Sometimes seasons of intense suffering show up in our lives—no warning, no easy answers.

This week, mindfulness teacher Vanessa Hutchinson-Szekely shares a tender meditation for those in the middle of pain. Based on her own experience with an extended episode of chronic back pain, she offers a moment of reprieve and caring attention to release tension and open to the possibility of joy.

Vanessa Hutchinson-Szekely is a California-French educator, writer and mindfulness advocate. As the founder of "Big Belly Breathing," including a podcast and YouTube channel, she offers mindfulness joy resources in English and French for kids and adults alike. Vanessa writes regularly, recently authored the Joy Burst journal, and teaches yoga throughout The City, bringing her passion for well-being to diverse communities. Feel free to connect with her for inquiries or discussions; she's eager to engage with fellow health enthusiasts and life lovers. Find her at www.bigbellybreathing.com.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Vanessa Hutchinson-Szekely here.

Go Deeper

For additional resources on finding moments of calm in the midst of suffering, check out these articles on Mindful.org:

• Let Your Pain Be a River: Vidyamala Burch on Living and Teaching With Chronic Pain

• Where To Start When There Is So Much Suffering

• Breaking Generational Patterns of Suffering

• Study: Mindfulness reduces suffering associated with pain

• How Mindfulness Provides Relief from Chronic Pain

And for another meditation you can use when pain flares, try this practice: Filling the Body With Light: 12 Minute Meditation

And more from Mindful here:

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The start of the holiday season can be amazing: festive energy, time with loved ones, and delicious food. But it can also be super stressful.

This week, we're offering a quick practice from Shamash Alidina that you can turn to when you're in the thick of it. It's not the usual 12 minutes, but it's perfect for when you're running errands, preparing for visitors, or just need a moment to gather yourself.

Shamash Alidina is best known as the internationally bestselling author of 10 books including Mindfulness For Dummies and The Mindful Way through Stress. He frequently pops up in newspapers, magazines, and on radio shows. Based in London, he runs online trainings and speaks at conferences all over the world. He's been teaching mindfulness full-time since 2010.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Shamash Alidina here.

Go Deeper

For additional resources on how to manage the stress of the Holiday season (or anytime), check out these articles on Mindful.org:

• A Simple Practice for Regulating Stress in the Body

• A Steady Heart: A Cardiologist's Advice for Lowering Stress

• Break the Cycle of Stress and Social Media: Learn a 3-step process that builds healthy habits

• Let Go of Stress and Welcome Wisdom

• How to Manage Stress with Mindfulness and Meditation

And for another meditation you can use when Holiday stress shows up, try this practice: A 12 Minute Meditation to Defuse Holiday Stress

And more from Mindful here:

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As today's teacher notes, self-compassion is different from self-esteem. Relying on building up our self-esteem tends to lead us to need a lot of external validation in order to feel ok. Instead, self-compassion is the idea that even with all of our flaws, we can still care about ourselves and see ourselves as infinitely worthy of love and belonging.

In this extended 30-minute practice, mindfulness teacher Diana Winston guides us through a process to get familiar with our self-judging voice and how we relate to our flaws, so that we can nurture compassion and recognize our own worthiness.

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.

Note that there is an extended silent pause in the middle of this recording to give extra time to practice.

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.

Go Deeper

We all have an interior voice that keeps a running commentary on everything we do. Occasionally that voice is encouraging or kind, but often it isn't. The thing is, most of us aren't even consciously aware of this constant internal chatter. We just think it's reality. Mindfulness gives us the tools to notice, recognize, and work with this mental monologue in ways that improve our ability to learn from mistakes, be accountable, make amends, and grow as people. To learn more about the Inner Critic and how to tame it, check out these resources from the website:

• Mindful Parenting: Meet Your Inner Critic with Self-Compassion

• How to Teach Your Kids About Their Inner Critic

• How to Recognize Your Inner Critic

• How to Be Kind to Your Inner Critic

And for more ways to work with that pesky internal voice, try this practice: A Basic Meditation to Tame Your Inner Critic.

And more from Mindful here:

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Forgiveness is almost never a one-and-done action. Whether what we're forgiving is big or small, our own error or someone else's—most often, there are residual feelings of anger, hurt, or resentment to contend with.

In this guided practice, Mark Bertin addresses this tendency to compound our suffering when we hang onto these difficult emotions. He offers a way to gently surrender this extra emotional baggage so that we can fully experience the healing that forgiveness offers.

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.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Dr. Mark Bertin here.

