Most of us spend most of our waking hours at some kind of job, whether that's in an office, a classroom, or in our own homes. This week, mindful leadership expert Jancie Marturano leads a practice you can do at your desk—or anywhere—to give yourself a mindful pause during busy days.

Janice Marturano is founder and executive director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, a nonprofit that trains and supports leaders in exploring mindfulness and leadership excellence. She founded the institute after ending her tenure as Vice President of Public Responsibility and Deputy General Counsel for General Mills. She is the author of Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Janice Marturano and her commitment to raising mindful leaders here.

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Mindfulness and meditation don't just have to happen on a cushion. Learn more about creative ways to incorporate mindfulness into your everyday, real life here:

• The Power of Running and Meditation: A Guide to Mindful Movement

• Nature-Based Mindfulness Practices for Families

• Everyday Mindfulness Techniques: Mindful Photography

• Practice Mindfulness With Everyday Sounds

For more practice, here's another meditation to try: A Guided Walking Meditation to Notice the Beauty Around Us—Even in the City

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We often think about gratitude as happening in response to "good" things—but what about moments that aren't grand or overtly happy, but are small and emotionally neutral? This week, Kim Armstrong leads a guided visualization practice to help you notice, take in, and consciously appreciate even the basic things we do every single day.

Kimberly Armstrong is a cofounder and facilitator at Space Between. She practices mindfulness in order to know, see, and feel what is really important in life. Kim has a masters in Child and Adolescent Psychology from the University of Washington and is a certified meditation teacher and 500 hour yoga teacher. Kim's superpower is deep listening with full presence. When she isn't managing operational details, she can be found strumming chords on her guitar.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Kin Armstrong here.

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If you want to learn more about how starting or growing a robust, regular gratitude practice can improve markers of physical and emotional well-being, check out these articles:

• How to Practice Gratitude

• Gratitude for the Lousy Ingrate

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

• The Science of Gratitude

For support in establishing a daily practice, we also have a beautiful Gratitude Journal, and a deck of flexible, versatile Gratitude Affirmation cards.

For more practice, here's another meditation to try: A Guided Meditation to Awaken the Flow of Gratitude in Nature

And more from Mindful here:

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When we are experiencing a lot of stress or recovering from trauma or addiction, we can find ourselves living in a fight-flight-freeze state, where we feel either disconnected from or unsafe in our bodies. This practice is designed to gently cultivate a sense of safety and then create a kinesthetic anchor (rooted in awareness of how our body is moving) to start building a felt sense of security that your body can remember.

Emily Jane is a mindfulness teacher, certified Embodied Processing (EP) practitioner, and recovery coach with a background in social work. She's been in recovery for over eight years, following two decades of active addiction, and her lived experience now fuels her passion for helping others heal. Emily is also the author of Beyond Addiction: A Mindful Guide to Recovery, where she shares her trauma-informed, compassionate approach to healing. Her work integrates mindfulness, coaching, trauma therapy, and somatic tools to help people reconnect with their bodies and find safety, peace, and empowerment on their recovery journey.

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

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Show Notes

Find more from Emily Jane here.

You can order your copy of Beyond Addiction here.

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If you want to learn more about embodied practice and how mindfulness can aid in addiction recovery, check out these articles:

• Make It Personal: How Mindfulness Can Support Highly Stressed People

• A Simple Inquiry Practice to Unwind from Stress

• Could Mindfulness Decrease the Severity of Opioid Cravings?

• Constant Craving

For more practice, here's another meditation to try: HALT Practice to Tune In to What Your Body Needs

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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