12 Minute Meditation

Beyond just feeling good, laughter releases dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins , and also works on our heart, our lungs, our muscles, our thoughts, our behaviors. In short: laughter actually is good medicine. And here's a funny thing: whether we laugh in response to something, or we create a situation that gets laughter going, the body will still release the same endorphins. Try this qu...

Joy aids us in waking up to our lives, and savoring is a practice that allows us to slow down, immerse ourselves in experience, and deeply appreciate the moment we're inhabiting. These two together are a powerful antidote to the gravitational pull of negativity, doomscrolling, and despair.  Jessica Morey is a meditation teacher and coach. She has been practicing meditation for almost 3 decades. Sh...

When we talk about attention, we often use active and extractive verbs: pay, give, court, leverage . In mindfulness, attention isn't a commodity to be used; it's a gift to be nurtured. What might it feel like to rest our attention?  This week, teacher Sharon Salzberg offers a guided meditation that's down-to-earth and deeply restorative as we practice holding our awareness with the lightest touch...

One of the core principles of mindfulness practice that can be a challenge for people is the notion that it actually makes more sense to accept our emotions rather than resist them. Especially when it comes to painful, confusing, or frightening emotions, this move towards ourselves in compassion can feel incredibly counterintuitive.  This week, author and recovery coach Emily Jane guides us throug...

Our bodies come in all varieties, and we all have different interests, skills, and abilities. As today's teacher Cara Bradley observes, movement of any kind—from the slightest stretch to the most intense exercise—can be mindful.  This simple meditation helps you celebrate your physicality with practices to connect with your breath and your body, expand your awareness, and appreciate the gift of be...

This week, Mindful founding editor Barry Boyce reminds us of the basic why behind mindfulness meditation: We get off-kilter at various times throughout the day, and we need a way to pause and reconnect—with reality, with our senses, with our steady center. That's what meditation helps us do.  This practice is called "Taking Your Seat," and it's perfect if you're getting started with meditation, or...

Learning to live with pain and illness is challenging, arduous work. Often, people can go for months or even years without sufficient answers. Life gets turned completely upside down. The body you thought you had suddenly becomes something you don't recognize or know how to work with.  This week, meditation teacher and hypnotherapist Juliana Sloane offers an imaginative meditation that invites sof...

We often think of mindfulness and meditation as sustained states—when in reality, it's just a collection of micro-moments of stopping, breathing, really noticing our own bodies and our own lives, getting distracted, and then coming back again. Over and over.   As this week's teacher Shalini Bahl puts it, today's guided practice is about the art of stopping: letting go of our regular habits of the...

You can find the extended 20-minute version of this meditation here .  Want to explore how micro-practices can help shift your patterns in your real everyday life when you're off the meditation mat? Check out Shalini's article, How Micro-Practices Can Be the Bridge Between Your Meditation and Your Choices . 

In our concern for our children, sometimes we respond from a place of fear and worry. From time to time, we can even lose touch with the love that lies beneath that concern.  Reconnecting with the ground of our love and the wish for our children to be happy and well, especially in moments of difficulty, can be incredibly beneficial. This practice from Wendy O'Leary offers a pause of support and en...

Our bodies are so overworked and often ignored. This guided awareness practice offers space to feel a sense of gratitude for our body, in all of its beauty and mystery. Rashid Hughes (he/him) is a writer, meditation teacher, yoga instructor and a restorative justice facilitator. He is the co-founder of the Heart Refuge Mindfulness Community , a mindfulness community in Washington, DC that is dedic...

Thanks to our autonomic nervous system, life-sustaining processes like our heartbeat, digestion, and breathing all happen without us even having to pay attention. But our environments, stress levels, and other factors can definitely affect the health and efficiency of these processes.  For example, sitting hunched at our desks and staring at screens often means that our breathing gets shallow and...

City life can often feel frantic, loud, and cut off from natural beauty. It's not often we slow down and take in all there is to experience. But even in urban areas, if you pay attention, you can hear the call of a bird, notice your favorite color in shop windows, and look up at the vast sky above.  In this guided meditation, we slow our roll and take in the beauty of our surroundings, no matter w...

