This guided meditation allows us to move out of our own experience and open up to what is happening around and within us. This meditation cultivates awareness in a detailed way to deepen your mindfulness practice. 

Show notes: This meditation is adapted from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Guided Mindfulness Meditation Series 3, available here. These guided meditations are designed to accompany Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Meditation is Not What You Think and the other three volumes based on Coming to Our Senses.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as well as the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Can you extend compassion toward a difficult person in your life? Congressman Tim Ryan tries a practice to help him reach across the aisle.

In a world driven by competition and comparison, Sharon Salzberg contends shifting our definition of love might be the key to reconnecting to what matters most.

As part of the “Real Love with Sharon Salzberg” event hosted by Women of Wisdom and Mindful, meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg discussed the true meaning of love for ourselves, others and life. The following is an excerpt of her talk.

As we become more familiar with practicing mindfulness, we can begin to enjoy it as an opportunity to simply be—to inhabit our body and be wherever we are without having to do anything in particular. 

Show notes: Meditation by Barry Boyce. 

Barry Boyce is founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org. A longtime meditation practitioner and teacher—as well as a professional writer and editor—he is the editor of and a primary contributor to The Mindfulness Revolution: Leading Psychologists, Scientists, Artists, and Meditation Teachers on the Power of Mindfulness in Daily Life.

The moment of noticing a thought is a very powerful moment. It’s really where the real meditation occurs. That’s because there’s a spark of insight at that point, what in technical terms is called meta-awareness: you’re aware of your thought process, not just caught up in it. Now at that moment, there are lots of possibilities.

Show notes: Meditation by Barry Boyce. 

Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and Mindful.org. A longtime meditation practitioner and teacher—as well as a professional writer and editor—he is the editor of and a primary contributor to The Mindfulness Revolution: Leading Psychologists, Scientists, Artists, and Meditation Teachers on the Power of Mindfulness in Daily Life.

Explore a brief mindfulness meditation practice from Barry Boyce, Editor-in-Chief of Mindful. This is a short practice for settling the mind, intended for doing in the middle of the day, wherever you are out in the world. 

This guided meditation is an introduction to deep belly breathing which helps you relax and reduce stress. The practice triggers the relaxation response, which is the opposite of the fight-or-flight response. 

Show notes: This meditation is adapted from shamashalidina.com.

Shamash Alidina is the author of Mindfulness For Dummies and most recently, The Mindful Way Through Stress.

This guided meditation is about labelling your emotions. Research suggests that the practice helps the amygdala, the structure in the brain that registers danger, become less active. 

Show notes: Adapted from The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff and Chris Germer. 

Audio: © Christopher Germer & Kristin Neff. Mindful Self-Compassion. June 2017. All rights reserved.

Christopher Germer, Ph.D., has a private practice in mindfulness and compassion-based psychotherapy and is a psychiatry lecturer at the Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance.

An excerpt of a longer conversation with Rhonda Magee on mindfulness and dismantling the subtle habits and patterns that separate us. In this excerpt, Magee explores how mindfulness can be both a tool for personal growth and societal transformation—not either or, both "both, and," as she puts it.