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This is a new day. A mindful day. Our day.
It’s still dark
when one small bird
fluffs his feathers
And lifts his voice
To sing up the sun.
Snuggled deep in our dreams,
we hear his clear song.
And we open our eyes
To the gift of a new day.
This day.
Our day.
Years ago, we attended a family meditation retreat with the beloved Buddhist teacher Thich
Nhat Hanh. The children loved him. He showed them how to count their breaths from one to
ten. (The best part was finding ten perfect stones to move from one pile to another.) During
walking meditation, he urged them all ahead with a running meditation. Another time, the
children served tea to the adults, moving carefully and slowly, focused intently on the task at
hand.
Today, there is growing recognition that practicing mindfulness has benefits for children
regardless of religious or spiritual background. From preschools to middle schools, educators
are incorporating mindfulness into their learning communities as a way to help young people
cope with emotions and anxieties.
Mindfulness can also start at home. Here in Oregon, the OPEC (Oregon Parenting Education
Collaborative), a public-private parenting education effort, provides evidence-based parent
resources on mindfulness: “The Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness with Children at Home.”
I hope my new picture book, Mindful Day, with gorgeous illustrations by talented California
artist Shirley Ng-Benitez, will also be helpful to families. Rather than a how-to, the story instead
follows a young girl, along with her mom and little brother, as they go about the simple,
ordinary activities of a day: eating breakfast together, getting dressed, brushing teeth, and
going to the market.
Shirley’s child-friendly artwork makes the characters come to life and examples of how to
practice mindfulness are integrated into the text. As the young girl pops a raspberry into her
mouth she says, “I chew slowly. It tastes sweet as summer.” She also practices being aware of
her breath. “Together we breathe: in out, soft slow. I look and listen. I play.”
Mindful Day was inspired by the time I’ve spent with my toddler grandson. I hope readers will embrace Mindful Day and make mindfulness part of their own family life. In this way, we can better treasure each precious moment—and help our children learn to do the same.
Thank you,
Deborah Hopkinson
Deborah Hopkinson has a master’s degree in Asian Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she studied the role of women in thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhism. She lived in Honolulu for 20 years and practiced Zen Buddhism with the late Roshi Robert Aitken, founder of the Diamond Sangha and Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She lives near Portland, Oregon. For more, visit deborahhopkinson.com.
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Shauna Shapiro: Good Morning, I Love You
Shauna Shapiro, PhD, is a teacher, public speaker, and author whose published works include The Art and Science of Mindfulness and Mindful Discipline. With Sounds True, she has published Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire Your Brain for Calm, Clarity, and Joy. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Shauna about the neurology of self-image and why conscious acts of self-compassion greatly enhance our well-being. Shauna comments on practicing mindfulness with warmth and open affection, as well as how this gradually cultivates empathy. Tami and Shauna also talk about “trusting the good heart” and the possibility of changing our baseline levels of happiness. Finally, they discuss why changing ingrained habits is so difficult and the subtle power of the daily self-affirmation, “Good morning. I love you.”(55 minutes)
Yoga For Pain Relief
Yoga For Pain Relief
We often find metaphors for life in our yoga practice, and those of us who come to yoga stiff or weak are only too familiar with confronting our edges. In most urban, contemporary societies, we are frequently exposed to confrontation: in our communities, our relationships, our jobs—the list goes on. Our success in dealing with confrontation and the stress it generates depends on our ability to recognize and adjust to what presents itself in those situations. It is often easy to avoid dealing with confrontation until it reaches a certain level of intensity and we are forced to address what stands in our way.
The Hidden Gift of Obstacles in Yoga
When our tools for dealing with confrontation are overwhelmed and when what we perceive as our very nature becomes threatened, our life systems—mental, emotional, and physical—begin to contract. If we ignore this contraction for too long, it can color the way we perceive our reality, and what is very unnatural to a healthy body begins to seem natural. Because this process occurs over extended periods, as in the aging process, we often lack the awareness that it is happening until we are beyond simple fixes.
Difficult Poses
Consider the beginner’s approach to difficult poses—even the relatively simple ones—that challenge flexibility, balance, or strength. These poses take our attention directly into areas of our body that are unfamiliar, painful, or unresponsive. This is often confronting. Stiff people have to learn how to work with pain, which is often intense, in order to remove the obstructions found in tight muscles or joints. Typically, this work is associated with movement where previously no movement existed or where it was extremely limited. The weak or overly flexible have to learn how to work without overworking, to create the support or resistance necessary to bring about the subtle movement of energy in the body to build stamina or strength.
It is a common experience for beginners to question why they lack movement or feeling in these areas in the first place and to wonder if there will ever come a day when it could be different. This is the beauty of the confrontation found in yoga, where opposites attract and working simultaneously with effort and non-effort is a very important lesson to learn.
Overcoming Resistance In Yoga
With many of the asanas that a beginner tackles for the first time, it is common to struggle with the opposing forces of particular actions found in a pose. Attempting to relax tight muscles is not easy when we are receiving a steady stream (or scream) of more demanding messages in the seemingly undecipherable language of pain. It can feel like the very resistance we experience has been protecting us from injury or overdoing something and that to surrender into this discomfort would be unwise.
Likewise, working with weak muscles to stay in a pose, to dig a little deeper, even for one more breath, seems to go against all of the yogic principles of nonviolence (ahimsa), and the anxiety that this can produce is real. Fatigue (mental and physical) seems to threaten our very existence, and every cell in our body is convinced that we’re approaching an injury or a near-death experience.
