Our Mindful Nature: Meditation Inspired by Nature to Soothe the Overwhelmed Mind and Ease Anxiety

Two of the most common questions I receive from meditation students: How do I know meditation is actually helping me? Will meditation help with my depression/anxiety/PTSD? Today, I am bringing you a fascinating conversation with one of the world’s experts on what meditation actually does for your brain, Dr. Andrew Newberg, and he is going to help me answer these very questions! Dr. Newberg is the...

Today’s mini meditation is from my exclusive content from Shoreline meditation app. This meditation is accompanied by a custom soundscape from Gordon Hempton. Use headphones for the best possible experience. There is a reason so many fairy tales take place in a forest. There is something magical that happens here. It is a little dark, a little scary, a bit light, and a bit life-affirming. The fore...

Y’all know I am a voracious reader, right? So much so that I considered calling my donation page a “buy me a book” page. Books inspire me, provoke questions, and uplift me. I am releasing a series of interviews with authors of some new books that I have just read and love deeply!  You know the other thing that I love and do daily {aside from meditate}? I journal. Journaling is such an importa...

What an important conversation I am sharing with you guys today. I recently had the tremendous honor of having a conversation with Dr. Traci Baxley, the author of Social Justice Parenting: How to raise compassionate, anti-racist, justice-minded kids in an unjust world.  Dr. Baxley’s work introduces clear, do-able and specific steps for families to take to engage in the social justice activism...

In a recent meditation, the Franciscan priest and author Richard Rohr wrote: “Being human means acknowledging that we're made from the earth and will return to the earth. We are earth that has come to consciousness. In all the ancient teachings, we read that the body is a microcosm of the universe. There is both poetry and science in these statements. When we acknowledge the truth of this connecti...

Recently, I listened to an interview with Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. She talks so beautifully about how forests are wired for wisdom and how trees that we previously thought were drowning out young saplings are actually helping them to thrive, much like a grandmother-mother-child relationship. Within this interview, a comment was made t...

As our Living in a Divided World meditation series comes to end, I wanted to wrap up the month with a discussion with one of the amazing creative souls that has provided me with a sense of connection and hope during the pandemic - my cousin! Uli Beutter Cohen is a New York City–based documentarian, artist, and the creator of Subway Book Review. She explores belonging to a time and place through wr...

In this mini meditation, we dig into the four qualities that all beings possess in immeasurable quantities. Lovingkindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy & Equanimity. This guided meditation will walk us through all four qualities, allowing us to foster and grow what we need most for the days that lie ahead. These mini meditations are meant to support a daily home practice. Tune in every Monday...

This meditation series, Living in a Divided World, is a series about truly acknowledging the level of divisiveness in our society and in ourselves at this particular moment in time. It is a series exploring how we might find a sense of balance or even peace within the fractures. Part 1 invited us to courageously stop and notice that we stand at a crossroad. A crossroad between aversion {all that w...

As we explore living in a divided world, as we struggle with the myriad of problems that face us in this moment, it can be hard to understand the teaching of The Middle Way. The invitation to rest in the middle of tension, paradox or discord without needing to resolve it, can feel uncomfortable to say the least.  As I work through this teaching in my own practice, I often find myself reflecti...

“Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.” ~Ajahn Sumedo As we talk about facing the divisiveness that plagues our every moment, the never-ending...

As we explore the paradox of the deep divides of our world today and the teachings of connectedness that have existed throughout time, we use practices like this meditation to help us land right here in the present moment. Meditation is always inviting us into the reality of the present, where all opposites exist at once. "The still point of the turning world" as T.S. Eliot calls it. We can choose...

Today’s episode kicks off a new series for me, and I've been turning this over in my mind for months {maybe years?}... exploring how our meditation practice invites us to engage with a world that feels more divided than ever. This month, on The Mindful Minute we are going to *Deal with Divisiveness* - I struggle as much as the next person with fear, outrage, frustration and exhaustion. And yet, I...

