Resilience

How Do You Care for Your Mind?

Mindfulness, Recovery & Healing, Resilience / By / 5 minutes of reading

And an update on our mission In January 12’s newsletter, we shared the recent Ten Percent Happier podcast interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. My takeaway from the discussion is that the single most important thing we can each do at this moment of great personal, political, and global turmoil, is take care of our minds.  Practicing mindfulness helps us notice our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, which creates the foundation necessary to objectively examine our biases, discomforts, and the values and judgments we’ve inherited from others rather than consciously formed for ourselves.  Yes, I agree; […]

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Not Another Zoom Call!

Mindful Eating, Mindfulness, Resilience, Self-Compassion / By / 3 minutes of reading

We’ve all gone through a year+ now with video meetings taking the place of in-person connection. And Zoom fatigue is real.  Yet, we’d like to invite you to our upcoming online multi-week classes, or our free introductory classes two weeks before.  We get it: The last thing most people want to take on these days is one more Zoom call.  But while most video conferences on your schedule are asking for a chunk of your time, energy, or input, our online classes are meant to help you add some peace, balance, and restoration to multiple areas of your life!  Overcoming

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Can Mindfulness Make Us More Socially Engaged?

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

There’s a fair amount of criticism about how practicing mindfulness is a selfish endeavor. The assumption is that by taking time for classes or retreats, quietly reflecting on my inner state, and choosing to minimize distractions or “noise”, that I will become overly focused on myself at the expense of the very real local and world issues surrounding me. To that I say: Perhaps, but there’s much, much more to the story. Harmful vs. Noble Selfishness For most of my life, I have strived to be considered a success; to be “enough”. This meant being hyper-fixated on my outward appearance,

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Why Silence Scares Us

Mindfulness, Resilience / By / 4 minutes of reading

Like many people, you might hear about mindfulness and meditation and think, “Silence? Slowing down? That’s just not for me.” In our on-the-go, productivity-and-achievement-minded culture, the thought of sitting still, or embracing silence, can seem like the opposite of what will help us make progress in our lives. Yet if we don’t take time to slow down and zoom out from our day-to-day habits, our lives might start to live us in a way that eventually makes it hard for us to recognize ourselves! A result of our achievement-oriented culture is that many people fear or avoid slowing down and

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You’re Stronger Than You Think

Resilience / By / 4 minutes of reading

I’ve been contemplating resilience in adversity a lot lately. We’ve been forced into a position where we can either fold to the insurmountable obstacles in our path or reach deep down inside and find the reserves to climb out of the hole. This pandemic has pushed us all into a place of discomfort and uncertainty, and the question we must ask is how are we going to respond? Because as we are continually reminded, we don’t get to choose our circumstances, but we do get to choose where we go from here.  Where it All Began When I was younger,

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The Wisdom of a Broken Heart

Relationships, Resilience / By / 2 minutes of reading

A poem by Jeni Juarez What saddens me the most about the current state of the world is how people everywhere are becoming so paralyzed by fear; that they are struggling so much to access their emotional resilience—their unarmed heart. It is this turning away from—this armored heart—that keeps us separated, alienated from one another; unable to feel the warmth, the magnificence of a heart-to-heart connection. What encourages me the most about the current state of the world is how people everywhere are becoming so paralyzed by fear. Because my deeper wisdom tells me that suffering is Grace. It forces

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Spiritual Bypassing in the Time of COVID-19

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

by Susan Duesbery, as originally posted in Elephant Journal The other day I was speaking with a woman who told me that she was “excited” about the positive changes the coronavirus was already ushering in. She went on to express the hope that a new world order based on love would replace current systems based on corruption and greed. After she spoke these words, I realized that I’d seen a lot of similar comments on social media lately. In many ways, I couldn’t agree more with such remarks. But there are two sides to this coin, and to ignore one

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The Practices That Sustain Us, Part II

Mindful Communication, Mindfulness, Resilience, Self-Compassion, Yoga / By / 6 minutes of reading

We’re now in the third week since a State of Emergency was declared in Michigan due to the Coronavirus. Our lives have changed drastically within a short amount of time. It’s okay to acknowledge that this is really hard.   As a follow-up to last week’s blog post, we’d like to share more on how GRCFM team members have been meeting their difficult experiences snce the impact of the pandemic began sinking in, and what practices have been important to us in these challenging times.   We hope our stories give you comfort in knowing you’re not alone in what

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The Practices That Sustain Us

Mindful Communication, Mindfulness, Resilience, Self-Compassion, Yoga / By / 6 minutes of reading

As a Center focused on teaching mindfulness, resilience, and self-compassion, we are in the business of supporting our community during the challenging times of life. Each of us has had a personal experience of the transformative power of mindfulness practice, and so we offer it outwardly as a gift with reverence and longing to help. Just like all human beings, we experience fear, anger, grief, and sadness, and it is our continued practice that sustains us. These are unsettling times, and we are all looking for some ground to stand on. We’d like to take a moment to share with

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Resilience During COVID-19

Mindfulness, Resilience / By / 4 minutes of reading

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.” —M. Scott Peck The Coronavirus pandemic has shuttered schools, closed restaurants, canceled events, disrupted travel, and changed our lives in both small and dramatic ways. We are truly in uncharted waters as we try to navigate the choppy waters of uncertainty and change.   Please know that we are

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