12 Minute Meditation

Our bodies come in all varieties, and we all have different interests, skills, and abilities. As today's teacher Cara Bradley observes, movement of any kind—from the slightest stretch to the most intense exercise—can be mindful.

This simple meditation helps you celebrate your physicality with practices to connect with your breath and your body, expand your awareness, and appreciate the gift of being alive.

Cara Bradley is a seasoned mind-body expert dedicated to advancing mind-body education through movement, mindfulness and the science of human performance. She provides evidence-based mind-body approaches to global wellness brands, Fortune 100 companies and top-ranked sports teams, is the author of On The Verge: Wake Up, Show Up, and Shine and the Founder of Verge Yoga and Meditation Center. Cara was voted a "Top 12 Most Powerful Women in the Mindfulness Movement" by Mindful.org.

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 Cara Bradley here.

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Mindful movement comes in all varieties and can be a wonderful way to calm both body and mind. If you want to learn more, start with these resources from Mindful.org:

• Join the Nanalympics! 6 Ways to Get Playful with Mindful Movement

• 7 Mindful Movement Practices for Daily Life

• Swimming, Walking, Running—Why Mindful Movement Can Boost Resilience

• This Kind of Movement Can Be the Key to Healing Burnout

• Easy Ways to Make Mindful Movement Part of Your Day

For a creative and whimsical way to combine movement and meditation, try: Laughter Yoga: A Gentle Movement Practice to Get the Giggles Going

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This week, Mindful founding editor Barry Boyce reminds us of the basic why behind mindfulness meditation: We get off-kilter at various times throughout the day, and we need a way to pause and reconnect—with reality, with our senses, with our steady center. That's what meditation helps us do.

This practice is called "Taking Your Seat," and it's perfect if you're getting started with meditation, or if you just need a touchpoint during your day.

Barry Boyce is Founding Editor of Mindful and Mindful.org. He is a longtime meditation practitioner and teacher, as well as a professional writer and editor. Barry serves on the board of directors of the Foundation for a Mindful Society and the Centre for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto, as well as on the advisory board of Peace in Schools, in Portland, Oregon.

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 Barry Boyce here.

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Mindful.org has a wealth of articles, research, and guided practices that can help you start or grow your meditation practice. You can start here:

• Connecting With Why You Meditate Can Fuel Your Motivation

• Calm and Steady: Simple Ways to Create the Habit of Mindfulness

• Do I Need to Meditate to Be Mindful?

• Formal vs. Informal Mindfulness: 2 Ways to Practice

For another approach to a beginner's meditation, try: Beginner's Body Scan Meditation

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Learning to live with pain and illness is challenging, arduous work. Often, people can go for months or even years without sufficient answers. Life gets turned completely upside down. The body you thought you had suddenly becomes something you don't recognize or know how to work with.

This week, meditation teacher and hypnotherapist Juliana Sloane offers an imaginative meditation that invites softness and self-compassion in the midst of discomfort.

Juliana Sloane is a Buddhist teacher, hypnotherapist, and coach specializing in Depth Hypnosis, applied shamanic counseling, and client-centered neuroplasticity. She blends ancient wisdom traditions, hypnosis, and evidence-based approaches to help individuals create lasting transformation beyond the conscious mind. She helps clients transcend the limitations of talk therapy and achieve lasting transformation. Based in Santa Fe, NM, she teaches nationally and works one-on-one with clients worldwide.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online and in our app at Mindful.org next week.

Stay curious, stay inspired. Sign up for our free newsletter mindful.org/signup or download the app for free at mindful.org/app.

Show Notes

Find more from Juliana Sloane here.

You can read our recent interview with Juliana and learn more about her work combining mindfulness, meditation, and hypnosis for deeper healing and transformation with her clients.

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For more resources on how mindfulness can help you live more fully with illness or pain, check out these resources on Mindful.org:

• What Unexpected Chronic Back Pain Taught Me: 4 Takeaways That Matter

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

• Pain Opens a Door

• How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness

For more practice creating a sense of safety inside your own body, try: A Meditation for Easing Pain and Inviting Joy

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We often think of mindfulness and meditation as sustained states—when in reality, it's just a collection of micro-moments of stopping, breathing, really noticing our own bodies and our own lives, getting distracted, and then coming back again. Over and over.

As this week's teacher Shalini Bahl puts it, today's guided practice is about the art of stopping: letting go of our regular habits of the mind—the pushing, pulling, running in circles— and instead just being for a moment.

This is an extended practice, but as a bonus, we're also sharing a micro-practice version of The Art of Stopping that you can take into busy days. And don't miss Shalini's new article on Mindful.org that's all about the power of micro-practices to affect our daily choices.

