopped in front of the refrigerator and began reciting the mindful self-compassion phrases I teach to many others (see the self-compassion practice). These (and the Hand on Heart practice) are drawn from the Mindful Self-Compassion protocol developed by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer.

By the time I had repeated those phrases a few times, slowly, thoughtfully, I could feel my mind expanding back from its contraction to a more open perspective. (You can feel this physically in your body—shifting from tightness and tension to openness and relaxation.)

“I have internet at my office! That’s only 10 minutes away.”

When I was in my contracted, frustrated state of mind, I couldn’t think straight. Repeating the mindful self-compassion phrases to myself broke the automaticity of my reactivity and allowed me to see the larger picture again.

It’s not that mindful self-compassion solves the problems of the moment. It doesn’t. Self-compassion and other positive emotion practices—gratitude, awe, generosity, joy, delight, serenity, love—simply shift the functioning of the brain to put us in a better position to solve the problem.

Shift happens when we intentionally choose to focus our awareness on the experience of compassion, gratitude, warmth, and other feelings that put us in touch with our natural resilience. These practices can shift the functioning of the brain instantly. Over time, these practices become steadily more reliable, the new “go to” when we are navigating the twists and turns of life. Mindful self-compassion shifts the possibilities of our responses instantly, in this moment, in any moment, and over time in every moment. Being kinder to ourselves becomes natural and effortless.

See Clearly

The need to feel connected to other human beings, to be seen, to have a sense of belonging, is so powerfully hard-wired by evolution into our brain’s circuitry that we can instantly feel the pain of disconnection from others, and then we can spin our own automatic stories about what that disconnect, or our reactions to it, might mean.

Mindful self-compassion practices allow us to be kind and caring to ourselves in the moment of any reaction to any event in any relationship, recovering our equilibrium and openness to the moment, allowing us to see our reactions clearly and make wise and resilient choices about how we relate to ourselves and to others.

A useful tool in helping to achieve this natural “self-righting” is the guided visualization, which I learned from Stuart Eisendrath, who studies mindfulness and depression at the University of California, San Francisco medical school.

Practices of mindfulness and self-compassion together allow us to make the wisest choices possible. We can shift our patterns of response to difficult, even adverse, life events, from confusion and reactivity to intentional openness and reliable clarity. Yes, shit happens—but shift happens, too. In this moment. In any moment. In every moment.

How to Shift Mental Gears: 2 Practices for Building Resilience

1) Practice: Hand on Heart

This practice can help you respond skillfully to distressing events. You can do it quickly, many times a day if need be, to bring a calming awareness to your experiences. Simply stop—pause—and:

1. Place your hand over your heart so that you feel the warm touch of your hand on your chest.
2. Begin to breathe more slowly, more gently, more deeply, into your heart center.
3. Recall a moment, just one moment, when you felt safe, loved, and cherished by another human being. (With practice, evoking this memory can happen instantly, too.) Not the entire relationship, just one moment. This could be a moment with a spouse or a parent or a child. It could be a moment with a friend, a therapist, a teacher, or even a beloved pet.
4. As you remember this moment, let its warmth wash through your body; savor this feeling for 30 seconds.
5. When you are ready, reflect on any shift you felt in your body from this practice.

2) Noticing Emotional Responses

1. Sit or lie down in a relaxed and comfortable position. Generate a kind and loving awareness of being present in your body in this moment in this place.
2. Imagine you’re walking on a sidewalk on a street in your hometown, someplace that feels familiar and comfortable to you.
3. On the opposite side of the street, walking in your direction on the opposite sidewalk, you see someone you know and recognize. You wave and call out “Hello,” but there’s no response. In that instant, note your own response. Notice any contraction, disappointment, reactivity on your part.
4. Now, change the scenario. Instead imagine that on his or her own, the person sees you and recognizes you instantly and waves and calls out “Hello!” Notice your own immediate response to the greeting.
5. Take a moment to reflect on any differences you noticed in your responses between when you were recognized and when you were not.

This article appeared in the December 2016 issue of Mindful magazine.

