Tuesday 30 December 2014

A Mindful Minute: 3 Fun Mindfulness Exercises For Kids (Illustrated)

By

Remember, mindfulness takes training. The goal is to train your mind to observe your thoughts and feelings without judgement or criticism. In this, you can cut out habitual, negative thought patterns and prevent downward spirals of negativity. You further carve a path to access expansive inner resources of peace, contentment, meaning, and well-being.
If you want to go deeper with your learning, there are many good on and offline materials available. In fact, one of the best books I’ve read on the subject is Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World.
This post (and the ones to follow) will primarily deliver fun and simple exercises you can practice with the family. One goal of these exercises is to train the mind to purposefully focus attention on a present experience. Try them in the morning, before bed, or at my favorite place/time: the dinner table right before you eat.

1. Breathe like a bee.

Mindfulness GoZen Exercise
Mindfulness Exercise Bee Breathing GoZen

2. Create magnetic hands.

mindfulness_37_phil_hands_061714
GoZen Mindfulness Cards Exercise

3. Dissolve a thought.

Mindfulness to help anxious thoughts - GoZen
You are not your thoughts GoZen Mindfulness exercise
 

Renee Jain is an award-winning tech entrepreneur turned speaker and certified life coach. She specializes in cultivating skills of resilience in both adults and children. Renee's passion is taking research-based concepts and transforming them into engaging and digestible learning modules. For children, she has created one-of-a-kind programs, GoStrengths! and GoZen!, to teach life skills via digital animation.

Source: 



Saturday 15 November 2014

Mindful Living Everyday



An orientation to practicing in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Produced by David Nelson



Monday 10 November 2014

The Benefits of Mindfulness

by Sarah Rudell Beach


Why Practice Mindfulness-

The modern mindful life, according to my new tagline, is informed by research and grounded in practice. It is absolutely astounding how much research has been conducted in the last decade on mindfulness and meditation and all the amazing ways it can transform our brains, and our lives.
Much of the research on mindfulness and meditation reveals the amazing neuroplasticity of our brains — while we used to think that our brains stopped developing in our early twenties, we now know that our experiences can shape our neural development well into our sixties and beyond. The more we exercise a particular neural pathway in the brain, the more we strengthen it. In the cute phrase neuroscientists use, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

For example, a study of London cab drivers revealed that they had larger-than-average hippocampuses (hippocampi?). The hippocampus plays an important role in memory — and the researchers concluded that all of the spatial memories the cabbies created while driving through one of the world’s largest cities actually increased the area in their brains devoted to making new memories.

Recent studies indicate that as little as 12 minutes of meditation a day, over an 8-week period, is enough to create changes in the brain! Read on for a summary of some of the most amazing findings in meditation research:

Physical Benefits

  • Meditation practice has been demonstrated to increase immune function – in one study, people who meditated produced more antibodies to the flu vaccine than people who didn’t meditate (which makes me excited because I just got a flu shot yesterday!)
  • Meditation is also linked to an increase in telomerase (at the end of our genes), which can possibly reduce cell damage in the body.
  • Mindfulness, including eating mindfully, has been linked to weight loss.
  • In one study, participants who practiced meditation lowered their blood pressure and cut their heart attack risk in half over five years.
  • Meditation reduces levels of the hormone cortisol (which raises blood pressure and levels of stress).
  • Taking a few deep breaths engages our parasympathetic nervous system (our “rest and digest” mode), and deactivates our sympathetic nervous system (our “fight, flight, or freeze” mode).

Mental Benefits

Emotional Benefits

  • Mindfulness and meditation practices have been extensively linked to easing symptoms of depression and anxiety, and these techniques are used in many therapy settings.
  • A 2007 study of students who had been taught meditation techniques revealed a decrease in test anxiety, nervousness, and self-doubt, and an increase in focus and concentration. Further studies have shown reduced absenteeism and suspensions in schools where mindfulness programs have been implemented.
  • Mindfulness and meditation help us learn to turn off the negative self-talk or rumination that our minds often resort to when left on their own.
  • Meditation reduces our emotional reactivity.  One study found that mindful stress reduction practices actually decreased the size of people’s amygdala (responsible for our aggression, anxiety, and fear — an overactive amygdala is associated with depression).
  • These practices can make us more compassionate.  People who meditate show more activation in the area of the brain associated with empathy when they are exposed to someone who is suffering.

The Anecdotal Evidence

This information is impressive, but is also very clinical. I want to end with some personal stories about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation.

I love this post from Michelle Noehren of CTWorkingMoms, What I Know About Motherhood Now That I Practice Meditation. Michelle writes, “I’ve experienced a dramatic drop in my anxiety level and I feel like I’ve healed some relationships in my life that were difficult, not because the other person changed anything, but because I now fully understand that I have the ability to change situations solely based upon the way I think.”

Meditation 

I have shared with you my experiences with postpartum depression and anxiety. In addition to seeking professional help, I have greatly benefited from practicing mindfulness and meditation. I am a lot calmer than I used to be in dealing with my children, often responding now with compassion and a hug, rather than reacting with anger. Practicing mindfulness has indeed made me a better parent.

It has also helped me in overcoming my depression. The first time I read about rumination {the negative self-talk often associated with depression} I was shocked to see it listed as a symptom of depression. I thought everyone did that! If we had a bad morning getting ready for school, my 20-minute drive to work was filled with thoughts of what a terrible mother I was, worrying my life would never feel normal again with these two little children to take care of, and anticipating the continuation of the drama when picking them up after work and then starting over with mama-stress and dinner-time battles…. By the time I got to work I was emotionally exhausted, and found little joy in being a teacher or a mother.

Mindfulness and meditation have made me so much more aware of my thoughts, and how I can stop my mind from dwelling on the negative. I now realize my thoughts are just the stories I tell myself about my life, they are not my life itself. The emotions come and go, and I don’t need to waste my energy indulging anger, worry, or frustration. Mindfulness allows me to find the skillful response instead of jumping to an emotional reaction. I pay attention to the present moment and become aware of the good that’s always there, waiting to be seen.

As I have begun sharing this practice with colleagues, teachers, and students, many people have thanked me for teaching mindfulness. A common theme has emerged in all of the stories I hear from people who have discovered these techniques — almost always, they will say, “Mindfulness changed my life.”

