A Meditation for Creating an Anchor of Inner Strength with Melli O'Brien
Release Date: 03/28/2025
A Meditation to Create Space in a Storm of Emotions
12 Minute Meditation
When difficult or painful emotions feel like they’re swirling all around you, it can be challenging to find a steady place to catch your breath. In this guided meditation, mindfulness teacher Scott Rogers uses the metaphor of a hurricane to help us recognize the qualities and the impermanence of even our stormiest emotions. Scott Rogers is founder and director of the University of Miami School of Law’s Mindfulness in Law Program where he integrates mindfulness into the law school curriculum, and he is co-founder of the UMindfulness, the University’s Mindfulness Research and Practice...
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A Body Scan Meditation to Prepare Mind and Body for Sleep
12 Minute Meditation
If you’ve been having trouble falling asleep lately, this body scan meditation with Diana Winston offers a gentle, soothing way to be with the tension in our minds and our bodies. Take a deep breath, let go, and ease into rest. Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center and author of several books including The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering your Natural Awareness. A quick note: Since this is a sleep meditation, you won’t be hearing a closing bell or statement like usual, but instead just a...
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A Meditation to Be At Peace with How Things Are
12 Minute Meditation
In this week’s meditation, Dr. Mark Bertin walks us through a practice that is both concrete and compassionate. It guides us to take note of our tendency to either deny or try and “fix” what’s going on in our lives, and then find a third way—one where we aim to see things as clearly as possible, so that our decisions are filled with awareness, skill, and care for everyone involved. Mark Bertin, MD, is a pediatrician, author, professor, and mindfulness teacher specializing in neurodevelopmental behavioral pediatrics. He’s a regular contributor to Mindful.org and Psychology Today. He...
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A Loving-Kindness Meditation to Expand the Warmth of Your Heart
12 Minute Meditation
Loving-kindness meditation, also called metta, springs from a basic understanding of human nature: On one hand, we might truly believe that compassion makes the world better—and on the other, we might struggle to offer it to ourselves and to others for various reasons. Metta practices, like the one Dr. Emma Seppälä leads this week, offer a simple, structured way to help us gently expand our capacity to both give and receive love. As a bestselling author, Yale lecturer, and international keynote speaker, Emma Seppälä teaches executives at the Yale School of...
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Transform Shame to Self-Trust
12 Minute Meditation
Shame is one of the most complex and difficult human emotions to experience and process. This week, we’re refreshing a meditation from Dr. Patricia Rockman, who offers a practice to meet shame with courage, tenderness, and curiosity. The more we can sit with these difficult emotions, the more we build resilience, self-knowledge, and self-trust—which are the most powerful natural antidotes to shame. Patricia Rockman, MD, CCFP, FCFP is a family physician with a focused practice in mental health. She is the senior director of Education and Clinical Services at the Centre for Mindfulness...
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SOS Meditation to Unwind Anxiety
12 Minute Meditation
In this week’s guided meditation, teacher and author Melli O’Brien offers a practice that uses gentle, steady awareness to help you find your calm center again when you’re feeling wound up with stress or anxiety. Melli is a mindfulness educator and mental health coach with over two decades of experience. She is also cofounder of Mindfulness.com and the Mindfulness Summit—the world’s largest mindfulness conference. Melli has distilled and synthesized her knowledge on resilience, stress management, peak performance psychology, positive neuroplasticity training, and mindfulness into The...
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A Meditation for When You Need a Break
12 Minute Meditation
Sometimes the best gift we can give ourselves is just a moment set aside for quiet, breath, and reminding ourselves of who we really are. In this gentle guided practice, Kimberly Brown uses simple repeated phrases to ground attention and offer a place to rest and reset. Note that this practice includes longer pauses of complete silence for reflection and presence. If you want more time, feel free to pause the recording as you go. Kimberly Brown is a meditation teacher and author. She leads classes and retreats that emphasize the power of compassion and...
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Use Distraction to Hone Your Focus
12 Minute Meditation
It might seem counterintuitive, but intentionally tuning into what’s distracting you can actually help strengthen your ability to focus. In today’s guided practice, meditation teacher Toby Sola introduces what he calls a “concentration algorithm.” This practice will help you identify which type of sensory experience you are naturally drawn to, and then give you a structure for how to focus on it, so that you can quickly attain deep concentration. Toby Sola is dedicated to helping you create a feedback loop between your meditation practice and your ability to make the world a...
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A 10-Minute Full Body Scan Meditation
12 Minute Meditation
When we are stressed or overwhelmed, or when our mind feels like it’s spinning out of control—it’s easy to forget that simply dropping into the body can be a powerful way to interrupt thEse thought loops. In this week’s refresh, meditation teacher Tara Healey guides us through a practice to calm the mind, notice sensations in the body, and bring awareness to the present moment. If you’d like the transcription of this guided meditation, it will be online on Mindful.org next week. Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free...
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A Walking Meditation to Savor the Day
12 Minute Meditation
We mostly think of walking as an activity that is supposed to accomplish something: getting from point A to point B, exercising, reaching our daily step goals. And of course, those are all great reasons to go for a walk. In today’s practice, meditation teacher and bestselling author Jon Kabat-Zinn offers up another way that you can experience a walk—simply as a way to enter more deeply into the vitality and sensory richness of what is happening in and around you right now. A walking meditation isn’t about getting anywhere or accomplishing anything. It’s just about being...
info_outlineWhat does it feel like to experience ourselves—in our own minds and bodies—as a reliable place we can come home to in order to feel grateful, calm, and resilient?
In this week’s guided meditation, Melli O’Brien walks us through a practice we can return to in times of uncertainty or challenge to remind us of our own inner strength.
This meditation is part of our Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement series, where we're sharing guided practices from the women featured in our 2025 special edition of Mindful magazine.
If you’d like the transcription of this guided meditation, it will be online on Mindful.org next week.
Curious about the many benefits of being a member? Learn about our subscription tiers and join Mindful here.
Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter, where we share compelling insights and actionable ideas to enrich your everyday life. Connect with us at mindful.org/signup.
Show Notes
Find more from Melli O’Brien here.
You can learn more about Melli’s story and her leadership in helping people develop robust mental strength on Mindful.org, where we interviewed her for our 2025 Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement feature.
Get your copy of Melli’s new book, Deep Resilience, here.
You can also sign up for a chance to win one of three signed copies of Melli’s book during our giveaway. Just click here to learn more and add your name to the drawing.
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