Newsletter Articles

This year, we're bringing World Meditation Day down to earth with a week-long celebration of free meditations and live content unlocks.

For seven days straight, we're celebrating the power of meditation and mindfulness with practical techniques that you can apply to your everyday life.

Starting on Monday, May 15th and culminating on Sunday, May 21st with World Meditation Day, we invite you to join us on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth through free daily meditations.

I cried so much in the months after I had both of my two kids.

I cried in banks, in coffee shops, and lord knows every room of my house. I’m not actually sure who cried more – me, or my colicky babies. It wasn’t quite post-partum depression –I prefer to describe it as the everyday gut-wrenching, confusing, disorienting, sleep-deprived vertigo of parenthood.

Meanwhile, here I was, a meditation practitioner for almost two decades, with no clue about what my carefully cultivated spiritual practice had to say about this massive life shift.

Do I have your attention right now?

I hope so, but even if I do, I won’t keep it for very long. As you read this newsletter, chances are that you’ll miss up to half of what I say. And on top of that, you’ll finish reading it, convinced that you didn’t miss a thing.

There are days when I feel that climate change is the only thing that matters, and that the tragedy of it is unbearable. At least I know that I’m not alone. According to a 2020 study by the American Psychiatric Association, over half of Americans said they were somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change.

So what can we do?

According to the World Health Organization, "burnout" means emotional exhaustion, plus depersonalization, and a reduced sense of efficacy. But chances are, we don’t need that formal definition. All of us have experienced it, especially over the last year.

For many people, meditation is like trying to put a wild animal into a tight little cage. But, says meditation teacher Cara Lai, this approach doesn’t work.

Even when we are powerless to change it, it is possible to bear witness to suffering, mindfully present and aware. Zen monk Koshin Paley Ellison explains how.

We share some tips from Dr. Valerie Young, who appeared on a special episode of the Ten Percent Happier podcast co-hosted by Dan and Bianca Harris. Dr. Young is the co-founder of the Imposter Syndrome Institute, and offers up three key tools for handling imposter syndrome in their conversation.

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You can’t talk yourself out of imposter syndrome. Instead, try connecting with your body.

Meditation can help you relax, but more importantly, it can help cultivate an attitude of acceptance that makes falling asleep, or not falling asleep, more restful.

There’s more and more data showing that if you want to be happy, the most important thing in life is the quality of your relationships. In the midst of a holiday that would have you focus all your attention on your romantic partner (if you have one), we think it’s worthwhile to put some focus on friendships. 

It’s very common, in mindfulness meditation, to be invited to “rest the attention on the breath” or even “focus on the breath.”  But particularly if you’re new to meditation, you may have wondered: What does this actually mean? 

Here are three elements to consider.

Last fall, I traveled seven thousand miles to Dharamsala, in northern India's Kangra Valley, to a place that has been home since 1959 to one of the most recognizable human beings on the planet: the Dalai Lama. For decades, His Holiness, as the Dalai Lama is called, has been working with Western neuroscientists, combining ancient wisdom practices with modern science to study what really works to make us happy.

Editor’s Note: With many of us taking some down time this week, we thought we’d offer something lighter in this week’s newsletter: an adaptation of the children’s book by author and filmmaker Todd Strauss-Schulson titled, believe it or not, Your Mind Makes Thoughts Like Your Butt Makes Farts. We think it conveys the essence of mindfulness in a way that matches well with this week’s mood.

Grudges generally get a bad rap.  And for good reason – holding onto resentments can be toxic, trapping us in cycles of anger or bitterness.

And yet, all of us have grudges, no matter how much we’re told not to.  What if there were a way to allow them to exist, maybe even to learn with them?

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I first tried meditation nearly fifty years ago, and I have practiced psychiatry as a therapist for nearly forty.  In that time, I’ve written several books comparing, contrasting, and translating the ideas of one into the language of the other, all the while continuing to see clients and attend regular silent meditation retreats.