I know it has changed my life. And that’s why I want to share it with all of you.


Source: http://leftbrainbuddha.com/living-a-mindful-life-why-practice-mindfulness/

On Mindfulness

by Sarah Rudell Beach

Human Experience and Mindfulness

Mindfulness is truly having its moment right now. It’s the Year of Mindful Living, the age of the Mindful Revolution. Mindfulness is branching out from clinical and therapeutic settings and entering classrooms and boardrooms, congressional offices, and military bases. Each day, scientific research confirms the physical, cognitive, and emotional benefits of a mindfulness practice.

The more ubiquitous mindfulness becomes, the more people begin to ask questions about it. And let me just say for the record, I think both of those are good things. I truly believe mindfulness has the power to transform our lives and our world. And I absolutely believe that questioning is a good thing — knowledge is power! Don’t jump on the bandwagon of a trend just because it’s on the cover of Time magazine and Kobe Bryant does it. As Immanuel Kant implored us to do centuries ago, “Dare to know!”

One of the most common questions raised about mindfulness is this:

Is mindfulness a religion?

Short Answer

No.

Long Answer

No.
{Just kidding. I’ll give you the long answer…}

Mindfulness can be defined in many ways — the definition I like is simple: compassionate and intentional awareness. Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention – to thoughts, physical sensations, and the environment — without constantly feeling the need to judge what’s happening or to make it other than it is. To cultivate this present moment awareness, we pay attention on purpose, with an attitude of kindness to ourselves and others.

Words like “meditation” and even “mindfulness” may make us think of berobed hippies or esoteric practices conducted in the mountaintops of Tibet, but mindfulness can be as simple as taking a few deep breaths before an important meeting, or bringing our full awareness to a moment spent with our children. Cultivating this compassionate and purposeful awareness allows us to be present for the important people in our lives, as our kind attention is the most loving gift we can offer.

Mindfulness is a way of being in the world. It is being present and available. It is a fundamental human capacity. You’ve probably experienced it before, whether you’ve labeled it as such or not. Think of a time when you were so engaged in an activity — creating a work of art, playing a sport, reading a good book — that your entire being focused on that one activity. That heightened state of attention is mindfulness.

In my training with Mindful Schools in July, program director Megan Cowan described mindfulness as “a human ability, that, when it is lacking, makes life more unbearable.” Mindfulness is a way of meeting our experience with the presence of mind to respond skillfully to life’s challenges, rather than reacting based on intense emotions. 

Mindfulness teaches us an awareness of the habits of our minds and allows us to catch ourselves in negative patterns of rumination. We may see that a good deal of our suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves about the events in our lives, rather than from the events themselves. This human practice of compassionate and intentional awareness requires no dogmatic or spiritual beliefs.

But doesn’t mindfulness have religious origins?

Mindfulness has its origins in contemplative practices that go back thousands of years, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Stoicism. Some of these are religious traditions, and some are not.
Virtually every spiritual tradition has practices for mindful contemplation and silence, and direct awareness of experience, such as Catholic centering prayer, Buddhist meditation, the Jewish Shabbat, or Sufi mysticism. Many secular philosophies incorporate these teachings as well. The Roman Stoic philosophers Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius advocated an approach to life that today we might label as mindfulness; Aurelius wrote, “Our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.”

And when it comes to compassion, well, there’s a reason they call it The Golden Rule. No tradition has a monopoly on empathy and love and kindness. Educator Daniel Rechtschaffen sums it up this way: “Mindfulness does not belong to Christianity, Buddhism, or Taoism, just as the breath we inhale and exhale does not belong to any one of us.”

The fact that so many of our traditions — religious and secular, spiritual and philosophical — come back to these fundamental practices of compassion and awareness suggests that mindfulness is simply part of the human experience. As Daniel Rechtschaffen writes, “Everywhere human beings have lived, we have needed to cultivate attention; whether it was for hunting, fashioning tools or clothes, or intellectual pursuits. We have always needed compassion to live in harmony and enjoy our lives.”
Cultivate Attention

The mindfulness that is taught today in hospitals, clinics, schools, military bases, and corporations is based primarily on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn (a physician at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center) in the late 1970s. He created MBSR to treat patients who suffered from chronic pain, and hadn’t responded to traditional treatments. He developed MBSR based on his knowledge of meditation and yoga, but he stripped them entirely of their metaphysical and spiritual components. Most amazingly, he found that simply teaching people meditation and mindfulness helped relieve their physical pain!

MBSR courses today (there are thousands of them across the US) teach basic meditation practices such as body scans and breath awareness, as well as gentle yoga and movement exercises. They are completely secular — they are essentially teaching life skills for coping with the human experience. 

Mindfulness has become a core component of many mental health therapies today, including Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Corporations like Google and General Mills teach mindfulness classes to their employees, and incorporate meditation into the workday.

Many people around the world — Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, and atheist — have begun to practice mindfulness simply as a way to live happier lives. (ABC news anchor Dan Harris suggests mindfulness can make you 10% Happier). In A Mindful Nation, Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan writes, “Mindfulness itself is not a religion. Practicing it does not require giving up religious faith, or adopting a ‘foreign’ faith, or becoming religious if you are not so inclined.”

But CAN mindfulness be a spiritual practice?

Yes, if you choose to make it so. And for that matter, you can make a spiritual practice of gardening and walking and singing and dancing and reading poetry and washing the dishes.

Does it HAVE to be a spiritual practice?

No. (Back to that short answer again!)
I’ll leave you with the following analogy:
Yoga originated as a practice in the Indian traditions that became part of Hinduism. You can go to yoga classes today that are very woo-woo, with chanting and om-ing, and an instructor who talks about finding your heart center and connecting to the ground of being and the divine within. Or you can go to a yoga class at your local gym where they make you use weights and do cardio intervals and play hip-hop music and you sweat and drip all over your mat during Down Dog.
Sometimes a workout is just a workout.
Silence can just be silence, attention can just be attention.
It will all work out.
Sarah is a writer, teacher, and mother. At Left Brain Buddha, she writes about her journey to live and parent mindfully, joyfully, and thought-fully in her left-brain analytical life. When not working, she enjoys dancing, reading, and hanging out with her little Buddhas.


