Mindfulness

Thanksgiving: A Time to Appreciate the Richness of Our Lives

Gratitude, Mindfulness / By / 4 minutes of reading

Thanksgiving is the beginning of the holiday season and a time to stop, take stock and say thank you for all the gifts we have been given. It is a time to reflect on the abundance that surrounds us and the people that give our lives meaning. So, Why Is It So Hard Sometimes? But, often this is also a time when we feel overextended and under-resourced and balancing the many demands in our lives can feel more like drudgery than joy. Our natural tendency is to see what isn’t working and where we are not being enough or doing […]

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Care for Yourself This Holiday Season by Asking: What Do I Really Need?

Body Awareness, Mindful Eating, Mindfulness, Self-Compassion / By / 4 minutes of reading

I teach what I need. When I teach mindful eating, I often say mindful eating is a lifetime practice. That may feel daunting to hear, but my personal experience tells me that it’s true.  At this time of year, my mindful eating practice always requires some extra care and attention.  Amongst my family and close friends, there are 10 birthdays to celebrate within a few months and preceding and after the prime holiday season. Mindful eating is the practice of returning to the experience of tasting, savoring, breathing, and resting, over and over. Practicing mindful eating helps me to focus

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The Habit Loop: How it Can Lead to Mindless Eating

Habits, Mindful Eating, Mindfulness / By / 4 minutes of reading

Mindful eaters don’t eat mindfully all of the time. Cereal has always been a favorite food of mine.  Somewhere along the way, I created a habit of eating a small bowl of dry cereal with my morning coffee. I would brew coffee, pour cereal then munch and drink while watching the morning news.  I enjoyed the combination of bitter coffee and sweet and crunchy cereal. Many times, I asked myself if there was any harm in my habit?   I was aware I  wasn’t being that mindful, yet  I didn’t see any significant consequences.  Over time though as I continued

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Parenting is Hard: Mindfulness to the Rescue

Children & Youth, Mindfulness, Parenting / By / 2 minutes of reading

Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn.” Elizabeth Lawrence By now we have settled into the school year, established our routines, and maybe even had a bit of time to relax and soak in the beauty of fall. Fall is one of my favorite seasons. The warm air is balanced with a bit of coolness. Temperatures begin to drop drastically at night and rise quickly during the day. Our days become shorter and a general softness settles in. The leaves turn brilliant colors, eventually falling and becoming crisp and fluffy. Mother Nature is preparing to rest and

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Gratitude: A Training Ground for Happiness

Gratitude, Mindfulness, Resilience / By / 4 minutes of reading

Gratitude: a feeling of appreciation or thankfulness. “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. It turns problems into gifts and failures into successes. It can turn an existence into a real life, and disconnected situations into important and beneficial lessons. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” – Melody Beattie “The Scarcity Loop” Sometimes

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Move Your Body Change Your Brain

Body Awareness, Exercise, Mindfulness, Resilience / By / 5 minutes of reading

Your brain is constantly remodeling itself. When you learn to play the guitar or expand your vocabulary, you physically alter your brain. When you meditate, you stimulate the executive parts of the brain to get bigger, and the anxiety parts to get smaller. In brain-speak, this is called neuroplasticity and there is powerful science to back it up. When I tell my mindfulness students about the research into brain science, they are excited that they are doing something positive and proven. When I first started meditating, we had no idea that meditation was changing the brain, just stories that said

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Too Busy to Meditate? – Try This

Habits, Mindfulness, Self-Compassion / By / 4 minutes of reading

I started out great! I was beginning to see the actual benefits of my practice…but then I got busy. My lapse in practice started with one day when I didn’t have time. Then, the next day it was really easy to say, “I broke my streak, I’m still busy, and I’ll get back to it tomorrow.” Then the next day, it was, “One more day won’t matter.” That was two months ago, and now whenever I think about meditating, I just feel guilty. How can something that was beginning to make a real difference in my life become so dispensable?

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8 Simple Mindfulness Practices to Weave Into Your Day

Body Awareness, Mindfulness, Self-Compassion / By / 3 minutes of reading

Although I know that meditation calms my mind and makes me feel more confident and spacious, I can’t always fit a formal practice into my day. Knowing what’s good for me and doing it are often two different things.  I’ve experienced the profound healing that formal meditation practices can provide. These practices helped me through the anxiety and depression that were constant parts of my existence. At that time in my life, yoga and meditation were my medicine, and it was critical to take that time just for me. Some would say that these daily practices are the bedrock of

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Benefits and Pitfalls of Mind Wandering

Body Awareness, Mindfulness, Relationships, Self-Compassion / By / 4 minutes of reading

Moving Through Life on Auto-pilot Have you ever gotten into your car driven someplace, gotten out of your car, and had no idea what happened in between? Or, sat down to read a book and at the end of the page realized that you had no idea what you had just read? These are two examples of how we check out on our lives, how we can be there and yet not be there at all. Another word for this is mind-wandering, and researchers have found that our minds wander nearly half the time. The Benefits of Mind-Wandering The idea

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The Practice of Welcoming: Well-Being Series

Body Awareness, Mindfulness, Self-Compassion / By / 4 minutes of reading

“Welcoming…means opening the door to everything we experience-turning nothing away-and learning how to authentically meet our own experience in each moment.” Kelly Boys But I don’t want it to be this way, you say. I want things to unfold according to plan! I hate this! That is natural, we all want to be happy and fulfilled. So, as often as not we refuse our experience. We create a story in our heads about our inability to handle that thing whatever that thing is. How we’re not smart enough or strong enough to find a solution. We look the other way

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