Mindfulness meditation involves a willingness to be with ourselves as we are. It offers a way of learning to work with ourselves, and not on ourselves, especially if we are healing from perfectionism. Mindfulness reminds us that not everything has to be "fixed"—and very often, our movement back to wellness starts when we stop trying to change ourselves and simply accept where we are with care and...

Change of any kind—whether it's small, momentous, expected or unexpected—can make us feel so vulnerable and unsteady.  This week, Susan Bauer-Wu offers a guided meditation to invite and nourish inner strength in the face of change.  Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD, is a registered nurse and nursing educator, as well as a mindfulness teacher and researcher. She is president of the Mind & Life Institute and aut...

Our culture prizes certainty and tends to regard not-knowing as weakness or failure.  But research has shown that uncertainty is a quality that we're meant to engage, not reject. Not only does it spark curiosity and help us learn, but it also strengthens confidence and resilience.  This week, Dr. Sará King offers a practice to help us build comfort with our "don't-know mind" so that we can stay co...

When we are going through a difficult season personally, or we are bearing witness to the pain of others, our relationship to genuine joy or happiness can get complicated and confusing. Happiness can feel out of reach, or it can feel like a betrayal, like it's something we don't "deserve" in hard times.  But strengthening our ability to notice and soak in moments of beauty, tenderness, connection,...

There are so many reasons why we might be struggling to get to sleep and stay asleep. Work or relationship stress, health concerns, hormonal changes, the state of the world—there's plenty to keep us awake at night.  This week, Mark Bertin offers a soothing sleep practice to help settle our restlessness, using the breath as a calming anchor to gently coax our busy minds and tense bodies into rest. ...

Daily life is full of irritations: moments of inconvenience, situations where we don't get what we were hoping for, delays, disappointments, prickly interactions that can leave us confused and exasperated.  If we're honest, we can probably admit that sometimes our reactions in those moments tend to be reflexive rather than intentional. We feel our anger or annoyance rise, and we react almost as th...

It's not always an instinctual go-to for us, but self-compassion is one of the most powerful forms of healing and restoration for our mental and physical well-being.  In this meditation, mindfulness teacher Shamash Alidina offers three ways to show compassion for yourself when you're stressed and need a reset.  Shamash Alidina has been practising mindfulness since 1998 and runs his own successful...

There's a paradox inside mindfulness practice: When we want to heal something, we move toward what hurts, not away from it. It's not easy to keep our hearts soft or open, and a mindful practice doesn't change the inherent risks in being a human in a world of other humans.  This week, as part of his mini-course Opening Ourselves Up to Compassion, Vinny Ferraro shares a practice to meet our pain and...

Everything is impermanent. It's always changing, coming together and falling apart. This, of course, includes small daily things and massive, disruptive, and life-shattering things.  It's frustrating to not be able to control these movements and outcomes. But paradoxically, when we can accept that everything is not up to us, and we stop trying to control what we can't change or trying to predict w...

Many of us are bearing witness daily to suffering all over the planet. We care about others, and we want desperately to be of use—and seeing the horrors in images and videos and stories every day can be deeply dysregulating to our nervous systems.  When we get overwhelmed by this vicarious trauma, we tend to shut down. We disconnect from ourselves and each other. We're so spun out in our anxiety,...

We often treat experiences like restlessness, uncertainty, or the overwhelm of difficult emotions as a problem to be solved. And of course, it's normal to want relief.  Today, teacher Cherl Vigder Brause leads a guided practice that's centered around meeting ourselves exactly where we are. In that pause, where we encounter ourselves without trying to fix anything, even if just for a moment, we act...

Loving-kindness seems like a practice that would feel good—but in times of tension, uncertainty, pain, or anger, it can be one of the most challenging mindfulness tools to apply. How do we love when it is most difficult to love?   This week, renowned teacher Sharon Salzberg offers a guided practice to connect us to the deep heart and transformative courage of metta or loving-kindness meditation.  ...