Go Deeper

Forgiveness is one of the most challenging mindful qualities to develop. Understandably, we want to feel seen and heard in our pain, and we don't want to feel like we're being walked over or making excuses for harmful behavior. From a mindfulness perspective, forgiveness holds all of these experiences in a kind of loving tension, allowing the complexities to surface. To learn more about what forgiveness is (and isn't) and how to nurture it in your daily life, check out these resources from the website:

• New Research on Mindfulness and Forgiveness

• The Work It Takes to Forgive

• How to Let Go of an Old Regret

• Let It Go: How to Practice Forgiveness

If you're at the very beginning of the process and want help getting started on your forgiveness journey, try this practice: A Guided Meditation to Welcome Forgiveness.

And more from Mindful here:

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Having chronic pain often feels incredibly lonely. You might not know anybody else who has the same condition. In addition, most people you're close to, even though they might be well-intentioned, might not understand what you're going through.

But the fact is that probably thousands and thousands of people all over the world know exactly what you're feeling. In this meditation, Christiane Wolf offers a guided practice to meet your own body in pain and relieve that sense of isolation by internally connecting with others who understand your experience.

Christiane Wolf, MD, PhD is a former physician, internationally known mindfulness and Insight (Vipassana) meditation teacher. She is passionate about translating ancient wisdom teachings into accessible and applicable modern-day language. She is the author of Outsmart Your Pain – Mindfulness and Self-Compassion to Help You Leave Chronic Pain Behind and the co-author of the classic training manual for mindfulness teachers, A Clinician's Guide To Teaching Mindfulness. Christiane is the lead-consultant and teacher trainer for the VA's (US Department of Veteran Affairs) National Mindfulness Facilitator Training and a senior teacher at InsightLA. She is the mom of three amazing humans and can usually be found in the Los Angeles area training for ultramarathons and triathlons.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Christiane Wolf here.

Go Deeper

Living with chronic conditions is one of the most difficult challenges to face—the effects are never just physical. While mindfulness is never a cure-all for pain or illness, it can offer relief in sometimes-surprising ways. To learn more about how mindful practices can ease suffering in mind and body, check out these articles from the archive:

• Let Your Pain Be a River: Vidyamala Burch on Living and Teaching With Chronic Pain

• The Science of Chronic Stress, Inflammation, and Mindfulness

• How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness

• How Mindfulness Provides Relief from Chronic Pain

For more practice using meditation to be with your body, even when it's in pain, here is a meditation from pain expert Vidyamala Burch: Filling the Body With Light: 12 Minute Meditation.

And more from Mindful here:

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We often imagine that our actions are the result of choice and awareness, which means that we can be extra critical of ourselves when we're struggling with habits that aren't serving us. But researchers in the science of habit and craving have found that much of our decision-making process is the result of unconscious neuro-chemical loops that reinforce themselves over time.

In this meditation, author and researcher Judson Brewer introduces a thoughtful way to bring genuine awareness and choice back into the equation when cravings arise.

Judson Brewer, MD, Ph.D. ("Dr. Jud") is a New York Times best-selling author and thought leader in the field of habit change and the "science of self-mastery," who blends over 20 years of experience with mindfulness training and a career in scientific research. He is passionate about understanding how our brains work, and how to use that knowledge to help people make deep, permanent change in their lives — with the goal of reducing suffering in the world at large.

Dr. Jud is the director of research and innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center, where he also serves as a professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University.

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

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About the Teacher

Find more from Judson Brewer here.

Go Deeper

Learning how to witness our mind without over-identifying with everything it comes up with is one of the most challenging parts of mindful practice. But it also yields some of the biggest benefits for our overall well-being. If you want to learn more about this foundational mindful skill, check out these resources from Mindful.org:

• A Basic Mindfulness Meditation for Labeling Thoughts and Emotions

• I'm More Than My Anxious Thoughts—And So Are You

• A Mindfulness Practice for Changing Your Relationship to Thoughts

• What to Do When Thoughts Arise While Meditating

For more practice on working with thoughts, here's another meditation you can try: Slow Your Breath and Your Thoughts.

And more from Mindful here:

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The nature of the mind is to make thoughts. All day long, mostly without our even noticing, the mind is generating thousands of thoughts. People often misunderstand mindfulness and meditation as ways to control or even stop our mind's churning—but that isn't even really possible.

With mindful attention, we can learn to notice and be aware of what our minds are up to, and that awareness is what gives us agency and opens new doorways to interior peace. In this meditation, teacher Vinny Ferraro guides us through a practice to see thoughts clearly as they arise, gently note them, and then return to the breath and body.