Hatha Yoga Is A Confrontational Journey
By its very nature, though, hatha yoga takes us on a confrontational journey that can produce the awareness required to overcome ingrained resistance and penetrate the dense matter of our consciousness. For those with chronically tight or weak muscles, the correct practice of asana with conscious breathing forces the mind into a very alert state and very quickly fills the gaps typically found in a beginner’s attention. This is a very important place to be. In it, we are given an opportunity to feel the power of this situation physically, to observe the dynamics of stress in an intense environment, and to overcome the mental or emotional struggle inherent in that predicament.
Of course, entering these situations in your practice requires a little preparation, and in the event of any preexisting conditions, it is beneficial and highly recommended to work with an experienced teacher who can suggest modifications to challenging poses. However, once you become familiar enough with your edge to gaze at what lies beyond it, an exterior guide will only be a distraction. Instead, you can reach inside yourself—toward your inner teacher—for guidance.
This is an excerpt from Gravity & Grace: How to Awaken Your Subtle Body and the Healing Power of Yoga by Peter Sterios.
Peter Sterios is a popular yoga teacher and trainer with over four decades of experience. He’s the founder of LEVITYoGA™ and MANDUKA™, as well as KarmaNICA™, a charitable organization for underprivileged children in rural Nicaragua. Sterios taught yoga at the White House for Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiatives for three years, and in 2018 he was invited to the Pentagon to share yoga’s therapeutic effects with the US Marine Corps. He resides in San Luis Obispo, CA. For more, visit LEVITYoGA.com.
Read Gravity & Grace today!
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Medicine Meets Meditation – with Drs. Andrew Wei...
Dear friends, enjoy this short exchange between Drs. Andrew Weil and Jon Kabat-Zinn on medicine and meditation. Jon and Dr. Weil have published a fascinating audio program with Sounds True entitled, “Meditation for Optimum Health: How to Use Mindfulness and Breathing to Heal Your Body and Refresh Your Mind.”
Andrew Weil: I’ve always been interested in the fact that there is a linguistic link between the words “meditation“ and “medicine.“ Both of them arise from a Sanskrit root that also has given us the English word “measure.“ And while it’s impossible to pin down the exact meaning of that ancient Sanskrit root, it seems to have to do with thoughtful action to establish order. Implied is a sense of some kind of active process: it’s work-action of some sort with a goal in mind, and the goal is creating order. So medicine and meditation are both different expressions of that kind of process in different realms.
Jon Kabat-Zinn: Adding to what Dr. Weil has said, I believe the common root “to measure“ has something to do with the platonic notion of “right inward measure.“ And so medicine is the restoring of right inward measure or order when our health is disturbed in some way. And meditation is, in my mind, the direct perception of right inward measure.
Sounds True: Is there specific evidence that meditation can impact health?
Andrew Weil: There actually has been a great deal of medical research on the health benefits of meditation. One of the researchers who has established a reputation in this area is Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School. Years ago, he described what he called “the relaxation response,” which was a set of physiological changes correlated with a particular type of meditation, namely transcendental meditation, which involves repetition of a mantra. And the typical changes that were seen were a slowing of heart rate, a slowing of respiratory rate, and a decrease in blood pressure. So I think in very simple terms, meditation is a way of engaging the relaxation response, a way of decreasing chronic, nervous driving of the cardiovascular and digestive systems.
Jon Kabat-Zinn: When we’re so busy, running here and there, that can be tremendously problematic in terms of our overall health—mental, physical, psychological, and spiritual. When we get really driven on automatic pilot, trying to get someplace else all the time, without being attentive to where we already are, we can leave a wake of disaster behind us in terms of our own health and well-being, because we’re not listening to the body, we’re not paying attention to its messages; we’re not even in our bodies much of the time.
Mindfulness—paying attention on purpose in the present moment nonjudgmentally—immediately restores us to our wholeness, to that right inward measure that’s at the root of both meditation and medicine.
More from Meditation for Optimum Health
The same ability that helps ordinary men and women achieve extraordinary success is also the secret to optimizing your life span, letting go of stress, and even enhancing your body’s self-healing powers.
In Meditation for Optimum Health, you will join bestselling authors Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn for a practical introduction that makes it simple to enjoy the life-changing benefits of meditation even if you’ve never tried it before.
How does meditation work? Can anybody do it? What do I need to get started? Is it religious? Does it have the power to heal? In alternating sessions, Dr. Weil and Dr. Kabat-Zinn give you straight answers to the most common questions about meditation, and dispel the myths and misconceptions surrounding this time-honored practice.
By learning to cultivate the power of your attention through daily practice, you can harness the full potential of your mind, and use it to enrich every dimension of your life. You will learn how meditation can actually unify your mind and body’s many related functions and help you start enjoying the best health of your life.
Complete with real-life examples, and a proven program of step-by-step meditations to get you started, here is the perfect introduction to the oldest and most effective system for feeling better, naturally: Meditation for Optimum Health.
How to Meditate – with Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön is treasured around the world for her unique ability to transmit teachings and practices that bring peace, understanding, and compassion into our lives. With How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind, Pema offers her first book exploring in-depth what she considers the essentials for a lifelong practice.
More and more people are beginning to recognize a profound inner longing for authenticity, connection, and aliveness. Meditation, Pema explains, gives us a golden key to address this yearning. This step-by-step guide shows readers how to honestly meet and openly relate with the mind, embrace the fullness of our experience, and live in a wholehearted way as we discover:
Visit the How to Meditate page for more information, a free sample, and ordering instructions.
Free audio teachings from Pema Chödrön:
The Art of Subtraction
Father Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest and prolific author. With Sounds True, he has released the six-part audio learning program, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis, in which Richard explores the life and teachings of this beloved figure, and offers ways we can incorporate his wisdom into our lives. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Father Rohr and Tami Simon discuss the relevance of Saint Francis in today’s world, what he calls the “spirituality of subtraction,” Jesus’ teachings on nonduality, and what genuine contemplation might look like. (52 minutes)