Source: http://leftbrainbuddha.com/is-mindfulness-a-religion

Sunday 20 July 2014

Mindfulness and Compassion

Compassion is the feeling of concern that arises when we encounter pain and suffering, our own as well as others. It involves the motivation to relieve this suffering and is natural in everyone but for many reasons often not cultivated. One can feel compassion without acting on it.

While cynics may dismiss compassion as touchy-feely or illogical, scientists are now mapping the biological basis of compassion, suggesting its deep evolutionary purpose. Research shows that when we feel compassion, our heart rate slows down, we secrete the “bonding hormone” oxytocin, and regions of our brain linked to empathy, caregiving, and feelings of pleasure light up, which can result in our wanting to approach and care for other people.

Does research supports the value of practicing Compassion?

Scientific research shows that being compassionate can improve health, well-being, and relationships as well as being crucial to our survival. Compassion can be cultivated by meditation practice and offers many benefits:
  • Strengthens brain circuits for pleasure and reward and leads to lasting increases in self-reported happiness
  • Reduces risk of heart disease by boosting the positive effects of the vagus nerve
  • Makes people more resilient to stress; lowers stress hormones in the blood and saliva
  • Boosts the immune response
  • Increases Positive emotion, decreases rumination
  • Decreases negative emotions such as: hatred, jealousy, anger
  • Enhances communication and connection with others so better relationships
  • More compassionate people / parents / workers / societies have better social skills, take care of their most vulnerable members, assist other nations in need, and perform more acts of kindness.

Tuesday 15 July 2014

Feeling Overwhelmed? Remember "RAIN"

Four steps to stop being so hard on ourselves.

Illustrations by Michael Woloschinow
When I was in college, I went off to the mountains for a weekend of hiking with an older, wiser friend of twenty-two. After setting up our tent, we sat by a stream, watching the water swirl around rocks, talking about our lives. At one point she described how she was learning to be “her own best friend.” A wave of sadness came over me, and I broke down sobbing. I was the furthest thing from my own best friend. I was continually harassed by an inner judge who was merciless, nit-picking, demanding, always on the job. My guiding assumption was, “Something is fundamentally wrong with me,” as I struggled to control and fix what felt like a basically flawed self.
Over the last several decades, through my work with tens of thousands of clients and meditation students, I’ve come to see the pain of perceived deficiency as epidemic. It’s like we’re in a trance that causes us to see ourselves as unworthy. Yet, I have seen in my own life, and with countless others, that we can awaken from this trance through practicing mindfulness and self-compassion. We can come to trust the goodness and purity of our hearts.
In order to flower, self-compassion depends on honest, direct contact with our own vulnerability. Compassion fully blossoms when we actively offer care to ourselves. To help people address feelings of insecurity and unworthiness, I often introduce mindfulness and compassion through a meditation I call the RAIN of Self-Compassion. The acronym RAIN, first coined about 20 years ago by Michele McDonald, is an easy-to-remember tool for practicing mindfulness. It has four steps:
Recognize what is going on;
Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
Investigate with kindness;
Natural awareness, which comes from not identifying
with the experience.
You can take your time and explore RAIN as a stand-alone meditation or move through the steps in a more abbreviated way whenever challenging feelings arise.
RAIN practice from Tara Brach

R
Recognize What's Going On
Recognizing means consciously acknowledging, in any given moment, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are affecting us. Like awakening from a dream, the first step out of the trance of unworthiness is simply to recognize that we are stuck, subject to painfully constricting beliefs, emotions, and physical sensations. Common signs of the trance include a critical inner voice, feelings of shame or fear, the squeeze of anxiety or the weight of depression in the body.
Self-compassion flowers with honest, direct contact with our own vulnerability.
In order to flower, self-compassion depends on honest, direct contact with our own vulnerability. Compassion fully blossoms when we actively offer care to ourselves.
Different people respond to the sense of unworthiness in different ways. Some might stay busy, trying to prove themselves valuable; others, fearful of failure, may become discouraged or even paralyzed. Still others may resort to addictive behaviors to avoid facing their shame and fear. Any of these strategies can lead to either defensive or aggressive behavior with others, or unhealthy attachment.
Some of us are at war with ourselves for decades, never realizing how our self-judgment and self-aversion keep us from finding genuine intimacy with others or enjoying our lives. One palliative caregiver reports that a key regret of the dying is not having been true to themselves. Rather than listening to and trusting our inner life, most of us try to live according to the expectations of others, which we internalize. When we inevitably fall short of the mark, we condemn ourselves.
Though it may sound depressing or overwhelming, learning to recognize that we are at war with ourselves is quite empowering. One meditation student described the trance of unworthiness as “…the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing.” As he became increasingly mindful of his incessant self-judgment and feelings of inadequacy, his aspiration to free himself from his painful inner prison grew.
AAllowing: Taking a Life-Giving Pause
Allowing means letting the thoughts, emotions, feelings, or sensations we have recognized simply be there. Typically when we have an unpleasant experience, we react in one of three ways: by piling on the judgment; by numbing ourselves to our feelings; or by focusing our attention elsewhere. For example, we might have the sinking, shameful feeling of having been too harsh in correcting our child. But rather than allowing that feeling, we might blame our partner for not doing his or her part, worry about something completely different, or decide it’s time for a nap. We’re resisting the rawness and unpleasantness of the feeling by withdrawing from the present moment.
We allow by simply pausing with the intention to relax our resistance and let the experience be just as it is. Allowing our thoughts, emotions, or bodily sensations simply to be doesn’t mean we agree with our conviction that we’re unworthy. Rather, we honestly acknowledge the presence of our judgment, as well as the painful feelings underneath. Many students I work with support their resolve to let it be by silently offering an encouraging word or phrase to themselves. For instance, you might feel the grip of fear and mentally whisper yes in order to acknowledge and accept the reality of your experience in this moment.
Victor Frankel writes, “Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in this space lies our power and our freedom.” Allowing creates a space that enables us to see more deeply into our own being, which, in turn, awakens our caring and helps us make wiser choices in life. For one student, the space of allowing gave her more freedom in the face of urges to binge eat. In the past, whenever she felt restless or anxious at night, she’d start thinking of her favorite food—trail mix—then mindlessly consume a half pound of it before going to bed, disgusted with herself.

