Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2016 i Mindful

This year the California State Assembly passed a bill to ban orca captivity, and prohibit the use of orcas for entertainment, breeding, or exportation. Students and faculty from Greece's University of the Aegean built a giant chess board from lifejackets and lifeboats that helped refugees cross the sea, to symbolize the environmental and refugee crises. It turns out manners still matter. Believing a human being replied to every Google query, 86-year-old May Ashworth typed "please" and "thank you" with her searches. Google replied, "In a world of billions of Searches, yours made us smile." What to do with the world's ugliest color? Save lives! According to research, the color Pantone 448C makes people think of words like "death" and "tar," so in 2012 Australia started using it on cigarette packs.…

There seem to be so many different types of meditation. How do I know if mindfulness is the right one? Why does that question make me think of a newcomer to online dating asking “How will I know if he’s the one?” In that case I would say that a good clue will be how you feel when you are with him, and whether his personal grooming habits are up to your standards. In the case of mindfulness meditation, it will be what you feel when you are practicing, what you are feeling between periods of practice, what you have typically felt prior to meditating, and your grooming habits probably don’t figure into this particular equation. I’m not suggesting that “what you feel” equates to how you feel, but literally…

Boredom is a sign that we’ve become habituated. We’re getting stuck on automatic pilot, and losing touch with actual experience, which can always be interesting if we bring our curiosity to it. By helping us shift modes of mind from thinking into sensing, this practice invites us to rediscover interest, beyond our expectations. Linger on each step for at least three minutes. Seeing anew Take a familiar object from your home (such as a mug you’ve owned for years, an old photograph, a piece of clothing, or furniture) and examine it as if you’ve never seen it before. Let your thoughts about the object drop into the background as you offer it your full attention. Is there something you’d forgotten or never noticed before, or is your experience or reaction…

The brain has no pain receptors and so it wouldn’t hurt if someone plunged a knife straight into it. There are more bacteria living in your mouth than people living on Earth. Your body is made up of approximately 7,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000000 atoms (that’s 7 octillion). In a single day, a drop of your blood clocks 12,000 miles in its journey through your body. Your brain is made of 73% water. When you blush, so does the lining of your stomach. Half your DNA is the same DNA as a banana. Your body is continually regenerating. It makes 25 million new cells every second. The cells in your stomach are replaced once every five days, your taste buds regenerate every 10 days, the outer layer of your skin (the epidermis) once…

ATLANTA, GA Population: 463,878 Median household income: $46,439 Median age: 33 “The best way to change a community is to change the conversation,” says Robert Thompson, one of the founders of Compassionate Atlanta. And that’s been one of the campaign’s primary goals since the city adopted the Charter in 2014. To that end, the group focuses a lot of its attention on convening neighborhood forums on racial diversity and other topics to raise awareness of the benefits of compassionate action. Compassionate Atlanta has formed partnerships with more than 60 organizations, including Emory University, which has done extensive research on cognitive-based compassion training in conjunction with Tibetan academic institutions; the DeKalb Coral Group, a music society that performs in retirement homes and other locations; and the Community Assistance Center in Sandy…

1 Give the speaker your full attention. This is easier said than done, but simply requires an intention to do so and a bit of persistence. We can offer our presence in a relaxed way, just being there for another. Mindfully focus on the person. Let them be your main object of awareness. 2 Use your body to help you stay present. Our body is an incredible doorway into the present moment. Our mind can be anywhere: past, future, lost, reactive, spaced out, daydreaming, ruminating, angry, anxious…but our bodies are always in the present moment. If we can remember to bring our minds into our bodies—just feel a body sensation or two—while we are listening, we have immediate access to the present moment. 3 When your attention wanders away (and…

Our must-read story this issue: “Building a City that Lives on Love” tells us how the mayor of Louisville is helping the city he loves become a place that is centered on human caring. On page 60. If you’re going to take something up—learning a language or taking a course in managing difficult people or, say, meditating—you’d probably like to know whether it’s going to work, why you’re doing it, and what you might get out of it. Increasingly, we like those answers to come, if at all possible, in the form of some kind of data. We want evidence. Which is probably why mindfulness has grown in popularity in the 30 years since researchers started studying its effects in earnest. The marriage of science and mindfulness has been a…

THE POWER OF OFF The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World Nancy Colier • Sounds True Having a universal communicator, satellite-driven locator, and encyclopedia of all knowledge everpresent at our fingertips is making us a little bit crazy, and—according Nancy Colier, one of the newest entrants in the tech-survival guide game—a little bit unkind. As a therapist she has a window onto how a “teched-out mind” can make you unhappy. Her stories are warm, sad, funny at times, and they start to make you think too much “convenience” can actually be very unconvivial. DRAWING YOUR OWN PATH 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation John F. Simon Jr. • Parallax If you like the idea of mindfulness coloring books but you’re more of a draw-outside-the-lines…

When British author Karen Armstrong won the TED prize in 2008, she used the money to convene a group of religious thinkers from a wide range of faiths to craft an updated version of the Golden Rule for the 21st century. What emerged was the Charter for Compassion, which calls on people around the world “to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.” That document inspired the creation of an international network, which now includes hundreds of organizations and more than 75 cities, ranging from Karachi to Belfast to Chippewa Falls. Why the…

