Discovery

By Nate Klemp

I’ve come to a sobering realization when it comes to my meditation practice: I will never be an elite meditator.  

And that has led me to rethink the basic nature of mindfulness practice.

Here’s the context. In Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson’s latest book Altered Traits, which brings together the most cutting edge scientific research on the benefits of meditation, they conclude that the benefits of meditation are a function of the...

By Due Quach

1. Accept that anxiety is biological

The first step in managing anxiety in a healthier manner is to make peace with the fact that having anxiety is natural and normal. According to evolutionary psychology, human psychological traits like anxiety exist because they serve a function. Anxiety signals that we believe the outcome of a situation in which there are factors beyond our control, is very important to our survival, social status, happiness, or well-being. Anxiety is the...

By Rhonda Magee

What we call the self is shaped by the cultures in which we live. And because race is a cultural feature of societies built on racism, notions of self include notions of race. The racialized self is produced by and helps reproduce racism in our cultures. Mindfulness helps us understand and expand our notions of race. And yet, talking about race and racism and examining these through the lens of mindfulness is uncommon. This is not to say that it is not being done at all. But...

By Mo Edjlali 

I've recently have had a great many questions spurred on by some of the critics of what is happening with Mindfulness. My conversations with folks like Professor Ron Purser, Professor Candy Brown, Assistant Professor Jaime Kucinskas, Professor David Forbes, and independent scholar Glenn Wallis have me thirsty for more intellectual debate. When it comes to mindfulness & meditation where can we find good debate and discussion? Have we created a tone that welcomes...

By Ronald Purser

Mindfulness helps people face pain with equanimity. But it also conditions us to think about stress in unhelpful ways. First, it says we face an epidemic, which is simply an inevitable part of modern life. Second, since stress is endemic, it is up to us all to get it under control and adapt to these conditions as best we can. It sounds like an empowering tool, but it ignores any source of pain outside our heads, such as the capitalist system, which exerts so much pressure in...

By Mark Mitchnick 

Long before any of the neuroscience was known, Winston Churchill said, “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.” Although he didn’t know it, Mr. Churchill was actually describing the two separate yet conjoined systems operating in our heads. 

Over the past 15 years, what these two systems look like and how they function has been described in both scientific and general publications. Together, they inform the understanding of our...

By David Treleaven

A few months ago, a colleague who taught meditation in corporate settings asked for my advice.

A woman in one of his programs had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, and she was now experiencing symptoms of traumatic stress. When she’d meditate, images and sensations would flood her field of consciousness, leaving her more rattled than before.

“Should I keep meditating?” she’d asked him. “I want to work with my stress, but...

By Karlie Kramer

Have you ever felt mentally drained after a long meeting or taxing workday? That’s because you’ve probably made anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 decisions, switching tasks over 300 times during the workday — and your brain is exhausted. This is called decision fatigue, and it’s responsible for the decline in focus and willpower that affects millions of Americans daily.

 The phenomenon was first discovered by social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister,...

By Ginny Whitelaw

Imagine you’re opening a large, cardboard box. Those of you who remember Wylie Coyote from vintage Road Runner cartoons can see ACME written on the side. This box contains a magnificent contraption: a Universal Energy Concentrator.  As advertised, it can turn vision into reality, ideas into actions; YES, it can actually turn energy into things that matter. You can’t wait to try it out, but you can’t figure out how to get it working. You see a few...

By Regina Leeds

You can ignore your physical space, but you can’t hide the story it tells. Like a friend with loose lips, your environment reveals all. Some people try and fake it. The public rooms, for example, present a story of perfection only to be betrayed by total chaos in the bedroom. Others hide their detritus behind closet doors, under beds, and in drawers already bursting at the seams.  The greater the chaos, the deeper the emotional wound. A college student whose parents...