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How to Fight Stress with Empathy

How many times have you been concerned about a friend or other loved one and asked if everything’s all right only to be told, “Oh, I’m just stressed,” as if there’s nothing to worry about?

We often use the words “I’m stressed” casually in our everyday conversations, with little acknowledgment of the adverse effects of stress in our lives. But evidence suggests that we should be much more concerned about our stress levels than we are.

The Center for Disease Control found that 66 percent of American workers say they lie awake at night troubled by the physical or emotional effects of stress, and stress has been linked to many health problems, including obesity and heart disease—especially among low-income Americans. Stress not only affects us, but it can impact those around us, too, especially our children.

Variables That Determine How Stress Affects Us

Not all stress is bad, of course. Stress can also be invigorating or lead us to care about the welfare of others, if channeled in the right way. Nor is it always avoidable—many of us have lives with stressors beyond our personal control. But, psychologists have identified key variable that determine whether stress ultimately affects us positively or negatively:

• Our perception of stress
• The meaning we attach to it
• Our ability to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity
• The degree of control we have over the circumstances that produce the stress

In my experience, many people don’t recognize the role that their own perceptions, fueled by biases, play in exacerbating stress. By becoming more aware of our biases in perception, we can learn to focus on the truthful assessment of situations we encounter without distorting reality, thereby remaining calm, energetic, creative, and resilient when faced with highly stressful situations.

As a psychologist, I’ve worked with countless people who suffer from debilitating stress in their lives, often without recognizing how it impacts their health, relationships, and work lives. In my book, The Stress Solution, I provide an outline of the research-based steps I often give to my clients so that they can learn to manage stress in more positive ways.

To some extent, we can reduce stress by simply taking good care of ourselves through getting proper sleep, exercise, and nutrition. But, to really thrive in the face of stress, we should also work toward finding meaning or purpose in our work or other activities, and toward nurturing our positive relationships using empathy.

Leading with empathy can help those around us to be sources of support in our lives and reduce the likelihood of interpersonal conflicts.

Why use empathy? Because when we give and receive empathy we produce the near magical neurotransmitter oxytocin, which creates a sense of trust and cooperation—keys to negotiating and resolving conflict, whether between couples, communities, states, or countries. Leading with empathy can help those around us to be sources of support in our lives and reduce the likelihood of interpersonal conflicts.

Of course, it may be difficult to imagine feeling empathic when we are angry or tired. Think of a couple reuniting after a long day of work. Without first connecting through empathy and love, they may end up fighting over whose turn it is to do the dishes or simply withdrawing from each other, depriving themselves of the comfort that closeness brings.

Empathy Practice: Listening

How to avoid this? By practicing empathic listening with one another instead of falling on our usual patterns.

Too many of us listen to each other with half an ear, preoccupied and not fully present. We tend to listen with bias, making up our minds before we hear the full story, or to connect everything the other person says to our own experience without considering their perspective. We then make well-meaning comments that do not honor the uniqueness of the other’s person’s thoughts or feelings, such as, “I know what you’re going through.” Or, we get distracted by the noise of our internal voices and end up judging or second-guessing one another, which keeps us from really listening. Without truly listening, we run the risk of losing connection and making false assumptions.

What does empathic listening look like? It requires giving up a self-centered view of the world, focusing and paying attention, and setting aside biases or distorted thinking to connect with another person’s emotions. It means coming to your interactions with a true desire for connection and understanding, rather than winning.

Empathy is easier when we understand some of the stories we carry inside about who we are and learn to see how it clouds our reactions and judgments. If we have been humiliated in childhood or starved of attention, we may have trouble trusting others or feeling comfortable with intimacy. Couples who fight a lot often carry stories like these about themselves—perhaps feeling unworthy because of past hurts—that make it hard for them to be present and more vulnerable to their partners.

But, when people learn to respond with empathic listening, it can help them to shift from their stories and distorted ways of thinking. They become less likely to take something done or said personally, assume that other people hold similar attitudes to one’s own, or focus only on the negative instead of the positive in a situation.

