Table of contents for December 2015 in Mindful

11 ways to take time for what matters 1 Eat Slightly Slower With the speed at which we do most things today, eating can easily become just another thing to cross off your to-do list. The next time you eat, try slowing down—you’ll pull more enjoyment out of your food, feel more satisfied, and your digestive system will thank you. 2 Honor the Elements Every piece of food we eat has its own rich origin story, which we usually don’t think about. Next time you sit down for a meal, take a moment to acknowledge everything that went into the food on your plate. Consider the people who made it, bought the ingredients, stocked the store shelves, delivered it, harvested it, and all the natural elements of sun, rain, soil,…

Consider these two experiences: It’s a crisp early autumn day as you begin walking through the woods, sensing fall in the coolness of the air on your face. You see the play of light and shade as the sun shines through the leaves swaying in the breeze. You feel the weight of your body on your feet as you walk along the path, and feel the beating of your heart as the path inclines up a hill. You hear the chirp of the birds, the sound of the season’s last cicadas, and the distant rumble of a truck. Thoughts of daily life come and go, but don’t interfere with your enjoyment of the simple pleasure of a walk in the woods. Nothing special, yet you feel alive and present, open…

I love to watch people touch the ones they love. When I witnessed the birth of my beloved friends’ daughter, the most poignant moment was watching the first-time father tear his shirt off and hold the minutes-old infant to his bare, receptive chest. Skin on skin, heart to heart. At our best, we intuitively use touch to span the distance between us. Two separate bodies and minds, me and you, become an “us” when we embrace. That which is broken—a promise, a skinned knee, even a heart—is coaxed toward fullness again in the incubator of a loved one’s arms. Since touching each other brings a multitude of emotional, physical, and social health benefits you’d think we’d be cuddling all the time. Yet our culture is touch-deprived. One study noted that…

Before Bring awareness to the habit that you want to change and think about the situations or conditions that trigger the habit. Are there actions you can take to avoid acting out the habit? What might be an alternative, healthier choice? For example, if you frequently snack on sweets when you’re feeling anxious, uncertain, confused, or lonely, ensure that you don’t have sweets in the house. Purchase healthier foods, such as nuts or fruit, to be on hand when a wish to have a snack arises. During Work with the trigger, urge, or craving to act in a habitual way: Pay attention to the context or environment in which the habit typically arises—the place, time, people, sights, sounds, smells. When you first become aware of an urge to act, pause,…

1 Is there a wrong way to meditate? A right way to meditate? People think they’re messing up when they’re meditating because of how busy the mind is. We get caught in the trap of thinking that meditation is supposed to be giving us a whole new magical device, like they sell on late night television: “Get NewBrain. It’s does all the thinking for you, except better!” But, nope, it’s just the good ol’ human nervous system and brain. So, when we find that meditation acquaints us further with our same old brain and its same old ways, we’re convinced we must be doing it wrong. We want that shiny new thing. Getting lost in thought, noticing it, and returning to your chosen meditation object—breath, sound, body sensation, or something…

Have you ever sent an email and immediately wanted to take it back? Who hasn’t! We can churn out emails at such lightening speed, it’s easy to write something that accidentally offends someone or is easily misunderstood. Emailing feels almost like a conversation, but we lack the emotional signs and social cues of face-to-face or phone interactions. If there’s any challenging content to convey—and if you’re sending it out to more than one person—it’s easy for problems to arise. Also, when we senselessly send too many messages to too many people, it clogs up everyone’s inboxes. Some companies are taking steps to encourage more conscious emailing, and asking people to try a routine like this for important email messages. 1 Compose an email. (Try using the Enter key more. Shorter…

So you started meditating—perhaps you completed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course—and you sat there on your shiny new cushion that you just bought, convinced that practicing meditation was going to finally do what nothing else had. It just made sense: letting go of the seeming unending judgmental activity of your mind and dropping down into a more purposeful and balanced life of equanimity and loving-kindness. You were set. You found a way to carve out time in your crazy schedule to just sit and watch your breath. And off you went. Watching the in-breath and the out-breath. Seeing thoughts arise and simply noting them arising, dropping back into the breath when you found yourself caught up in thinking. Working mindfully with difficult emotions that periodically oozed in. Faithfully (and a…

Meditation reduced violence and dropout rates among Chicago youth Becoming A Man, a youth dropout and violence prevention program run by Chicago organization Youth Guidance, adds to the proof that meditation has a role to play in social change. Researchers from the University of Chicago recently invited 1,473 students to get involved with BAM activities and compared them to a control group. The program, which works with at-risk male students in grades 7-12, encourages “positive anger expression” through exercises including breathing and meditation training, conflict resolution, and social and emotional recognition. The university study found that BAM participants were 44% less likely to commit violent crimes, and their academic performance was significantly better, compared with those who didn’t participate. “Often I begin dynamic mindful yoga classes by saying, ‘First of…

If only global warming were caused by ISIS declaring a “weather war” on the west, perhaps by gleefully releasing 18 tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every day and gloating when droughts, deluges, heat waves, killer storms, wildfires, or floods ensued. That might incite more people to get upset about it. In fact, global warming is increasing the frequency and severity of all those events, as well as raising sea levels. But it comes from something quite different from an evil-looking terrorist. The sources—such as power plants, vehicles, farms, and factories—are impersonal and invisible, and close to home—the way we use energy, not the machinations of a foreigner. Faced with a threat with these attributes, the brain reacts with an unimpressed meh: Our minds evolved to detect and respond…

Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” As she suggested, we search for the hidden kernel of meaning in the shifting phantasmagoria that is our life so we can make sense of what is so often senseless—random gunfire that takes the life of an innocent child, an earthquake that kills thousands, a medical diagnosis that rocks us to our core. But sometimes our stories become fixed, frozen, unchanging—even when change is both possible and desirable—especially the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Here’s a story that until very recently I told myself about the insomnia that has plagued me for 30 years: “My body doesn’t know how to sleep. There’s obviously something very wrong with me. The only way I can fall…

Your cat’s paws cross and rest gently on your bedroom floor, soft light refracting each hair. Rust caked on an old nail bleeds streaks of deep orange-red into the dry, split wood of an ocean dock. A garbage pile, glistening in the sun, strikes you with its off-putting-yet-captivating sliminess. So, you grab a camera. Click. Photography, like meditation, can be a mindfulness practice. Like following your breath, the camera can become an anchor—a gentle reminder to notice your perceptions, without letting the filters you put between what you’re seeing and what you’re thinking carry you away from the present. When you take in your surroundings, camera in hand (or in mind), your eyes open up to the textures and forms and colors that make up our world. Not all photographers…