Learning to recognize the cues and taking a pause interrupted the pattern. While pausing, she would allow herself to feel the tension in her body, her racing heart, the craving. Soon, she began to contact a poignant sense of loneliness buried beneath her anxiety. She found that if she could stay with the loneliness and be gentle with herself, the craving passed.
I—Investigating with Kindness
Investigating means calling on our natural curiosity—the desire to know truth—and directing a more focused attention to our present experience. Simply pausing to ask, what is happening inside me?, can initiate recognition, but investigation adds a more active and pointed kind of inquiry. You might ask yourself: What most wants attention? How am I experiencing this in my body? Or What am I believing? What does this feeling want from me? You might notice hollowness or shakiness, then discover a sense of unworthiness and shame masked by those feelings. Unless you bring them into awareness, your unconscious beliefs and emotions will control your experience and perpetuate your identification with a limited, deficient self.
Poet Dorothy Hunt says that we need a “...heartspace where everything that is, is welcome.” Without such an attitude of unconditional care, there isn’t enough safety and openness for real investigation to take place. About ten years ago I entered a period of chronic illness. During one particularly challenging period of pain and fatigue, I became discouraged and unhappy. In my view I was terrible to be around—impatient, self-absorbed, irritable, gloomy. I began working with RAIN to recognize these feelings and judgments and to consciously allow the unpleasantness in my body and emotions to just be there. As I began to investigate, I heard an embittered voice: “I hate living like this.” And then a moment later, “I hate myself!” The full toxicity of self-aversion filled me.
Not only was I struggling with illness, I was at war with the self-centered, irritable person I believed I had become. Unknowingly, I had turned on myself and was held captive by the trance of unworthiness. But in that moment of recognizing and allowing the suffering of self-hatred, my heart began to soften with compassion.
Here’s a story that helps to describe the process I went through. Imagine while walking in the woods you see a small dog sitting by a tree. You bend down to pet it and it suddenly lunges at you, teeth bared. Initially you might be frightened and angry. But then you notice one of its legs is caught in a trap, buried under some leaves. Immediately your mood shifts from anger to concern. You see that the dog’s aggression sprang from vulnerability and pain.
This applies to all of us. When we behave in hurtful, reactive ways, it’s because we’re caught in some kind of painful trap. The more we investigate the source of our suffering, the more we cultivate a compassionate heart toward ourselves and others.
When I recognized how my leg was in a trap—sickness compounded with self aversion— my heart filled with sorrow and genuine self-care. The investigating deepened as I gently put my hand over my heart—a gesture of kindness— and invited whatever other feelings were there to surface. A swell of fear (uncertainty for my future) spread through my chest, followed by an upwelling of grief at losing my health. The sense of self-compassion unfurled fully as I mentally whispered, It’s all right, sweetheart, and consciously offered care to the depths of my vulnerability, just as I would to a dear friend.
Compassion arises naturally when we mindfully contact our suffering and respond with care. As you practice the RAIN of Self-Compassion, experiment and see which intentional gesture of kindness most helps to soften or open your heart. Many people find healing by gently placing a hand on the heart or cheek; others, in a whispered message of care, or by envisioning being bathed in warm, radiant light. What matters is that once you have investigated and connected with your suffering, respond by offering care to your own heart. When the intention to awaken self love and compassion is sincere, the smallest gesture—even if, initially, it feels awkward— will serve you well.
NNatural Loving Awareness
Natural loving awareness occurs when identification with the small self is loosened. This practice of non-identification means that our sense of who we are is not fused with any limiting emotions, sensations, or stories. We begin to intuit and live from the openness and love that express our natural awareness.
Though the first three steps of RAIN require some intentional activity, the N is the treasure: A liberating homecoming to our true nature. There’s nothing to do for this last part of RAIN; we simply rest in natural awareness.
The RAIN of Self-Compassion is not a one-shot meditation, nor is the realization of our natural awareness necessarily full, stable, or enduring. Rather, as you practice you may experience a sense of warmth and openness, a shift in perspective. You can trust this! RAIN is a practice for life—meeting our doubts and fears with a healing presence. Each time you are willing to slow down and recognize, oh, this is the trance of unworthiness… this is fear… this is hurt…this is judgment…, you are poised to de-condition the old habits and limiting self-beliefs that imprison your heart. Gradually, you’ll experience natural loving awareness as the truth of who you are, more than any story you ever told yourself about being “not good enough” or “basically flawed.”
A friend of mine was sitting with her dying mother while she was in a coma. At one point the mother opened her eyes, looked at her daughter with great lucidity, and said “You know, all my life I thought something was wrong with me.” She closed her eyes, sank back into a coma and died shortly thereafter. For my friend, her mother’s words were a parting gift. They inspired her to dedicate herself to the mindfulness and self-compassion that frees us.
We each have the conditioning to live for long stretches of time imprisoned by a sense of deficiency, cut off from realizing our intrinsic intelligence, aliveness, and love. The greatest blessing we can give ourselves is to recognize the pain of this trance, and regularly offer a cleansing rain of self-compassion to our awakening hearts.
Clinical psychologist Tara Brach is the author of True Refuge: Finding Peace & Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart. For guided meditations and talks, visit Tara Brach's website
This article also appeared in the August 2014 issue of Mindful magazine.

No Time for Mindfulness? Try This On-the-Go Walking Meditation

Elisha Goldstein offers a simple walking meditation in four steps.