Like Dr. Johnson’s summation of the cosmopolitan life of 18th century London, mindfulness offers us full and open access to every experience. So does that mean if we’re bored in meditation, we’re also bored by our lives? And if so, what can be done about it? Meditation shows us our habitual patterns of mind; how we typically relate to the world. If we find the practice boring, our tendency may be to blame the experience—to think it’s our breath, body sensations, or thoughts that are boring. Yet, if we observe what’s happening carefully, we see that we’re actually relating to it in a bored way: We label meditation uninteresting, and we identify with the desire to get away from it. However, it’s actually our mind that creates the boredom, rather…

Louisville mayor Greg Fischer was on his way to a bourbon festival in nearby Bardstown when he got the call. It was from Dr. Muhammad Babar, a prominent member of the Louisville Islamic Center, who was disturbed because earlier that day vandals had defaced the mosque with bright red anti-Islamic graffiti: “This Is for France,” “Nazis Speak Arabic,” “Moslems Leave Jews Alone.” Some of the mosque’s members wanted to do a quick paintover of the graffiti, but Fischer advised against it, saying that the city—and the Muslim community, in particular—needed a chance to heal. So the next day they held a press conference at the mosque and invited the whole city to participate in the cleanup. The response was overwhelming. More than 1,000 people of all ages, races, and creeds…

“Let’s play Ramona.” Those three words from my six-year-old inspire a deep internal cringe (that I attempt to be mindful of). “Ramona” is my daughter’s invented doll game, based on the beloved classic book Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary. Beezus is the “good” sister—the dutiful, polite, compliant daughter, while Ramona is the “bad” little sister who locks a dog in the bathroom, scribbles in library books, and cooks her doll in the oven. Mira, my daughter, has worked out the game so that she is Beezus and I have to act out Ramona’s voice, but, did I mention? Ramona is a mermaid doll with pink hair. Ramona threatens to do terrible things like spray paint on the wall, hit people really hard, and pee on the rug. Beezus/Mira responds…

1 Speak authentically from our heart. Can we learn to speak in a way that we feel connected to our inner selves, so that we are expressing what’s true? Now certainly this needs to be well-timed— we’re probably not going to bare our soul to the barista making our coffee. But we can, in appropriate moments, purposefully speak with more intentionality and connection to ourselves. 2 As with mindful listening, we can always return to our bodies to come back to the present moment. When our speech gets disconnected, rambling, unhelpful, lost, we can take a mindful breath, or notice our bodies standing or sitting (or whatever it’s doing). This can return us to the present moment and potentially reinvigorate our connection to mindful speech. 3 We can always use…

Find a willing partner. One person will speak first and the other will listen—start by deciding who. In this exercise, the first speaker will speak for 90 seconds on the topic below. The listener can nod and smile and show that he/ she is interested, but not interrupt. After 90 seconds, ring a bell and take a silent pause to feel the impact of listening or speaking in that way. Then reverse roles and let the other person speak for 90 seconds. Ring a bell, take a pause, and then reconnect for a few minutes (with no rules!) to share what it was like doing the exercise and to follow up on anything you want to ask or say based on what your partner shared. Use the following topic: “What…

Are you familiar with the mid-afternoon slump? You know, the fog that rolls in sometime between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., without so much as a warning, destroying your will to do anything except curl up in a ball under your desk. You’re not alone. The afternoon slump is a real, biological phenomenon that lots of people experience every single day. In fact, it’s a sign your internal clock—fluctuations in energy and body temperature regulated by our circadian rhythms—is running on time. But that doesn’t mean the slump has to keep you down. Clear away the haze with a few body-and-brain-boosting tricks—none of which involve pumping yourself full of caffeine or sugar—so you can go forth into the world with a fresh mind. 1 Stretch Stretching for even 20 seconds…

Another way to awaken interest is to seek out new situations and experiences, inviting a different perspective. Try one of these each day for a week and notice what happens. 1 Take an unfamiliar route to work, or to a regular appointment. Change your mode of transport—if you usually drive, take the bus, or train, or walk. 2 Follow a recipe for a meal you’ve never tried, with at least one ingredient you’ve not before cooked with. 3 Start a conversation with someone you’ve never really talked with: the barista at your coffee shop or someone from a different department in your company who you sometimes see in the elevator—ask them how their day is going and be prepared to listen with interest. 4 Go to the cinema without checking…

I was walking on a warm September morning, lost in thought, listening to music through ear buds. I decided to leave the sidewalk to cut across the grass on the outer edge of Battery Kemble Park. The air was fresh and crisp: Presumably, the trees continued their dutiful business of absorbing gases and cleaning the air. That is when I saw it—an acorn, lying on a cushion of moss, half hidden beneath twigs and fallen leaves, not far from the veins of tree roots. The sighting was not surprising. After all, I was under cover of a few tall leafy oaks that stood guard at the northern opening of the forest. My senses had been preoccupied with the rhythm of walking, the sounds in my ears, and the path ahead.…