Vinny Ferraro has been a practitioner of insight meditation (vipassanā) since the early 1990s. He is a co-Founder of the Dharma Punx and co-Guiding Teacher of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. He is also a nationally recognized leader in designing and implementing interventions for at-risk adolescents and is currently Senior Trainer for Mindful Schools. In 1987, he began leading groups in drug rehabilitation centers, juvenile halls, and halfway houses. In 2001, he began teaching for Challenge Day, a nationally recognized, social & emotional learning program, eventually becoming their Director of Training and leading workshops for over 110,000 youth on four continents.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Vinny Ferraro here.

Go Deeper

Learning how to witness our mind without over-identifying with everything it comes up with is one of the most challenging parts of mindful practice. But it also yields some of the biggest benefits for our overall well-being. If you want to learn more about this foundational mindful skill, check out these resources from Mindful.org:

• A Basic Mindfulness Meditation for Labeling Thoughts and Emotions

• I'm More Than My Anxious Thoughts—And So Are You

• A Mindfulness Practice for Changing Your Relationship to Thoughts

• What to Do When Thoughts Arise While Meditating

For more practice on working with thoughts, here's another meditation you can try: Slow Your Breath and Your Thoughts.

And more from Mindful here:

More episodes of 12 Minute Meditation

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

What do you do when you've made a plan, you've done everything you can to make it work…and things still don't turn out the way you hoped? In frustration and disappointment, it's easy to focus on what's wrong.

This exercise—adapted from Start Here: Master the Lifelong Habit of Wellbeing by Eric Langshur and Nate Klemp, and led by mindfulness coach Priti Patel—offers a quick way to realign toward what is working, which can help us settle and give us clarity.

Nate Klemp, PhD, is coauthor of Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World. He is a former philosophy professor and a founding partner at Mindful. He is also coauthor of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship and Start Here, a New York Times bestselling guide to mindfulness in the real world. Nate received his BA and MA from Stanford University, and his PhD from Princeton University.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Nate Klemp here.

Go Deeper

Gratitude is a game-changer. It's so much more than just trying to scare up happy feelings—it's actually a practice that can rewire our brains, shift our neurochemistry, and improve our relationships over time. For more info on this small-but-mighty skill, check out these resources from Mindful.org:

• How to Practice Gratitude

• Gratitude for the Lousy Ingrate

• The Power of Gratitude (with a Healthy Dose of Cynicism)

• The Science of Gratitude

For more practice, here's A 12-Minute Meditation for Cultivating Daily Gratitude you can try.

And more from Mindful here:

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When 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:

• A Mindful Guide to Navigating Difficult Emotions

• Befriend Painful Emotions with the Handshake Practice

• Three Ways Acceptance Helps You Work with Difficult Emotions

• You Can Investigate Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them

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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If you've ever tried to push away anxiety or depression when they show up, you probably already know: Fighting these complex, difficult emotions usually doesn't work. In fact, our resistance often makes the experience even more challenging.

In today's practice, Ed Halliwell offers a guided visualization based on a foundational mindful question: What if you don't try to push this experience away, but instead watch it as it plays out?

Ed Halliwell is a mindfulness teacher and writer, based in Sussex and London, UK. He is author of three books: Into The Heart of Mindfulness, How To Live Well By Paying Attention and (as co-author) The Mindful Manifesto and teaches courses and retreats to public groups, in organizations and to individuals, face-to-face and online via Skype. He is also an advisor to The Mindfulness Initiative, which is supporting the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group to develop mindfulness-based policies for the UK.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Ed Halliwell here.

Go Deeper

Anxiety, panic, and depression can sometimes feel like a vortex we're sucked into that's impossible to get out of. It's important to understand that mindfulness and meditation aren't cure-alls or instant fixes, and that they're most effective when used in concert with other healing modalities. There are practices that can help us be with thoughts and feelings in a compassionate, non-judgmental way—and this open-hearted approach can often loosen the grip of difficult moments. If you'd like to explore more about how mindful practices can help improve mental well-being, check out these resources on Mindful.org:

• Practicing Self-Compassion Can Boost Your Mental Health

• Using Mindfulness for Mental Health

• Is Mindfulness a Treatment for Depression?

• 4 Ways to Curb a Panic Attack with Mindfulness

• How Mindfulness Protects Against Postpartum Depression

• ​​Unwinding Your Anxiety Habit Loop

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

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].