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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