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Exercises / Practices
5 Steps to Cultivate Supportive Inner Dialogue
By Georgina Miranda
Photo courtesy of the author.
The alarm clock goes off and it’s time to start a new day. Those first initial thoughts and words that run through your mind will play a factor in how your day carries on. Just like those parting thoughts and words before you dozed off to sleep the night prior likely had an impact on the quality of your night's rest. Are you waking up to and going to sleep with a critic or a friend each day? It can be easy to run though the daily motions of lif…
How We Can Change... Or Stay the Same
By Joy Reichart, New Ventures West
Cyd is the person in the office who is always fixing everything: the broken printer, the scheduling snafu, the delivery gone awry. They see things that are invisible to most: the bump in the ceiling that could become a leak; the fact that you’re halfway through the second-to-last jug of water and haven’t placed the next order yet. They have the answer to everyone’s mystifying computer issues (or if they don’t, they’ll find out). Whether or not this is in their…
Body-Centered Speaking and Listening
By Joy Reichart, New Ventures West
In Integral Coaching we often talk about the three centers of intelligence: head, heart, and body.* Useful across all areas of coaching, they are particularly interesting to explore in the realm of speaking and listening.
Recently, I had the opportunity to spend several days with a group of highly experienced Integral Coaches, observing how they interacted with each other as they explored issues that were both deeply personal and globally impactful. And in s…
Practice: Uncovering Your Natural Awareness
NOTE: Diana Winston will be hosting a Mindful Leader Expert Workshop, Refine and Expand your Meditation Practice: Practicing Mindfulness Across the Spectrum of Awareness, on June 4th. Click here to learn more.
By Diana Winston
Awareness is a capacity of the human mind. Awareness is the ability to directly know and to perceive, sense, feel, or be cognizant of experience. We might think of awareness simply as the state of being conscious of something.
Every living being is aware. We usually do…
5 Ways to Restore Mental Wellness during COVID
NOTE: Dr. Elisha Goldstein will be hosting a Mindful Leader Expert Workshop, Moving from Fear to Empowerment, on May 7th. Click here to learn more.
By Dr. Elisha Goldstein
In the past year of Covid-19 mental wellness for many of us has gone out the window entirely. If you're experiencing that you're not alone. It used to be that 1 in 12 people suffered from symptoms of an anxiety disorder and this last year the CDC found it was 1 in 3. I say this just to give you a sense that you’re not alone…
How to Use Music in Your Mindfulness Practice
By Joy Reichart, New Ventures West
When I was a student in the Professional Coaching Course some years ago, I found myself sobbing deeply one morning as my classmates and I listened to “Father and Son” by Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens.
I couldn’t explain why this was happening… only that something about the combination of voice, melody, and words touched my soul in a particular way. The song found a spot in me that needed release.
A decade later I can recognize that the song brought forth for me …
9 Mindfulness Exercises to Help you Manage COVID Stress
By Amy Rigby
Mindfulness exercises are the gold standard for managing COVID stress for a reason.
53% of adults in the U.S. say their mental health has worsened because of Covid-related stress and worry.From the pandemic that brought you the terms “social distancing” and “Zoom fatigue,” here’s another one to add to your vocabulary: Covid stress. Google Trends shows that searches for the term were nonexistent in February, peaked at the end of March, fell at the start of summer and were again…
Strengthen Self-Observation with this Journaling Practice
By Joy Reichart, New Ventures West
An effective use of the mind
Part of what makes the Integral Coaching methodology effective is its focus on somatics: awareness of what is happening in the body, and physical practices that support clients in building the body of someone who has the qualities or competencies they wish to develop (e.g., receptivity, relationality, humility, power, etc.)
In part we pay so much attention to the body because of the automatic and over-developed nature of cognitio…
Kindfulness-Based Stress Reduction — KBSR?
View our Free Guide - What is MBSR?
By Cassie Schindler
Right there, in the foreword of Jon-Kabat Zinn’s powerful book, Mindfulness for All; The Wisdom to Transform the World, he coins the word kindfulness, knowing that someone would pick it up, and expand, rather than exploit, its relevance. I hope to do that with this writing.
If the name of the 8-week MBSR course began with the word kindfulness instead of mindfulness, would you register? Would you have a clear understanding of that w…
An Unexpected Gift from Taking MBSR
View our Free Guide - What is MBSR?
By Karyn Sandelman
There were many things that attracted me to this particular path when I made the commitment to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) years ago. First was my determination to share mindfulness—the practice that has been a steady, positive force of growth in my life for nearly 25 years. Beyond that, I was (and still am) committed to making mindfulness accessible to as many people as possible. MBSR, with its inclusive approach, …