You may have heard of "impermanence" as an important theme in meditation. In this guided practice, Toby Sola introduces us to the ease of flow state with two simple but profound techniques: exploring impermanence directly by noticing changes in our body sensations, and using labels to hone concentration.  

Toby Sola is dedicated to helping you create a feedback loop between your meditation practice and your ability to make the world a better place. Toby has been teaching meditation for two decades and has refined his craft through years of monastic training and close collaboration with the world-renowned teacher Shinzen Young. He is an award-winning designer and founder of the Brightmind Meditation app.

Note that this meditation includes longer pauses of complete silence to give you time to spend in contemplation and practice the techniques introduced. If you want more time, feel free to pause the recording as you go.   

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week. 

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Show Notes

Find more from Toby Sola here.

Go Deeper

If you want to learn more about flow state, focus, and facing impermanence, here are more articles to explore:   

• Flow State: How to Get in the Zone 

• Find Your Focus: Own Your Attention in 12 Minutes a Day 

• Not Just Marking Time: How Rituals Help Us Face Impermanence with Mindfulness and Gratitude 

For more practice, here’s another meditation to try: A Guided Meditation to Rest in the Flow of Effortlessness.

And more from Mindful here:

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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 Initiative. Scott collaborates on neuroscience research into the efficacy of mindfulness training programs in high stress professions and has written numerous articles and authored five books on mindfulness, including The Elements of Mindfulness. He has appeared on television and radio and been interviewed in newspapers and magazines across the world for his creative and accessible methods of sharing mindfulness with people of all ages and walks of life. Scott is principal advisor to Innergy Meditation in Miami, and lives with his family in Miami Beach, Florida.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week. 

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About Our Contributor

Find more from Scott Rogers here.

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If you want to learn about how mindfulness can help you make room for and move through all kinds of challenging emotions, check out these articles:   

• A Mindful Guide to Navigating Difficult Emotions
• The Upside of Sadness 
• Making Friends with Difficult Emotions

For more practice, here’s another meditation to try: A Guided Meditation for Navigating Difficult Emotions.

And more from Mindful here:

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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 drifting off into silence.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week. 

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Show Notes

Find more from Diana Winston here.

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Reconnecting with our body and its signals is a key part of being able to drop into full relaxation and rest. Here are two more articles that can help you increase body awareness:  

• How to Befriend Your Body
• The Science of Embodiment: Connect to Your Body’s Wisdom

For more practice, here’s another meditation to try: A 12-Minute Body Scan Meditation for Letting Go of Stress and Falling Asleep

And more from Mindful here:

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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 is the author of How Children Thrive: The Practical Science of Raising Independent, Resilient, and Happy Kids (Sounds True, 2018). Dr. Bertin resides in Pleasantville, New York. For more, visit developmentaldoctor.com.

Together with ADHD Life Coach and Certified ADHD Educator Dana Crews, Dr. Bertin is leading a retreat October 10-12, 2025, to support adults navigating life with ADHD. Hosted at the Menla Retreat Center in the serene Catskill Mountains, Held and Whole is a restorative and educational three-day ADHD retreat that will offer practical, mindfulness-based tools to strengthen emotional regulation, deepen self-awareness, and foster authenticity. 

You can get more information and reserve your spot here. Plus, listeners to this podcast can claim a 15% early bird discount when they enter code “Mindful” at checkout, good through August 15th.   

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week. 

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More About Our Contributor

Find more from Dr. Mark Bertin and his work here.

Go Deeper

Being with reality exactly as it is, without judgment or denial, is one of the core principles of mindful practice. It is also one of the most challenging. If you want to learn more about what this principle looks like in practice, including fostering mindful awareness with neurodivergence, check out these additional articles:

• Wise Engagement with the World: What to Do When You Wish Things Were Different  

• Three Ways Acceptance Helps You Work with Difficult Emotions 

• Mindful Parenting for ADHD 

And for more practice building calm awareness in meditation, here are other meditations to try: 

• A Guided Breathing Meditation to Cultivate Awareness 

• A Mindfulness Practice for Nonjudgmental Awareness 

More from Mindful here:

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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 Management and is faculty director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program. A psychologist and research scientist by training, her expertise is the science of happiness, emotional intelligence, and social connection. Her bestselling book The Happiness Track (HarperOne, 2016) has been translated into dozens of languages. Her new book is Sovereign (Hay House, 2024). Seppälä is also the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week. 