During the day many of us are moving so fast, sometimes physically, but almost always mentally. Our neurons are firing in hyper speed with so much to do and so much to pay attention to. We’re all working so hard to get somewhere that we forget to be here. Sometimes when I’m rushing, I’ll notice that I’m “rushing home to relax.” In that moment I become present and realize that I don’t have to rush home to relax, I have arrived in the present moment and can choose to “be” different.
Here’s a trick I learned that helps me train my brain to be present while simply walking.
Mindfulness On-the-Go: Walking Meditation Practice
1. Appreciate. If you are fortunate enough to have the ability to walk, try and remember, it took you over a year to learn how to walk and these legs are often the unsung heroes that take you to and fro day in and day out. Thank your legs for all their efforts.
2. Ground. Bring your attention to the sensations of your feet and legs as the heel touches the ground, then the base of the foot, then the toes, and then they lift. You can actually say to yourself, “heel, foot, toes, lift.” This is a way to connect to the action of walking in the present moment.
3. Come to Your Senses. Walk slightly slower and begin to open your awareness to all your senses, one by one. Sight, sound, taste, feeling, smell. See what is around you, listen to the sounds, taste the air or whatever is in your mouth, feel the warmth, coolness, or breeze on your cheeks, smell the air. Then stop for a moment and see if you can take in all of the senses.
4. Say a helpful phrase. Recite some sayings while taking a few steps. For example, take a few steps and during an in breath say to yourself, “Breathing in, I have arrived, breathing out, I am home” or “Breathing in, I calm my body, breathing out, I relax.” Or make up your own sayings.
Be mindful everyday with this walking meditation practice from Mindful's mental health blogger, Elisha Goldstein.

You can do this while walking to work, in the hallways, running errands, or walking from the car to the door on the way home. Keep in mind this is a practice. So whenever you remember that you are rushing home to relax, or really rushing anywhere, just say to yourself, “rushing, rushing, rushing.” This in itself widens the space between stimulus and response where awareness and choice lies.
In this space, you are now present and can engage in any of these ways of mindful walking. But don’t ever take my word for it, try it for yourself! Imagine what the days, weeks and months ahead would be like if you practice mindfulness on-the-go a bit more often. (And for more on walking meditation, you might want to check out "Walk This Way," from the June 2013 issue of Mindful magazine.)

Thursday 10 July 2014

Mindful Warriors: Meditation for Teenagers





Can meditation positively affect teenagers lives?

Absolutely it can!

Research in neuroscience and attention provides evidence that meditation strengthens the neural systems of the brain that are responsible for concentration and generating empathy. Becoming more mindful helps children and adolescents better regulate how life circumstances impact their mental health.

Last week, I posted an article at Psychology Today, Happiness or Harvard? — about high school valedictorian Carolyn Milander (pictured above) who discovered her own values about success through her meditation practice. If you haven’t read her compelling story of why she chose a community college over an Ivy-League school, don’t miss it! Her story shows the impact of meditation for teenagers!

All young people cope with stress in one form or another.

In schools, we teach reading, science, and math. Yet most communities miss one of the most important aspects of learning – how to care for and nurture the mind.


 

Guiding Meditation for Teenagers

The book, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life For Teens: A Guide to Living an Extraordinary Life, provides excellent insights for young people and why mediation for teenagers is helpful. Written by psychology professionals Joseph Ciarrochi PhD, Louise Hayes PhD, and Ann Bailey, it introduces teens to the concept of becoming mindful warriors.

Mindful warriors are BOLD. This is an acronym used in the book to describe the skills required to help young people deal with their emotions and stay committed to the kind of life they want to create. The BOLD skills coincide with Carolyn Milander’s story to a tee!
  • B – Breathing deeply and slowing down.
  • O – Observing.
  • L – Listening to your values.
  • D – Deciding on actions and doing them.
Like adults, meditation for teenagers, takes regular practice. While this book is designed to be a resource and road map for teens, I believe it will be best utilized when combined with a face-to-face meditation class. For those who teach meditation for teenagers, this workbook may be a great companion to your classes as it is well-designed so that teens can complete home exercises and record their reflections.

Children of all ages can benefit from meditation, even elementary-school-age. Numerous books are available to help younger children develop the art of mindfulness, including Planting Seeds: 

Practicing Mindfulness with Children by Thich Nhat Hanh and Buddha at Bedtime by Dharmachari Nagaraia.

 

Improving Schools through Meditation and Quiet Time

It is very clear that the culture of schools must change in ways that reduce stress on children and teens. Whether students feel pressured to score high on standardized tests or burdened by poverty and violence, their mental health is similarly at risk.

One school in San Francisco took a BOLD approach to reducing student stress.

In a compelling video produced at the Visitacion Valley Middle School, meditation improved student’s well-being. And, by the way, it significantly lowered truancy and suspensions too!
Watch this and be inspired! Then introduce meditation for teenagers or relaxation activities for children in your own community or school!


 

Meditation and Happiness

Most of us are not exposed to meditation before adulthood.

Yet we know that meditation creates more contentment, less anxiety, and the ability to better overcome challenging life problems.

Longitudinal research shows that today’s youth experience more stress than previous generations. Meditation and mindfulness practices can help.

Carolyn Milander referred to her meditation class as “Happy Class.” She said, “Happy Class prompted me to turn my life around. The meditation I did inside and outside of Happy Class was the impetus that caused me to start making healthy changes in my life.”

“I will always live in the skin I was born with,” asserted Carolyn, “so the sooner I learn to accept myself for who I am and the differences I may have, the better. Meditation was a step forward in which I acknowledged to myself that I needed help dealing with my stress.”

These are wise words from a young woman who learned how to meditate in ninth grade. In fact, they should speak to all of us who experience the stresses of everyday life.

If we create cultures where young people can quiet themselves from the busy world, observe their thoughts and feelings, listen to their values, and decide with intentionality on their actions, we will surely nurture healthier and happier children.

Let’s help kids be BOLD and mindful warriors!

Breath.
Observe.
Listen.
Decide.
Video credits:  Edutopia





Tuesday 8 July 2014

Toward a Mindful Society

Barry Boyce interviews Jon Kabat-Zinn, who was a keynote speaker at the Creating a Mindful Society conference in New York City. (Click here to view the livestream).

Does mindfulness go beyond simply cultivating our attentiveness?

The ultimate promise of mindfulness is much larger than that, more profound. It helps us understand that our conventional view of ourselves and even what we mean by “self” is incomplete in some very important ways. Mindfulness helps us recognize how and why we mis-take the actuality of things for some story we create, and then makes it possible to chart a path toward greater sanity, well-being, and purpose.

Why do you think a scientific approach is important in spreading the practice of mindfulness?

I am not really interested in “spreading” mindfulness, so much as I am interested in igniting passion in people for what is deepest and best within all of us, but which is usually hidden and rarely accessible. Science is a particular way of understanding the world that allows some people to approach what they would otherwise shun, and so can be used as a skillful means for opening people’s minds. By bringing science together with meditation, we’re beginning to find new ways, in language people can understand, to show the benefits of training oneself to become intimate with the workings of one’s own mind in a way that generates greater insight and clarity.