7 Ways to Increase Your Empathic Listening Skills

Here are some of the recommendations I make to help people enhance their empathic listening and their ability to express empathy:

• Reflect what others say to you by either repeating or rephrasing what someone has said. It sounds like you had a lot going on today at work, right?
• Emphasize the feeling behind the words and check on the accuracy of your interpretation. You sound exhausted. Is there something affecting you at work?
• Pay attention to body language. You look tense. What can I do to help?
• Ask open-ended questions, to show you are interested in their perspective. How was your day at the office? Not, Why are you so late?
• Slow down and take a deep breath to calm yourself if you are feeling your buttons being pushed or if you are absorbing someone else’s tension. Slowing down your emotional reactions can be helpful for truly tuning in to another person and not being tripped up by your own reactivity. Some people have found that mindfulness meditation, self-compassion, or compassion training can help with this kind of emotional regulation.
• Avoid snap judgments. Empathy means seeing human beings as always changing and evolving; so you don’t want to judge and shut the person down.
• Learn from the past. If you are unaware of your own biases and often jump to conclusions, you will have trouble truly listening to another person and perceiving them accurately. Know your personal biases and use cognitive reframing—a technique that involves reconsidering your interpretations of events, something I describe in detail in my book—to help you reevaluate what’s actually happening in a given conflict or situation versus what you’re telling yourself at the time. By engaging your brain in this way, you can rewire it to be less emotionally triggered and to calm your nervous system.

Avoid snap judgments. Empathy means seeing human beings as always changing and evolving; so you don’t want to judge and shut the person down.

Learning to communicate with empathy can go a long way toward building more positivity in your relationships and reducing your stress. If we all focused more on listening and understanding each other, the world would be a lot less stressful—and a lot happier—place to live.

 

© 2016 by Arthur P. Ciaramicoli and adapted with permission from New World Library.

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

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How to Be Mindful When Life is in Flux

“If you let go completely, you will be completely happy.”

Stress reduction, helping with depression, coping with illness and adversity, improved relational skills, and an ability to make better, less bias-prone decisions—all of these benefits can flow from mindfulness training. But they might all be seen like by-products of travelling along a path to deeper awakening, which flows from the recognition that nothing in life, including ourselves, is stuck in the way we habitually think.

In mindfulness practice, we train in letting go of our stories about stress and pain, learn that thoughts are not facts, and watch sensations change from moment to moment. We notice that experience is fluid, and can be perceived without taking it so personally. We learn that pain, stress, thoughts and everything else that occurs in the mind and body are not “me.”

Why “Me” Always Changes

So what kind of “me” is there? When we ask ourselves this question, most of us will come up with a list of identities—perhaps a name, a profession, a family role, a nationality. Already there are problems with this—as Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it, your name is “just a sound that your parents gave to you when you were born.” It may be applied consistently, for convenience, throughout a lifetime, but what it refers to certainly shifts over the years. I am not the same “me” who had my name as a baby.

The composition of our bodies is in continual flux. Over the last few weeks, your epidermis (the layer of skin that covers your body) has completely regenerated. Cells in the stomach are replaced after about five days, while our livers regenerate every year. Our entire skeleton is replaced every ten years. The brain changes all the time, too. Over the last fifteen years, researchers have learned that neural shifts occur as a consequence of events in the mind, body, and life. An experienced taxi driver will develop an unusually large hippocampus (a part of the brain associated with learning, memory, and spatial processing), while a skilled musician’s fine motor cortex will reflect their years of practice. Even learning to juggle over the course of a week produces observable neural changes in the brain. Many people believe that the core of their “self” resides in the brain, but if we never have the same brain from one moment to the next, how could there be such a core?

What Makes Up “Me”?

The evidence from neuroscience research suggests that what feels like “me” is in fact an infinite number of changing aspects of mind, brain and body, working in harmony to produce a sense of coherence and agency from the events of life. The experience of being “me” is a projection—a bit like when a film appears on a screen from the projection of different colours. This projected “me” assumes responsibility for actions that actually occur as a fluid interchange of indefinable aspects of mind,
body, brain, and environment.

