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,...
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A Meditation to Connect With Loving-Kindness (Even When It's Hard)
12 Minute Meditation
Loving-kindness seems like a practice that would feel good—but in times of tension, uncertainty, pain, or anger, it can be one of the most challenging mindfulness tools to apply. How do we love when it is most difficult to love? This week, renowned teacher Sharon Salzberg offers a guided practice to connect us to the deep heart and transformative courage of metta or loving-kindness meditation. Sharon Salzberg is a meditation teacher and New York Times best-selling author. She is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and has played a...
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A Meditation to Skillfully Connect With Your Anger
12 Minute Meditation
As today’s teacher Jessica Morey says, “Anger’s fundamental role is to protect us and protect what we care about in the world. It lets us know when a limit of ours, or a boundary, has been crossed.” But because of its power and volatility, anger can be a troubling emotion to be with and a difficult one to work with. Today’s practice is aimed at gaining insight into our anger so that we can respond skillfully in any given situation. Jessica Morey is a meditation teacher and coach. She has been practicing meditation for almost three decades. She is also the co-founder and former...
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A Meditation For When Suffering In the World Feels Heavy
12 Minute Meditation
Many of us are carrying the weight of the world’s suffering right now. How can we acknowledge the immense suffering around us, and our own—and still tend to our hearts, minds, and bodies in a way that keeps us grounded and able to take compassionate action? This week, mindfulness teacher and author Wendy O’Leary shares a guided practice that offers refuge and reminds us of our real and loving connection to one another. Wendy O’Leary, M.Ed., author and health educator, has three children’s books and an adult book on self-compassion in families. She is a...
info_outlineDaily 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 through a meditation to help us meet whatever is arising, so that we have more agency when the next moment arises.
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 Studies, Toronto. Rockman is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Family Medicine, cross appointed to Psychiatry. She has extensive experience practicing individual psychotherapy, leading therapy groups, and training healthcare providers in mindfulness-based interventions, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and change management for stress reduction. She is a freelance writer, yoga teacher, and meditation practitioner.
The transcription of this guided meditation will be online and in our app at Mindful.org next week.
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Show Notes
Find more from Patricia Rockman here.
Go Deeper
For more resources to explore reactivity and choice, check out these resources from Mindful.org:
For more practice with compassionately looking at and interrupting unconscious reactivity, try The S.T.O.P. Practice: Creating Space Around Automatic Reactions.
And more from Mindful here:
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