And yet, while my encounter with meditation has been the most important influence on my work, it was never something that I could describe easily.  Meditation has taught me, changed me, and shaped my life. But how do I use it—or how does it use me—in my interactions with patients?  I know meditation has taught me how to sit still and listen non-judgmentally, but are these the only ways it has contributed to my process?  How do the teachings of mindfulness show up in my day-to-day sessions?  What seeps through from my meditative experiences into conversations with my patients?

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One of the most common core beliefs that people in our society hold is that we are unworthy. We may hear it from others or we may hear it from ourselves. We may have gotten the message from the culture or from people in our families. And it can be very tender to contemplate when we turn our attention to it.

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As we approach the holiday of Thanksgiving, I’m thinking of the word “Enoughness.”

‘Enoughness’ is an awkward term, but it’s used a lot in meditation circles, because it refers to a sense that frequently comes about through meditation: that this moment, this body, even this life can feel like “enough,” even if it might be less than perfect. 

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It’s not just you – dread is on the upswing.

Whether it’s world events like political polarization or climate change, or personal anxieties like meeting new people or speaking on camera, more and more people are reporting experiences of dread: the uneasy feeling you get when you think that something you really don’t want to have happen, is going to happen.

We know this not only because we're feeling it ourselves, but because of the overwhelming response we got when we asked our community to tell us about their dread experiences.

This week, with the control of both houses of Congress at stake, Americans will head to the polls for a crucial election.

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Or will they?

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Midterm election turnout is always lower than in presidential election years, and even in 2020, with the highest voter participation in decades, only 66% of eligible voters actually cast a vote.

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And when people don’t vote, there are consequences.

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Editor’s Note:  We’re proud to feature this exclusive excerpt from Koshin Paley Ellison’s new book, Untangled: Walking the Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion, which is being published this week.  Please note this essay has themes that some may find disturbing.

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I grew up in a home that held violence and fear: an unstable, unpredictable home. I was raised by loving, ethically idealistic people with, at times, a huge gap between their values and how they actually functioned in the world.

Here’s how bad I am at mindfulness.

At this time each autumn, as leaves begin to fall in earnest here in the Northeastern United States where I live, I actually feel a desire to somehow paste them back onto the trees.

So much for “being in the present moment” and “letting go” and all the other things mindful people are supposed to do.

And I actually love autumn! I love the weather, the looks, the smells, even the dreaded pumpkin spice. But I know that, as the Starks were warned, winter is coming. For years, I’ve suffered from seasonal affective disorder, and while I’ve learned that mindfulness jujitsu of both accepting and mitigating it, still, I know it’s coming. Even if the autumn leaves are riotously beautiful, the bare branches of February are bleak and dour.

A few years ago, I signed up for something called a 360 Review, which is an anonymous survey of your friends and colleagues to get a panoramic sense of your strengths and weaknesses. I opted for the colonoscopy version, which also included my wife, my brother and two of my meditation teachers. 

Why?  Because after three years of meditating regularly, I wanted to get a sense of whether my inner work was having outer results.  Was meditation making me a better person, or just helping me feel less stressed inside?

Well, I got a big surprise. 

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The next several weeks, as we in the United States enter a highly contentious election season, will ask all of us some challenging questions: How do you remain engaged in civic life, even if you’re tired or frustrated? How can we connect to something larger than the small-minded views the world may be pulling us toward? How do values of compassion and mindfulness impact the actions we take in the public sphere?

I’ve spent the last four decades working to help people cultivate the inner capacities of mindfulness and lovingkindness through meditation and other practices, so naturally I think these practices have some answers to those questions.

Meditation saved my life when I was a teenager. I was bullied for six years for being perceived as queer in my small mountain town in Colorado. I wasn’t out yet, even to myself, but I was taunted, physically harassed, teased, and manipulated by peers who perceived something different about me. Beginning meditation in high school taught me focus, revealed an inherent goodness in me regardless of what was happening around me or being said about me, and showed me a spaciousness inside that could never be taken from me.