This is the first meditation that Subha has recorded as an introduction to mindful breathing for young children. Mindfulness is a life skill that can be transformative specially for young children as they deal with "big" feelings. It can help them to get in touch with their body and work through the intense feelings. 

So many times we get caught up in our mind with our thoughts, stories and it can be really challenging to break through the continuous loop. This practice offered by Subha cultivates a gentle awareness that we have a choice in how and what we pay attention to. This practice can help you work with a particular situation or incident that you would wish to understand and process. 

We all have incidents or situations in our lives that are unresolved. This is a meditation practice that helps us to work with such situations by getting in touch with our feelings and understanding the needs that have been met or unmet. Working with our needs and feelings is a very powerful component of Non-Violent Communication practice. It may help to keep a copy of the needs and the feelings list as you do this practice. 

A typical gratitude practice focuses on an intellectual exercise of thanking one's body, relationships or material aspects. This is an experiential practice of gratitude offered by Subha, that helps us to get in touch with our breath, heart and mind and express gratitude for the unique being that we are. 

This is a meditative practice that helps you to deepen your awareness of your intentions and choices you make in your everyday life. The intention is the foundation of the practice of Non-Violent Communication in the daily life. There are many choices of intention - to connect, to correct or control, which dictates the strategies we use to meet our needs. The practice of Non-Violent Communication begins with the intention.  

This is Subha's version of the traditional loving-kindness practice. This practice focuses on visualising love and light instead of using words. This is a powerful heart practice that makes the concept of love for oneself and for others very real. This practice when done regularly can open up the heart and meet our needs for love, connection and affection into our lives. 

Opening our hearts is an essential mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is about paying attention, on purpose, with presence and non-judgement. Non-judgement means working from a space of kindness, compassion, love and curiosity. This practice is the traditional loving kindness practice that helps to open up one's own heart.  An open heart serves as a compass for the thoughts that we would like to choose to act on.  In the beginning, the words may seem mechanical or may not resonate, when that happens lean into the resistance and discomfort and see what happens. 

Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. The suffering comes when we are predominantly inside our head, and are caught in our thoughts and storylines. One of the ways to get out of the head, and break the cycle of thoughts and get some perspective is to get in touch with what is happening inside our body. Most of us live only in our heads, and think that the body is an apparatus that carries the head and the brain. Our entire body is responding to the thoughts, events, stimulus and this practice helps us to get in touch with our body and practice awareness & attention that would help us to get an "in"sight into what is happening within. 

Focusing on breath as an anchor is one of the traditional forms of mindfulness practice. This helps to build our muscles of "attention" of focus and of the "awareness" when the mind gets distracted and the "gentleness" with which we bring our mind back to the breath. 

This episode presents an introduction to mindfulness as a way to manage stress in an unpredictable world. The first step to managing stress is to build awareness through the practice of mindfulness. Subha introduces us to a practice of awareness in this episode.