The science is also showing interesting and important health benefits of such mind–body training and practices, and is now beginning to elucidate the various pathways though which mindfulness may be exerting its effects on the brain (emotion regulation, working memory, cognitive control, attention, activation in specific somatic maps of the body, cortical thickening in specific regions) and the body (symptom reduction, greater physical well-being, immune function enhancement, epigenetic up and down regulation of activity in large numbers and classes of genes). It is also showing that meditation can bring a sense of meaning and purpose to life, based on understanding the nonseparation of self and other. Given the condition we find ourselves in these days on this planet, understanding our interconnectedness is not a spiritual luxury; it’s a societal imperative.

Three or four hundred years ago, not so long in the scheme of things, people practicing meditation did so under fairly isolated conditions, mostly in monasteries. Now meditation is being practiced and studied in laboratories, hospitals, and clinics, and is even finding its way into primary and secondary schools. The people teaching and researching it have in many cases been involved with mindfulness for ten, twenty, thirty, or more years by now. They are not just jumping on some new mindfulness bandwagon. And their work has resulted in many professionals being drawn to mindfulness for the first time. That in itself is a wonderful phenomenon, as long as it is understood that mindfulness is not merely a nice “concept” but an orthogonal way of being that requires ongoing practice and cultivation.

What are some of the new frontiers that mindfulness has entered in recent years?

The mindfulness work is spilling into areas way beyond medicine and healthcare and also beyond psychology and neuroscience. It’s moving into programs on childbirth and parenting, education, business, athletics and professional sports, the legal profession, criminal justice, even politics. For instance, Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, has become a major advocate of greater support for mindfulness research and program implementation in both healthcare and education, based on his own experiences with ongoing practice. In so many different domains, it’s becoming recognized as virtually axiomatic that the mind and body are and always have been on intimate speaking terms, at least biologically. We need to learn to be much more tuned in to the conversation and participate actively if we are going to function effectively and optimize our health and well-being.

Does the synchronizing of mind and body bring benefits beyond functioning effectively?

The awareness we are speaking of when we are using the term “mindfulness” also encompasses the motivations for our actions, for example, the ways we are driven by self-aggrandizement or greed. In the financial crisis of 2008-2009, we’ve seen the effects of greed played out on a massive scale in the banks and insurance companies. Healing that disease won’t just be a matter of bailouts, stimulus packages, and magically creating greater confidence in the economy. We need to create a different kind of confidence and a new kind of economics, one that’s not about mindless spending but is more about marshalling resources for the greater good, for one’s own being, for society, and for the planet. Mindfulness can help open the door to that by helping us go beyond approaches that are based on conceptual thought alone and are driven by unbounded and legally sanctioned greed.

It seems that the notion that we can think our way out of our big problems has been tarnished recently.

That’s a key point. Even very, very smart people—and there are plenty of them around—are starting to recognize that thinking is only one of many forms of intelligence. If we don’t recognize the multiple dimensions of intelligence, we are hampering our ability to find creative solutions and outcomes for problems that don’t admit to simple-minded fixes. It’s like having a linear view in medicine that sees health care solely as fixing people up—an auto mechanic’s model of the body that doesn’t understand healing and transformation, doesn’t understand what happens when you harmonize mind and body. The element that’s missing in that mechanical understanding is awareness.
Genuine awareness can modulate our thinking, so that we become less driven by unexamined motivations to put ourselves first, to control things to assuage our fear, to always proffer our brilliant answer. We can create an enormous amount of harm, for example, by not listening to other people who might have different views and insights. Fortunately, we have more of an opportunity these days to balance the cultivation of thinking with the cultivation of awareness. Anyone can restore some degree of balance between thinking and awareness right in this present moment, which is the only moment that any of us ever has anyway. The potential outcomes from purposefully learning to inhabit awareness and bring thought into greater balance are extremely positive and healthy for ourselves and the world at large.

On the other hand, if we continue to dominate the planet the way our species has for the past six or seven thousand years, it could be very unhealthy. Regardless of the beauty that’s come out of civilization, we could continue on a path of colossal upheavals that basically come from a human mind that does not make peace with itself—war, genocide, famine, grossly inadequate responses to natural disasters. These upheavals could destroy everything we hold most dear.

Earlier you talked about the promise of mindfulness being much greater than simply focusing attention. What are some of the keys to bringing about the profound effects of mindfulness that you’ve been talking about?

Ultimately, the path is uncertain. All we can do is listen deeply to the calling of our own hearts and of the world, and do the best we can. I emphasize the universality of the power of mindfulness and awareness, but I’m not talking about a universal church or a universal religious movement. I’m talking about understanding the nature of what it means to be human. I don’t even like to use the word “spiritual.”

Can we simply address what it means to be human—from an evolutionary point of view, from an historical point of view? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts itself up in the form of a human sentient body and being, and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that), and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential? A lot of the time we become so self-absorbed, so preoccupied, that we don’t pursue the kind of fundamental inquiry Aristotle proposed when he made the comment that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

In addition to developing a universal, nonreligious vocabulary, I have tried to stress the critical importance of the non-dual aspect of meditation by emphasizing that it is not about getting anywhere else. This of course immediately brings up a lot of bewilderment in people, because almost everything we do seems to be about trying to get somewhere else. Why on earth would you not want to get somewhere else? If you’re in a lot of pain, or if you have some kind of illness or whatever, you always want to get back to where you were, or get to some better place in the future. It sounds almost un-American just to settle for what is, but that is a misunderstanding of the potential for living in the present moment. It’s not a matter of settling. It’s a matter of recognizing that, in some sense, it never gets any better than this.

What do you mean?

Quite simply, the future is not here, even though we can create as many illusions about it as we’d like. The past is already over. We have to deal with things as they are in the moment. So, it’s most effective to deal with them if you don’t perpetrate illusions on yourself about the nature of your experience, and then fall into wishful thinking or ambition that drives you to create more harm than good.