Shalini Bahl, PhD, is the award-winning author of Return to Mindfulness and founder of Sama Life, where she offers daily live micro-practices for real-world engagement. Through her teaching, writing, and TEDx talks, she focuses on building practical mindfulness skills that disrupt default patterns and restore clarity, integrity, and care.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online and in our app at Mindful.org next week.

Stay curious, stay inspired. Sign up for our free newsletter mindful.org/signup or download the app for free at mindful.org/app.

Show Notes

Find more from Shalini Bahl here.

Go Deeper

For more resources on the power of the pause, check out these resources on Mindful.org:

• How Micro-Practices Can Be the Bridge Between Your Meditation and Your Choices

• W.A.I.T. a Minute: A Practice to Pause Before You Post on Social Media

• How to Get Good Pause

• Waking Up to Your World: Using the Pause Practice to Break Habitual Patterns

For more practice pausing before making choices by compassionately interrupting patterns, try: A 12-Minute Meditation to Get Curious About Your Cravings

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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].

You can find the extended 20-minute version of this meditation here.

Want to explore how micro-practices can help shift your patterns in your real everyday life when you're off the meditation mat? Check out Shalini's article, How Micro-Practices Can Be the Bridge Between Your Meditation and Your Choices.

In our concern for our children, sometimes we respond from a place of fear and worry. From time to time, we can even lose touch with the love that lies beneath that concern.

Reconnecting with the ground of our love and the wish for our children to be happy and well, especially in moments of difficulty, can be incredibly beneficial. This practice from Wendy O'Leary offers a pause of support and encouragement that can help you come back to that core of compassionate wisdom.

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 certified mindfulness teacher, parent educator, and self-compassion advocate with expertise in teaching emotional resilience to children and adults. Her card deck for children titled "Let's Grow Happiness," created in collaboration with her colleague Helen Maffini, is available for purchase at wendyoleary.com.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online and in our app at Mindful.org next week.

Stay curious, stay inspired. Sign up for our free newsletter mindful.org/signup or download the app for free at mindful.org/app.

Show Notes

Find more from Wendy O'Leary here.

Go Deeper

For more resources to support mindful parenting, check out these resources on Mindful.org:

• Mindful Parenting Toolkit

• Shifting Habits: Three Mindful Parenting Tips You Can Try Today

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

• Manage Big Parenting Feelings Before They Manage You

For more practice with meditations to meet your worry, anxiety, fear, or other difficult emotions, try: 12-Minute Meditation: A Grounding Practice to Create Space in a Storm of Emotions

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If you'd like to pre-order lifetime access to The Seven Strengths event recording, go to www.mindfulness.com/the-seven-strengths-hub to take advantage of our early bird pricing plus get a free bonus course from Melli O'Brien.

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

Our bodies are so overworked and often ignored. This guided awareness practice offers space to feel a sense of gratitude for our body, in all of its beauty and mystery.

Rashid Hughes (he/him) is a writer, meditation teacher, yoga instructor and a restorative justice facilitator. He is the co-founder of the Heart Refuge Mindfulness Community, a mindfulness community in Washington, DC that is dedicated to inspiring Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to live with love and courage. Rashid is an Affiliate Teacher for the Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC and is also a teacher of the Presence Collective. He holds a Master of Divinity Degree from the Howard University School of Divinity.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online and in our app at Mindful.org next week.

Stay curious, stay inspired. Sign up for our free newsletter mindful.org/signup or download the app for free at mindful.org/app.

Show Notes

Find more from Rashid Hughes here.

If you are looking for an in-depth resource to help build essential skills to meet a changing and uncertain world with a core of inner strength, join Melli O'Brien and a host of other teachers for The Seven Strengths, a FREE 7-day online course happening this May 13-19. Learn more and register at www.mindfulness.com/the-seven-strengths.

Go Deeper

For more resources to grow compassion and appreciation for the body, check out these articles on Mindful:

• What Green Spaces Can Do For Your Body, Your Mind & Your Practice

• Mindfulness Practices to Get Back in Touch with Your Body

• How to Befriend Your Body

• The Science of Embodiment: Connect to Your Body's Wisdom

For more practice with meditations to help you befriend and feel at home in your body, try A Meditation for Finding Safety in the Body.

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Thanks to our autonomic nervous system, life-sustaining processes like our heartbeat, digestion, and breathing all happen without us even having to pay attention. But our environments, stress levels, and other factors can definitely affect the health and efficiency of these processes.

For example, sitting hunched at our desks and staring at screens often means that our breathing gets shallow and irregular—which of course affects things like focus, energy, cognition, and attention.

This week, Shamash Alidina leads a guided breathing exercise called Light, Slow, and Deep (or LSD), designed to re-set the breath in a way that opens the chest, relaxes tension, and calms the nervous system.

Shamash Alidina has been practising mindfulness since 1998 and runs his own successful training organisation. He is the author of Mindfulness For Dummies, The Mindful Way Through Stress, and most recently, Breathing Exercises for Dummies. 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 and in our app at Mindful.org next week.