BIG news, y’all! This month I am celebrating 5 YEARS of podcasting?! 5 years of creating, writing and sharing meditations with you. And, this little podcast has grown to over 40,000 listeners each month! Wow. And, thank you! Thank you for listening and being a part of this community. I’ve got some big goals and some fun giveaways to help celebrate this milestone. Tune into today’s episode to learn...

What a fun show I have in store for you today! As I very often do these days, I got an email a few months ago suggesting that I consider artist Kyle Webster as a guest for The Mindful Minute. Now, I get a lot of these emails and 99% of the time, I say ‘no thank you,’ because this show is not primarily about interviews, but occasionally one feels like a really good fit. And this one??? Well, it was...

This class originally aired in July 2020: According to the Yoga Sutra, meditation connects us to our inner luminosity & sorrowless joy. In modern day terms, when we talk about meditation as a tool for emotional resiliency, we are really talking about tapping into this inner luminosity. ⁠ ⁠ We won't avoid hardship and pain in our lives just because we meditate, but we will be able to maintain c...

This class originally aired in July 2020 and is just as fitting today as it was then: This month, my meditation series has been focused on building emotional resilience. We are learning how to use the tools of meditation to help us not only survive tough times but more so to thrive in our daily lives. Today’s episode, the final installment of this series, is my personal favorite because I think it...

This class originally aired in July 2020: If you’ve discovered each time you sit to meditate lately, you are overcome with feelings of discomfort {too many thoughts, too much tension or anxiety in the body, too busy, etc.} then this is the class for you. Over the last few months, as I’ve sat to meditate, I’ve noticed a literal feeling of “tangle” in my chest. A tight, anxious, moving feeling that...

As pandemics and humanitarian crises abound, I am re-releasing my July 2020 series on emotional resilience. This particular class couldn’t have come at a better time. When our hearts are breaking, our fear is overwhelming, and we feel helpless to offer help or answers, we must lean into our own discomfort without needing to fix it. We must love the tangle. Keep practicing. Keep Going. I’m with you...

This class originally aired in July 2020: We can all apply specific mindfulness techniques to help us navigate these emotionally tricky times with as much emotional resiliency as possible. The goal is not to avoid hard times, but to know without doubt that you can survive these times. When we are feeling the impact of traumatic stress, one of the primary feelings is one of powerlessness. Therefore...

Well my loves, school has started here and already we are getting covid exposure emails, the news is filled with fourth wave worries, and I’m feeling much of the familiar worry, frustration and fear that I felt last year at this time. So I’ve decided to pause some of the upcoming interviews I have planned, and instead, I’m going to re-run the series I created in July 2020 - Meditation & Emotio...

Today’s mini meditation is one of the most popular meditations on my app - Shoreline. Take 5 minutes to try it now! “Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.” ⁠ ~Robert Louis Stevenson⁠ ⁠ There is something about the imagery of a clock in a thunderstorm - a steady, safe consistency that invokes t...

Well y'all... I was SO excited to host this conversation with my Teacher, Tracee Stanley, that I forgot to switch to my podcast microphone for recording.... So the audio might sound a bit different, but I promise the conversation is 100% worth listening to! Without doubt, if you listen to one of my episodes from 4 years ago and one today, you will hear quite a difference in my teaching. Much of th...

This week’s mini meditation is a self-compassion break guided by Dr. Kristen Neff. It is a powerful practice that offers you the chance to access exactly what you need in this moment - tender or fierce self-compassion. You can listen to the full interview with Dr. Neff in the previous episode titled Fierce Self-Compassion. You can learn more about Dr. Neff’s work here: https://self-compassion.org/...

I am thrilled to share today’s episode with y’all - I am talking with Dr. Kristen Neff. Kristin Neff received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, and is currently an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. During Kristin’s last year of graduate school she became interested in Buddhism and has been practicing meditation in the Ins...