A Meditation to Set an Intention for Your Future with Rich Fernandez
Release Date: 12/26/2025
A 12-Minute Meditation to Rest Your Body in Gratitude
12 Minute Meditation
Our bodies are so overworked and often ignored. This guided awareness practice offers space to feel a sense of gratitude for our body, in all of its beauty and mystery. Rashid Hughes (he/him) is a writer, meditation teacher, instructor and a restorative justice facilitator. He is the co-founder of the , a mindfulness community in Washington, DC that is dedicated to inspiring Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to live with love and courage. Rashid is an Affiliate Teacher for the Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC and is also a teacher of the Presence Collective. He holds a...
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A Light, Slow, Deep (LSD) Breathing Meditation
12 Minute Meditation
Thanks to our autonomic nervous system, life-sustaining processes like our heartbeat, digestion, and breathing all happen without us even having to pay attention. But our environments, stress levels, and other factors can definitely affect the health and efficiency of these processes. For example, sitting hunched at our desks and staring at screens often means that our breathing gets shallow and irregular—which of course affects things like focus, energy, cognition, and attention. This week, Shamash Alidina leads a guided breathing exercise called Light, Slow, and Deep (or...
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A Guided Walking Meditation to Notice the Beauty Around Us—Even in the City
12 Minute Meditation
City life can often feel frantic, loud, and cut off from natural beauty. It’s not often we slow down and take in all there is to experience. But even in urban areas, if you pay attention, you can hear the call of a bird, notice your favorite color in shop windows, and look up at the vast sky above. In this guided meditation, we slow our roll and take in the beauty of our surroundings, no matter where we find ourselves. Kazumi Igus is a Los Angeles native, science teacher, and trained meditation facilitator through UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Center. She currently serves as a WholeSchool...
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A Meditation to Meet Yourself Where You Are—No Matter What
12 Minute Meditation
Mindfulness meditation involves a willingness to be with ourselves as we are. It offers a way of learning to work with ourselves, and not on ourselves, especially if we are healing from perfectionism. Mindfulness reminds us that not everything has to be "fixed"—and very often, our movement back to wellness starts when we stop trying to change ourselves and simply accept where we are with care and attention. Cheryl Jones is a mindfulness teacher, health and wellness coach, and author of two books, Thriving When Your Cosmic Egg Is Cracked: A Mindful Journey and Mindful Exercise: A Bridge...
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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....
info_outlineIf you’ve grown weary of traditional resolutions, but you still carry a glimmer of hope that positive change is possible for us imperfect humans—then you’ll love mindful intention-setting.
In this practice from his mini-course, mindful leadership trainer Rich Fernandez shows us how to vividly envision the “imagine if” possibilities. When we tap into meaning, passion, and a felt sense of welcoming what we long for, it’s easier to get clear on the purpose behind our pursuits.
Rich Fernandez is the former CEO of Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI). He was previously the director of executive education and people development at Google, where he was also one of the first SIY teachers. Rich previously co-founded Wisdom Labs and has also served in senior roles at eBay, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America.
The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.
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Show Notes
Find more from Rich Fernandez here.
Go Deeper
There are subtle but crucial differences between making traditional New Year’s resolutions and setting intentions for the future—because in mindfulness, everything is anchored in self-acceptance and self-love, rather than a quest for endless self-improvement. To learn more and start practicing a gentler, more sustainable way to change and growth, check out these articles on Mindful.org:
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Why Do Resolutions Fail? 5 Ways to Invite Positive and Lasting Change
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3 Science-Backed Strategies to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
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The Power and Pleasure of Intention: How to Turn Your Dreams into Daily Reality
You can access all modules of Rich's mini-course on Mindful.org here.
And to experience another approach to intention-setting, try A Guided Meditation to Set Your Intentions for the New Year
And more from Mindful here:
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