There are heavy costs to this assumption. You don’t have to get depressed to witness how close identification with thoughts, emotions, and sensations creates suffering. Every time we turn a thought into a fact in our minds by calling it “mine,” we become blinded to the reality that it is influenced (and often biased) by myriad causes and conditions in our past and present. When we identify with a thought, it becomes difficult to see its biases, and we become trapped in a virtual version of life, doomed to self-righteousness, paranoia, negativity, or other patterns of distorted thinking. Similarly, when we identify with an emotion, we become prisoners of our moods. And when we get caught up with our bodies, we feel at their mercy, struggling with a journey through life that inevitably proceeds towards infirmity and breakdown.

Why Losing Control Can Make You Happier

Relief is attainable by shifting perception and letting go of the falsehood that we are in complete control. By recognizing the conditioning that deeply affects our lives, we can start to give ourselves—and others—a break. At the same time, realizing we are multi-faceted beings that change from moment to moment, in flow with an ever-shifting biological, psychological, social, and environmental context, we can start to practice riding with the changes. We can hold our beliefs and opinions lightly, rather than construct blindingly fixed identities from them.

As soon as we are aware of thoughts and sensations arising in experience, rather than getting caught in attempts to grasp or reject them, a glimmer of space emerges between the events of our lives and our reactions to them.

As soon as we are aware of thoughts and sensations arising in experience, rather than getting caught in attempts to grasp or reject them, a glimmer of space emerges between the events of our lives and our reactions to them. In this space, reactions can become responses, and tension and resistance can fall away, along with the stress they generate. Life becomes a dance with the world, rather than a war against it; a flow, rather than a struggle. By dropping our tight identification with what comes up in our minds, bodies and lives, we can start to feel better. As a famous meditation teacher once put it: “If you let go a little, you will get a little happiness. If you let go a lot, you will get a lot of happiness. And if you let go completely, you will be completely happy.”

You can watch a video of me speaking for Action For Happiness about this and other mindfulness-related themes here. And below is a practice you can try to train in resting in the changing flow of moment-to-moment experience.

Mindfulness Practice: Resting in the Flow of Experience

Being human is like flowing as a river—many moving droplets make up the stream. The river changes all the time, yet there is continuity as it follows well-worn grooves through the landscape. A river cannot suddenly shift its direction, just as we humans tend to follow a course set by past events and patterns. Yet, the more we become aware of how the flow occurs and the grooves are followed, the more we can relax into the ride. As we see more clearly, we also become more able to steer our way skilfully through the current. A good way to begin is to practice resting in the flow, as in this meditation.

1. Settle into a posture for sitting meditation, feeling the connection of your body to the floor, cushion, or seat. At any time during this practice, especially if you feel disconnected or disembodied, come back to this sense of groundedness, anchoring your experience.

2. Begin paying attention to breathing, noticing how each breath—indeed, each moment of each breath—is a unique experience, not the same as the previous one or the next. Notice how the breath happens without you controlling it—your breath is happening within you; “you” are not choosing to breathe. Know, too, that all of the automatic processes of the body—oxygenation of the cells, blood flow, heartbeat, and so on—are happening in the same way. As best you can, relax into this experience.

3. Open awareness now to the whole body. As sensations rise into consciousness and pass through, recognize that they are all impermanent, continually transforming in intensity, location, and quality. Let them be experienced, moment by moment, and allow them to pass through, as best you can, without attachment or rejection. Recognize too that the physical constituents of your body are in flux—skin is being shed, cells are growing and dying, some neural connections are strengthening, others are weakening.

4. Now bring awareness to thoughts. With a friendly interest, observe the patterns of thinking that are running through the mind, like clouds passing across the sky of the mind, making up its weather. Like the weather, these patterns are always changing, depending on atmospheric conditions. Realize that the thoughts you had a year ago, five years ago, a decade ago—each of which may have seemed extremely important back then—are now merely memories, and that thoughts appearing in the mind right now will share that fate.

5. Finally, open up your mindfulness to every aspect of conscious experience—sensations, sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and thoughts. Let go into the space within and around you, remaining alert and present to whatever comes. Allow the play of experience to happen by itself, resting in the flow, moment by moment. When you notice attention wandering to a particular place,
   acknowledge the wandering and open out to the whole panorama of experience once more.