Stay curious, stay inspired. Sign up for our free newsletter mindful.org/signup or download the app for free at mindful.org/app.

Show Notes

Find more from Shamash Alidina here.

If you are looking for an in-depth resource to help build essential skills to meet a changing and uncertain world with a core of inner strength, join Melli O'Brien and a host of other teachers for The Seven Strengths, a FREE 7-day online course happening this May 13-19. Learn more and register at www.mindfulness.com/the-seven-strengths.

Go Deeper

Breathing mediations have many mental and physical benefits, and you can find dozens of resources on our site. Start here:

• The Breath is Your Superpower: 3 Ways to Help Kids Reset

• Email Apnea Is Real. Here's How to Breathe Better at Work

• What Science Says About the Power of the Outbreath

• Helping Black Women Take A Breath

• How Your Breath Controls Your Mood and Attention

For more practice with breathing meditation, try 12-Minute Breathing Practice for Awareness: Sit and Know You're Sitting or A Guided Meditation to Encourage Deep Breathing.

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].

City life can often feel frantic, loud, and cut off from natural beauty. It's not often we slow down and take in all there is to experience. But even in urban areas, if you pay attention, you can hear the call of a bird, notice your favorite color in shop windows, and look up at the vast sky above.

In this guided meditation, we slow our roll and take in the beauty of our surroundings, no matter where we find ourselves.

Kazumi Igus is a Los Angeles native, science teacher, and trained meditation facilitator through UCLA's Mindful Awareness Center. She currently serves as a WholeSchool Mindfulness Director at one of the few predominantly Black high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Her mission is to transform education into a system that is inherently responsive to students' social and emotional needs, explicitly fosters focus, and empowers students to develop emotional resilience in an increasingly challenging world.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online and in our app at Mindful.org next week.

Stay curious, stay inspired. Sign up for our free newsletter mindful.org/signup or download the app for free at mindful.org/app.

Show Notes

Find more from Kazumi Igus here.

If you are looking for an in-depth resource to help build essential skills to meet a changing and uncertain world with a core of inner strength, join Melli O'Brien and a host of other teachers for The Seven Strengths, a FREE 7-day online course happening this May 13-19. Learn more and register at www.mindfulness.com/the-seven-strengths.

Go Deeper

Looking for more reasons to head outside? Here are some additional Mindful.org resources to help you build a stronger relationship with Mama Nature:

• The Nature Remedy: Find Freedom from Tech Overload

• Nature-Based Mindfulness Practices for Families

• We're Hard-Wired to Crave Nature

• Why Is Nature So Good for Your Mental Health?

• What Nature Teaches Us About Well-Being

For more practice being intentionally mindful outside, try A 12-Minute Meditation to Rest in the Movement of Nature.

And more from Mindful here:

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Mindfulness meditation involves a willingness to be with ourselves as we are. It offers a way of learning to work with ourselves, and not on ourselves, especially if we are healing from perfectionism.

Mindfulness reminds us that not everything has to be "fixed"—and very often, our movement back to wellness starts when we stop trying to change ourselves and simply accept where we are with care and attention.

Cheryl Jones is a mindfulness teacher, health and wellness coach, and author of two books, Thriving When Your Cosmic Egg Is Cracked: A Mindful Journey and Mindful Exercise: A Bridge Between Yoga and Exercise. She was the recipient of the Chairman's Leadership Award and the Norman Vincent Peale Award for Positive Thinking for integrating mindfulness into corporate culture at Aetna. You can find her at www.linkedin.com/in/cherylljones/.

The transcription of this guided meditation will be online and in our app at Mindful.org next week.

Stay curious, stay inspired. Sign up for our free newsletter mindful.org/signup or download the app for free at mindful.org/app.

Show Notes

Find more from Cheryl Jones here.

If you are looking for an in-depth resource to help build essential skills to meet a changing and uncertain world with a core of inner strength, join Melli O'Brien and a host of other teachers for The Seven Strengths, a FREE 7-day online course happening this May 13-19. Learn more and register at www.mindfulness.com/the-seven-strengths.

Go Deeper

Healing from perfectionism isn't easy. It takes time and practice. Here are some additional Mindful.org resources to help you build a stronger sense of self-acceptance:

• Awareness in Action: Rethinking ADHD Through Mindfulness

• What Swimming Taught Me About Self-Compassion and Letting Go

• It's Selfish, It's Hokey, and I'll Lose My Edge: 3 Half-Truths About Self-Compassion

• How Self-Compassion Can Improve Teen Mental Health

• This Is What Fierce Self-Compassion Looks Like

Want to try more practices that foster self-compassion? Start here: A 12-Minute Meditation to Embrace All Your Parts

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].