A Meditation to Create Inner Balance in the Face of Change
12 Minute Meditation
Change of any kind—whether it’s small, momentous, expected or unexpected—can make us feel so vulnerable and unsteady. This week, Susan Bauer-Wu offers a guided meditation to invite and nourish inner strength in the face of change. Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD, is a registered nurse and nursing educator, as well as a mindfulness teacher and researcher. She is president of the Mind & Life Institute and author of . The transcription of this guided meditation will be online and in our app at Mindful.org next week. Stay curious, stay inspired. Sign up for our free...
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A Meditation to Approach the World With a “Don’t-Know Mind”
12 Minute Meditation
Our culture prizes certainty and tends to regard not-knowing as weakness or failure. But research has shown that uncertainty is a quality that we’re meant to engage, not reject. Not only does it spark curiosity and help us learn, but it also strengthens confidence and resilience. This week, Dr. Sará King offers a practice to help us build comfort with our “don’t-know mind” so that we can stay courageous and open to the world around us. Dr. Sará King is a mother, a neuroscientist, political and learning scientist, medical anthropologist, social entrepreneur, public...
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A Meditation to Allow Genuine Happiness, Even In Hard Times
12 Minute Meditation
When we are going through a difficult season personally, or we are bearing witness to the pain of others, our relationship to genuine joy or happiness can get complicated and confusing. Happiness can feel out of reach, or it can feel like a betrayal, like it’s something we don’t “deserve” in hard times. But strengthening our ability to notice and soak in moments of beauty, tenderness, connection, and gratitude can actually have a fortifying effect on us. It can help us build resilience and fill our empty emotional tanks—which can foster our own healing and make it possible for...
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A Meditation to Settle Mind & Body for Sleep
12 Minute Meditation
There are so many reasons why we might be struggling to get to sleep and stay asleep. Work or relationship stress, health concerns, hormonal changes, the state of the world—there’s plenty to keep us awake at night. This week, Mark Bertin offers a soothing sleep practice to help settle our restlessness, using the breath as a calming anchor to gently coax our busy minds and tense bodies into rest. Because this is a sleep meditation, there won’t be the usual recorded outro, so you can just drift off in silence. Mark Bertin, MD, is a pediatrician, author, professor, and...
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A Meditation to (Gently) Interrupt Habitual Reactions
12 Minute Meditation
Daily life is full of irritations: moments of inconvenience, situations where we don’t get what we were hoping for, delays, disappointments, prickly interactions that can leave us confused and exasperated. If we’re honest, we can probably admit that sometimes our reactions in those moments tend to be reflexive rather than intentional. We feel our anger or annoyance rise, and we react almost as though we’re reading a script. Can we explore these habitual reactions in a way that gives us enough space to respond differently? In today’s practice, teacher Patricia Rockman guides us...
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Self Compassion for Nervous System Reset
12 Minute Meditation
It’s not always an instinctual go-to for us, but self-compassion is one of the most powerful forms of healing and restoration for our mental and physical well-being. In this meditation, mindfulness teacher Shamash Alidina offers three ways to show compassion for yourself when you’re stressed and need a reset. Shamash Alidina has been practising mindfulness since 1998 and runs his own successful training organisation. He is the author of Mindfulness For Dummies and most recently, The Mindful Way Through Stress. He frequently pops up in newspapers, magazines and on radio shows....
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A Meditation to Nourish an Undefended Heart
12 Minute Meditation
There’s a paradox inside mindfulness practice: When we want to heal something, we move toward what hurts, not away from it. It’s not easy to keep our hearts soft or open, and a mindful practice doesn’t change the inherent risks in being a human in a world of other humans. This week, as part of his mini-course Opening Ourselves Up to Compassion, Vinny Ferraro shares a practice to meet our pain and uncertainty, to recognize our inherent connection, and to summon the courage to lower our defenses. Vinny Ferraro has been a practitioner of insight meditation (vipassanā) since the...
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A Meditation to Help You Let Go and Accept Change
12 Minute Meditation
Everything is impermanent. It’s always changing, coming together and falling apart. This, of course, includes small daily things and massive, disruptive, and life-shattering things. It’s frustrating to not be able to control these movements and outcomes. But paradoxically, when we can accept that everything is not up to us, and we stop trying to control what we can’t change or trying to predict what we can’t predict, then we can feel a lot more at ease and more open to the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives. This week, Kimberly Brown shares a practice to loosen our...
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A Meditation to Return to Ourselves When Practicing Feels Impossible
12 Minute Meditation
Many of us are bearing witness daily to suffering all over the planet. We care about others, and we want desperately to be of use—and seeing the horrors in images and videos and stories every day can be deeply dysregulating to our nervous systems. When we get overwhelmed by this vicarious trauma, we tend to shut down. We disconnect from ourselves and each other. We’re so spun out in our anxiety, anger, or overwhelm that it can feel impossible to engage in any kind of mindfulness or meditation practice. This week, Shalini Bahl offers tender and practical guidance for how to...
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A Meditation to Tap Into Your Agency When Things Are Chaotic & Uncertain
12 Minute Meditation
We often treat experiences like restlessness, uncertainty, or the overwhelm of difficult emotions as a problem to be solved. And of course, it’s normal to want relief. Today, teacher Cherl Vigder Brause leads a guided practice that’s centered around meeting ourselves exactly where we are. In that pause, where we encounter ourselves without trying to fix anything, even if just for a moment, we actually create a space where we can get clarity on how to respond to ourselves, others, and the world. Cheryl Vigder Brause is a nationally recognized mindfulness and meditation teacher,...
info_outlineWhen painful emotions are circling all around, our instinct is often to reach for external reassurance.
In this practice, law professor and author Rhona Magee offers a gentle reminder that the key to calm starts with a simple pause—and we get to choose that.
Rhonda V. Magee is a professor of law at the University of San Francisco. Also trained in sociology and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), she is a highly practiced facilitator of trauma-sensitive, restorative MBSR interventions for lawyers and law students, and for minimizing the effects of social-identity-based bias. Magee has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society and a visiting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.
The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.
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Show Notes
Find more from Rhonda Magee here.
Go Deeper
Working with challenging, painful emotions is at the heart of mindfulness practices. It’s counter-intuitive, but the key to alleviating the suffering that often accompanies feelings like fear, rage, grief, or jealousy is not to fix or overcome them, but to move toward them with compassion and curiosity. To learn more about building this mindful skill, check out these articles:
For another meditation, here’s A 15-Minute Practice to Soften, Soothe, and Allow Difficult Emotions you can try.
And more from Mindful here:
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