This post was adapted from Into The Heart of Mindfulness, by Ed Halliwell, published by Piatkus). Download a set of 14 guided audio meditation practices from Ed’s books here.

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Getting Kids Unhooked from Their Smartphones

Kids and screen time cause considerable parental angst these days—and for good reason. Research shows children spend on average seven hours a day glued to computer, tablet, smartphone, or television screens. This reality has created such a stir that in the fall, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) updated its decade-old recommendation on childhood screen time.

Far from a radical revision, the guideline newly suggests a little well-chosen time is fine starting near eighteen months, when used interactively with a care taker. Below eighteen months no time remains best, apart from maybe video conversations with grandparents. From two to five, an hour daily maximum is recommended, and for older kids, two hours total time tops, no different than before.

Why is screen time such a uniquely charged and challenging topic? Guidelines of this type are tough to implement in the real world. Kids don’t want to hear that outside of homework too much screen time actually impacts healthy development. However, since children lack mature executive function, cognitive skills required to manage life like a grown up,  wise decision-making around screens remains limited until they learn better. As strong a pull as children feel, healthy technology use relies on parents.

The Command Center of Life

Executive function is like the CEO of our lives. Anything regarding organization, planning, anticipating, focusing, and regulating behavior relies on executive function. Healthy development of executive function in early childhood has even been linked to life-long academic and social success.

In large part, kids depend on parents to manage life while waiting for executive function to mature. Executive function represents the path toward complex problem solving and goal setting, and the ability to defer short term gratification for long term gain. The unsettling reality is that executive function doesn’t fully mature until around the age of thirty. That’s one reason kids and teens make not-so-smart decisions when it comes to social media. In a nutshell, even an independent-seeming teenager almost certainly lacks the full capacity to make long-sighted choices.

Immature executive function is a large part of what makes kids act like, well, kids. Around screens, think of it this way: Most adults have fully developed executive function and a strong ability to manage attention, prioritize, plan, and control impulses, and consider the future. They still struggle to keep phones and devices from becoming a distraction. What does that mean for the average child?

Because children lack the self-management capacities of a mature adult, they are particularly at risk when it comes to screens. For many, whatever feels best right now (I’m bored, where’s my tablet?) trumps health and well-being virtually every time. For teens immersed in their complex social world and drive for independence, volatile hormones and emotions create a perfect storm when joined with immature executive function and a smartphone. Sending naked selfies—hey, why not? The part of the brain responsible for reflection and foresight isn’t all grown up yet!

Putting Your Kids on a Media Diet

Like parents through the generations, our modern role is to love our kids, guide them, and teach them. Kids have always needed supervision, and there’s nothing unique about their fascination with technology. Parents before us managed a child’s behavior around driving, partying, curfews, and manners, and we now must keep track of technology, too. This means setting boundaries and giving them more independence as they earn it over time, not before.

Four Negative Impacts of Phone Addiction

Technology is a tool; it is not inherently good or bad. To keep it in a healthy place in our lives requires skillful use. Unlike passing trends that scared parents over the years, research shows poorly monitored screen time bluntly impacts kids for the worse. (Rock and roll was never shown to affect child development in any real way; it isn’t evil, as it turns out.) Well moderated activities may augment learning, but hundreds of studies show that when devices drive their own use, consequences follow. A few examples include:

• Short- and long-term attention and executive function suffer. Laser-like attention towards a screen is an illusion; kids remain engaged because their attention constantly, actively shifts. That’s why it’s fun. Increased time in front of screens has been linked to long-term worsening of focus. Short-term use—like playing games on the school bus—has been linked to immediate decreases in executive function.

• Sleep becomes disrupted. Studies show we all benefit from at least an hour without screens prior to bed. If you’re someone who falls asleep with the TV, you’re distracting yourself from restlessness but probably not helping yourself fall asleep.