When we delude ourselves about the true nature of our experience, we not only harm other people. We also harm ourselves, because we don’t befriend certain elements of who we are, of our basic connection to others and to our environment. That’s very sad and very unsatisfying. Healing and transformation are possible the moment we accept the actuality of things as they are—good, bad, or ugly—and then act on that understanding with imagination, kindness, and intentionality. This is not easy or painless, by any means, but it is both an embodiment of and a path toward wisdom and peace.
In this regard, we are trying to create a way of speaking about mindfulness as a practice, a way of being, and also as the culmination of the practice in any given moment that is so commonsensical that people will say, “Of course, that makes sense. It makes sense to be in the present moment, to be a little less judgmental or at least be aware of how judgmental I am. Why didn’t I notice this earlier? It’s so obvious.”

Who can we rely on to do the work of bringing this message to more people?

This is a huge challenge, given how imprisoned we are and how blinded by our own conditioning. There simply aren't enough great teachers to go around. Plus, not everybody can hear it in the language of the traditional meditation vehicles. So perhaps we need many highly dedicated and skillful meditation teachers, steeped in their own practice, to fulfill the need that’s waiting out there. There’s so much suffering in the world. Who are we not to respond to it in some way? That is why a lot of our efforts in MBSR go into professional training, toward developing a whole new generation of people deeply grounded in this universal dharma expression and committed to bringing it into the world in various ways as a skillful means for healing and transformation at a time that the world is crying out for kindness and wisdom.

What’s required to teach mindfulness other than a good human heart?

If we are teaching mindfulness in one setting or another, it really needs to be grounded in our own first-person experience. It needs to be grounded in humility and not-knowing, an openness to possibility but also a deep seeing into self and other. Since it’s available to all of us, it’s not really such a big deal or a special private possession.

Of course, some people will take mindfulness and other practices and put their own stamp on them. Some people are going to make a big campaign out of it without really understanding the depth of it, or understanding mindfulness only in a partial way. The inevitable possibility that some people may approach or exploit these teachings and practices in misguided ways is part of the price of the success of bringing mindfulness into the larger culture.

One of the big responsibilities of those of us who are doing this work is to nurture and mentor the younger people and those who are coming to it for the first time. We can remind them, or clarify for them, that it is not just a fad or merely a smart career move at the moment to become a mindfulness teacher or exponent. The value of mindfulness is both profound and unique. It calls us to take a deep look into the nature of experience itself, and the nature of our own minds and hearts. This is a kind of scientific inquiry, since the mind is really a huge mystery from the scientific point of view.

All of this work hinges on appreciating how awareness can balance thought. There’s nothing wrong with thinking. So much that is beautiful comes out of thinking and out of our emotions. But if our thinking is not balanced with awareness, we can end up deluded, perpetually lost in thought, and out of our minds just when we need them the most.



Sunday 6 July 2014

The Collective Evolution



The Collective Evolution 2: The Human Experience is a documentary focused on showing each of the dimensions to the experience we call life. The documentary does this by addressing exactly who we all are, and why we are here. It further delves into each of the key pieces that make up the human puzzle, namely the planet, the body, and the ego. The documentary concludes by addressing the shift in consciousness that has already begun and continues to intensify on the planet. It's intention is to further provide the viewer with the tools and understanding it needs to step out of current limitations and instead experience the infinite potentiality we are all capable of.




The Collective Evolution III -The Shift is a powerful documentary that explores a revolutionary shift affecting every aspect of our planet. As the shift hits the fan, people are becoming more aware of the control structures that prevent us from experiencing our full potential. CE3 uses a different level of consciousness and scientific facts to bring clarity about the shift while dispelling myths about our true nature. It offers practical steps that we can implement right now to transition out of survival mode and into our more natural state of peace and co-operation . CE3 includes fascinating interviews with revolutionary speakers and people who are already opting out of the current socioeconomic system. The film examines hidden technologies and exciting alternatives for a bright limitless future. This is the most exciting time in the history of our world.

Source: http://www.collective-evolution.com/

Saturday 5 July 2014

Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds



Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds is a documentary film created by Canadian film maker and meditation teacher Daniel Schmidt. The film examines various aspects of life, the universe, spirituality and the natural unseen links between them. The film was released in 2012 and juxtaposes ancient teachings alongside modern scientific findings, drawing conclusions about certain aspects of the universe and the vibratory field.

The film was released for free online. It has been narrated in English, French, Spanish, German and Hindi and there are subtitles for 17 languages. The film received over 2 million online views in its first year of release. The movie won a number of awards at film festivals, including the Award of Excellence at the Canada International Film Festival.


In early February 2013 after its release, the film was nominated for the Award of Excellence at the Canada International Film Festival.[7] The film won the Peace Award of Excellence at the International Festival for Peace, Inspiration and Equality[8] in Indonesia, and also won the Merit Award of Awareness at the Awareness Festival in California. It was the winner of Award of Excellence for the International Film Festival for Spirituality, Religion and Vision in Indonesia, and winner for Best Feature Documentary in the DIY Film Festival, California. In the Moving Images Film Festival in Toronto it won best of the Future World showcase. Inner Worlds Outer Worlds was nominated for the Cosmic Angel Award at the Cosmic Cine Film Festival 2014 in Germany. It was the winner of an Eternal Flame Award Surge Film Festival, Texas. Inner Worlds movie was an official selection in 19 film festivals worldwide.

*****

Akasha is the unmanifested, the "nothing" or emptiness which fills the vacuum of space. As Einstein realized, empty space is not really empty. Saints, sages and yogis who have looked within themselves have also realized that within the emptiness is unfathomable power, a web of information or energy which connects all things.

The Spiral. The Pythagorean philosopher Plato hinted enigmatically that there was a golden key that unified all of the mysteries of the universe. The golden key is the intelligence of the logos, the source of the primordial om. One could say that it is the mind of God. The source of this divine symmetry is the greatest mystery of our existence.

The Serpent and the Lotus. The spiral has often been represented by the snake, the downward current, while the bird or blooming lotus flower has represented the upward current or transcendence.The ancient traditions taught that a human being can become a bridge extending from the outer to the inner, from gross to subtle, from the lower chakras to the higher chakras.

Beyond Thinking. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We live our lives pursuing happiness "out there" as if it is a commodity. We have become slaves to our own desires and craving. Happiness isn't something that can be pursued or purchased like a cheap suit.