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Show Notes

Find more from Dr. Emma Seppälä here.

Go Deeper

If you want to understand more about the practice of loving-kindness, why it matters, and how to build it—even with difficult people or in times when you aren’t feeling very compassionate—here are some articles to get you started: 

• Wise Engagement with the World: What to Do When You Wish Things Were Different
• Loving-Kindness Meditation with Sharon Salzberg

For more practice, here’s another meditation to try: A 12-Minute Meditation for Self-Compassion and Loving-Kindness.

And more from Mindful here:

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Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing [email protected].

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 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 at Mindful.org next week. 

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Show Notes

Find more from Dr. Patricia Rockman here.

Go Deeper

Shame is a universal and challenging human experience. If you’d like to learn more about where it comes from and how mindfulness can help heal the wounds of shame, these three articles can help:

• Feeling Lonely? 4 Ways to Release Shame and Build Healthy Relationships
• Tame Your Money Shame
• The Downward Spiral of Shame

For more practice, here is another Meditation for Working with Shame.

And more from Mindful here:

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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 Deep Resilience Method, released as her book Deep Resilience in February 2025. 

Starting July 15th, Melli is hosting The Deep Resilience Experience, a 30-day online course that will help you build unshakeable inner strength in 15 minutes a day. 

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week. 

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Show Notes

Find more from Melli O’Brien here.

To learn more about Melli’s upcoming Deep Resilience Experience (and how you can get $350 in bonus gifts when you sign up before July 15th), click here. 

Go Deeper

Want to understand more about the connection between practicing mindfulness and easing anxiety? These three articles are a great place to start:

• Unwinding Your Anxiety Habit Loop 
• Most Habit-Change Tools Fail With Anxiety—Here’s One that Works
• Why Does My Anxiety Keep Coming Back?

For more practice, here are 5 Guided Meditations for Panic and Anxiety that you can try when you need support.

And more from Mindful here:

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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 kindness meditation to reconnect us to ourselves and others. She studies in both the Tibetan and Insight schools of Buddhism and is a certified mindfulness instructor. Her book Happy Relationships: 25 Buddhist Practices to Transform Your Connection with Your Partner, Family, and Friends, is published with Prometheus Books. You can learn more about Kimberly on her website, www.meditationwithheart.com.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week. 

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Show Notes

Find more from Kimberly Brown here and read her recent (and timely) article on Mindful.org.

Go Deeper

Want to learn more about how taking intentional breaks can make your days better? These two articles are a great place to start:

• Break Up Your Work Day with Purposeful Pauses
• How to Get Good Pause

For more practice, try this 12-Minute Meditation to Cultivate Calm and Clarity that you can turn to when you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed and need a break.

And more from Mindful here:

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Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing [email protected].

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 better place. Toby has been teaching meditation for two decades and has refined his craft through years of monastic training and close collaboration with the world-renowned teacher Shinzen Young. He is an award-winning designer and founder of the Brightmind Meditation app.

Note that this practice includes long pauses of complete silence to give you time to spend in contemplation. If you want more time, feel free to pause the recording as you go. 

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week. 

Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter:  mindful.org/signup

Show Notes

Find more from Toby Sola and his company Brightmind here.

Go Deeper

Want to learn more about training your attention? Here are two articles we think you’ll love:

• Paying Attention to the Space In Between
• Reclaiming Our Attention From “Convenience”

For more practice, try this 3-Part Focused Attention Meditation Series you can use to strengthen your focus when you feel distracted.

And more from Mindful here:

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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. 

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Show Notes

Learn more about Tara Healy here.

And more from Mindful here:

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Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing [email protected].

Today, meditation teacher and bestselling author Jon Kabat-Zinn guides us through a silent walking meditation—a great addition to your mindfulness toolkit and a way to enter more deeply into the vitality & sensory richness of what is happening in & around you right now. [link]