• Screen time can interfere with language, communication, and other forms of social engagement. Background television in homes has been linked to shorter social interactions. Even just having a phone on the table in a conversation has been shown disruptive. “Educational” DVDs used in one study not only failed to work—they caused language development to slow. Particularly in younger children, screen time should be an opportunity to engage, not disengage, with others.

• Screen time breeds behavioral difficulties. One study showed nothing more than cutting inappropriate media content in preschool homes leads to better school behavior. In another, violent video games in teens were shown to decrease activity in parts of the brain that respond to violence. Of course, not every child playing video games gets swayed, but over any group of children there seems to be an influence.

Mindful Screen Management

Mindfulness means living life with more awareness and less reactive habit. For a parent, that means not trying for perfection but taking the time to monitor and readjust often. As children need our guidance around any other area of health, they need it with technology. If there’s one takeaway point around the entire body of technology research it is this: Strong parental involvement moderating screen time in and of itself correlates with academic, behavioral, and social success.

Strong parental involvement moderating screen time in and of itself correlates with academic, behavioral, and social success.

Staying involved means pushing back against mindless screen habits. The role screens play in life is driven by buckets of research and advertising dollars, an industry itching to make more and more money. Wherever technology helps, educates, or entertains in a balanced way, that’s perfect. When its use is driven by boredom, fear, or compulsion, mindfulness means pausing and redirecting our behavior.

Nothing much has changed through the years about how children develop or the role of parents. You wouldn’t let a child eat chocolate cake at every meal and you wouldn’t let them drive recklessly. By the same token, you can’t let them use screens without limits. Parenting in the digital age means the same thing as in the stone age: Children require affection, firm limit setting, and a mindful, aware, clear-sighted approach to guiding them, from sticks and stones through television and smartphones.

Six Ways to Be Mindful with Your Tech as a Family

Some basic family guidelines for screen time include …

• Start with yourself. Children learn an awful lot just from watching their parents, and 70 percent of today’s kids feel their parents are on their screens too much. When you’re with your kids, try to put down your device and pay attention to your family. You are the first role model for screen use.

• Parents decide how much. For all the debate about how much time is healthy, it comes down to parents prioritizing what they want to prioritize. Take a daily calendar, and fill in everything you value first. Start with bedtime, school hours, homework, reading, exercise, outdoor time, after-school activities, and down time for open-ended play. Whatever is left after that exercise is the maximum available time for screens, without exceeding the AAP guidelines. (An online tool to figure this out is available here). Another trick is to ask yourself: What percentage of unscheduled down time goes directly to a screen?

What percentage of unscheduled down time goes directly to a screen?

• Parents decide when. Set guidelines around homework, meals, and a screen bedtime. Use allotted times wisely, scheduling so you can get what you need done around the house. Teach courtesy and manners too—meaning, when there’s an actual person around we pay attention to that person. One practice to stay engaged with others is taking a deep breath first when the phone rings or vibrates, pausing before deciding if it needs immediate attention.

• Parents monitor content. The Internet can be an incredible, healthy, helpful source of information for curious kids. It also can expose them to much that is developmentally inappropriate. A handful of games may educate, plenty more clearly do not. Sites such as a Common Sense Media provide unbiased information for parents about what is age appropriate around various games, shows, and movies. Keep computers and screens out of bedrooms so you know what your kids are doing. Use content filters, teach healthy use, and keep an eye on overall habits. Aim to stay a wise, involved parent.

• Remember that screens are a privilege, not a right. In generations past, kids used the family car responsibly and kept to curfew, or else there were consequences. Technology is no different. If children don’t follow family rules, there’s nothing wrong with a similar result—you’ve lost the privilege of your phone for the weekend. To disconnect for a time won’t destroy their social lives any more than getting grounded did all those years ago.

• Make active choices. Awareness is the core of mindfulness, stepping from autopilot into active decision-making. For example, a trend has grown to give every middle school student a smartphone, although most parents realize how disruptive they often are at that age. Most experts think high school a better time for a smartphone, but the trend lives on. Around that choice or any other, pause, note what’s driving your experience, and then decide what you think best.

This article originally appeared on The Garrison Institute, one of Mindful’s partners. See the original article.

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