Source: http://www.innerworldsmovie.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Worlds_Outer_Worlds
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/inner-worlds-outer-worlds/ 
and http://consciouslifenews.com/inner-worlds-outer-worlds-movie-parts-1-4/1146440/





Friday 4 July 2014

Can Mindfulness Make Us Better Teachers?


A new study suggests that training teachers in mindfulness not only reduces burnout but also improves their performance in the classroom.

Imagine this: In the middle of a lesson, one of your students deliberately makes an offensive remark that causes the other students to laugh and threatens to derail your lesson. Your fists start to clench and there’s a tightening in your chest. Before you know it, you snap angrily in a way that 1) doesn’t calm the students down, and 2) makes you spend the rest of the day, or several days, wondering if you’re a terrible teacher. Sound familiar?
This scenario is only one of many that add to a teacher’s daily stress level, which, over time, can lead to burnout—a major issue for those in the education profession. However, adding to this stress is often an educator’s own lack of social-emotional strategies for dealing with the stress and emotional intensity of the job, which researchers suggest may diminish his or her effectiveness as a teacher.
Participants at the GGSC’s Summer Institute for Educators Participants at the GGSC's Summer Institute for Educators Roibín Ó hÉochaidh
So is there something teachers can do to develop their social-emotional skills, not only to guard against long-term burnout but also to help them deal with stressful events while they’re happening? Yes, according to a new study conducted by the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM): the practice of mindfulness.
A decade’s worth of research has documented the great physical, psychological, and social benefits of practicing mindfulness, which involves paying careful attention to your thoughts, feelings, and environment. In recent years, schools have embraced mindfulness to help improve students’ attention, emotion regulation, and learning. For the most part, the focus has been on students rather than teachers.
A group of the Center’s researchers, led by Lisa Flook, took a different tack: They conducted a small pilot study to test the impact of an eight-week mindfulness course adapted specifically for teachers. The study found that those who completed the training enjoyed a myriad of personal benefits, including elevated levels of self-compassion and a decrease in psychological ills such as anxiety, depression, and burnout. In comparison, a group of teachers placed on a wait list for the course actually increased in their stress and burnout levels.
But what made this study unique is that it also looked at the participants’ classroom performance, such as their behavior management skills and their emotional and instructional support of students. What it discovered was this: The practice of mindfulness made them more effective teachers, possibly by buffering them from the impact of stressful experiences as they were happening.
In other words, the study suggests that when teachers practice mindfulness, students’ misbehavior and other stressors become like water off a duck’s back, allowing them to stay focused on what teachers really want to do: teach.
So how does the practice of mindfulness actually help teachers in and out of the classroom?
To start, the CIHM researchers defined mindfulness specifically for this study as, “Paying attention in the present moment, on purpose, and without judgment.” Anyone who has taught knows that paying attention in the present moment is incredibly difficult because of the thousand demands on a teacher’s attention all at once. And judgment is a very easy state-of-mind to slip into when confronted by a misbehaving child—you don’t only judge that child but judge yourself for judging him or her.
One of the most basic mindfulness practices involves sitting quietly and bringing one’s awareness to thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, or an external object. Neuroscientists and emotion researchers have found that this kind of practice heightens the activity in the regions of our brain that regulate our attention, which then carries over into our everyday lives.

Lisa Flook, lead author of the CIHM study Lisa Flook, lead author of the CIHM study
For teachers, this means that in the midst of the craziness that is a classroom, we remain aware of what’s going on inside our minds and bodies, which can help us rein in our knee-jerk angry reactions to a situation and instead choose a kinder and more compassionate response.
For example, in the scenario I described at the beginning of this article, a teacher skilled in mindfulness would notice his or her clenched fists and tightening in the chest, take them as a sign that he or she was about to hit the roof, and perhaps take a deep breath or two to calm down. Then he or she would be much better prepared to calmly redirect the students’ attention to the task-at-hand. Boom, done, just like that. Moment passed, no lingering stress in the body or mind of the teacher, and the lesson continues.
Mindfulness practice is also a way to deliberately cultivate positive qualities such as empathy and compassion. Previous studies have linked mindfulness to increased activity in brain regions associated with these positive emotions. In its training for teachers, CIHM included activities such as loving-kindness meditation, which has been found to help promote kindness and compassion toward others.
I like to think that teachers are naturally empathic and compassionate toward their students. But often these qualities get lost in the stress of classroom life, and what suffers most is the all-important relationship between the teacher and the student. By deliberately practicing mindfulness techniques that cultivate kindness toward others, a teacher faced with a misbehaving student might ask the question, “What happened to you?” rather than “What’s wrong with you?”—a more compassionate response that strengthens rather than hinders the teacher-student relationship.
Finally, the CIHM researchers found that the mindfulness group’s self-compassion increased as well—an important component of teacher well-being. Educators have a tendency to beat themselves up over so many things: a failed lesson, saying the wrong thing to a parent, an inability to reach a challenging student, helplessness in the face of a student’s tragic home life—the list goes on and on. And we take it all home at night, leaving us with little psychic space to re-charge for the next day. Over time, our teaching suffers.
Time and again, teachers ask me in workshops and at our Summer Institute for Educators how they can stop thinking about work after they’ve gone home. My suggestion, based on the research, is to have a personal mindfulness practice coupled with self-compassion. Mindfulness teaches us to “notice” our thoughts or thought patterns without judging them as “good” or “bad,” which helps diminish the emotional charge that keeps these challenging school situations reverberating in our heads. Once we’ve neutralized that charge, we can choose to take a more compassionate stance toward ourselves, realizing that all teachers face these challenges and that everyone, including yourself, is doing the best they can.
One caveat: The changes rendered through a mindfulness practice do not happen overnight, nor do they last without continuous practice. Although this study showed significant changes in just eight weeks, Richard Davidson, one of the study’s co-authors and a leading expert on the science of emotions and mindfulness, is quick to point out that mindfulness is like going to the gym: You have to keep practicing to enjoy the benefits.
While the practice of mindfulness is never a “cure-all”, research suggests that it is a powerful foundation upon which teachers can start to build their social-emotional skills—and, in turn, improve their teaching. So while we may never be able to stop that student from making an offensive remark, we can control our reaction—which, in the end, may make the student think twice about doing it again.
Resources for educators who would like to start a mindfulness practice: