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

In this meditation series, we are exploring the Dark. Winter is, by its very nature, the darkest time of the year, and our meditation practice, so often taught as an opportunity to chase enlightenment, can also be an invitation to linger in and celebrate endarkenment (as Deborah Eden Tull has phrased it). The dark so often is associated with something scary, and yet it is really simply something q...

I love the winter. I find a surprising sense of energy and creative spark that comes with the darkest, coldest months. The cold makes me feel alive; soups and stews, fires in the fireplace, and rich oils for skin make me feel nourished and cared for; and the dark… well, the dark is where I feel most awake.  I don’t mean that I'm a night owl… quite the opposite actually. I'm an in-bed-at-9-and-up-a...

Friends, today I get to share a conversation with one of my personal favorite meditation teachers, Diana Winston! Diana is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA, the author of several incredible books about meditation and a former Buddhist nun. Together, we talk about the second edition release of her book, Fully Present, as well as my personal favorite book, The Little Book of Being. Dian...

How to make your practice so lovely, so vital that you won’t skip a day: Make your practice beautiful. Don’t cram it in; savor it. Ask for what you most need. Name your intention, your purpose, your hope for this practice. Dedicate the merit. Our practice is never just about ourselves.  Friend, fellow teacher and former Mindful Minute guest Caverly Morgan in The Heart of Who We Are: “The longer we...

This month’s meditation series is a foundational challenge to help you build up to a 20-minute/day nourishing meditation practice. I want to get away from the ‘check-it-off-the-to-do-list’ mentality and instead build a practice that feels so vital and lovely that you wouldn’t skip a day no matter what happens.  A piece of this nourishing practice comes when we specifically name what we most want o...

Happy New Year! Every January, I see an influx of people who are ready to try a meditation practice, and every February, I see most of those people fall away once again. And so this year, I thought - “what can I do to help people immediately reap the benefits of meditation?” Normally, in January, I do an introductory series that lays out the foundations of a practice, and I stress that starting wi...

This meditation series has been an exploration of time. For most of us, time appears to be as steady as a stone - something that is always here, guiding us along - reminding us where we are supposed to be by what time it is.  But, things aren’t quite as they appear when it comes to time or to stones.  Time is both flexible and relative. It moves at different speeds depending on where you are and i...

Let’s start with two scientific facts: When we are in motion, time contracts. The universe is made up of events, not things.  In my exploration of time, I came across a sentence from physicist Carlo Rovelli that stopped me in my tracks. He wrote - “Now means nothing.” Now means nothing. Nothing?! What have I been teaching for the last decade if the truth of the present moment has been disproven by...

“I don’t have enough time” “Take your time” “You have all the time in the world” Common enough phrases; each signaling something about our interaction with the experience of time. Phrases hinting that we should move faster, or slower, that we should do something, or not. And all of which create a cascading story of beliefs for each of us. Time is such a funny thing. It feels fast and slow {sometim...

Today, on The Mindful Minute, I am sharing a conversation with meditation teacher and author Caverly Morgan about her new book, The Heart of Who We Are: Realizing Freedom Together. Caverly is a meditation teacher, author, speaker, and nonprofit founder. She is the founder and Lead Contemplative of Peace in Schools—a nonprofit which created the nation's first for-credit mindfulness class in public...

There is nothing I love more than responding to student questions about meditation, and recently I was asked two really good questions that I thought would be useful to the greater Mindful Minute community.  At the end of our Political Resilience series, I was asked about what to do if you want to forge connections, to return to the table, but everyone else is hostile? And, I was asked a crucial a...

Our meditation practice is the practice of The Middle Way. Meaning the practice isn’t about perfection, a goal or an end-game. The practice IS the practice.   A student once asked his teacher, “is there anything I can do to become enlightened more quickly?” And, the teacher responded, “as little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.” “Well, what good are these practices you prescribe?...

This meditation series has asked some really big questions of us. Can we start to let go of binary thinking? Can we believe that two seemingly opposite things can both exist as true in the same moment? That right and wrong are not the only two choices? In a very small way, this reminds me of starting a meditation practice. Do you remember that feeling? The feeling of believing that a meditation pr...

This series is one of the more challenging undertakings I’ve shared on this podcast. Talking about democracy in a time of toxic polarization feels daunting and more than a little bit overwhelming. I’m not here to fix it, and I definitely don’t have the ‘answers’ but I believe deeply in naming the things that cause us pain and turning towards them rather than away. So here we are.  Democracy is har...

Not Left, Not Right, but Deep - The Fetzer Institute. With the midterm elections surrounding us, I’ve been reflecting on the challenges I feel when it comes to engaging with democracy in this country right now. Sometimes I am all moral outrage and calling my representatives and going to rallys. Sometimes, I am overwhelmed, exhausted and scared so I shut down completely. I ignore it all.  In that e...

Today, I am sharing a conversation with a friend, colleague and teacher - Shonali Banerjee. Many years ago, Shonali led a Mantra Circle that I was a part of, and in it, I learned so much about the power of sound and voice. To this day, one of my strongest memories is chanting the Gayatri mantra along the banks of the Ganges river on a trip to India. And even now, I warm up my voice and set my inte...

We started this meditation series, The Stagnation Layer, with the connective idea that the human body is a microcosm of the universe; that we can view the universe as a mirror image of what goes on inside. And, we looked to the Voyager space expeditation, in particular the experience of Voyager 1 in the Stagnation Layer of the cosmos, as a metaphor for how we might engage with moments of ‘stucknes...

Part 1 of this meditation series introduced the Stagnation Layer of the cosmos and the periods of stagnation we experience as individuals both as naturally occurring phenomena. Part of the description NASA shares for the Stagnation Layer says -  There is a doubling in the intensity of the magnetic field in the stagnation region. Like cars piling up at a clogged freeway off-ramp, the increased inte...

Well friends, after 5 years of creating bi-weekly episodes of The Mindful Minute I am making a shift… As of today, all new mini meditation episodes can be found exclusively within awakenedheart.community. All of the existing mini meditations will continue to be here on the podcast, but I’m moving all future minis to my community for a number of reasons:  I am able to provide you these meditations...

When you read poetry of the mystics, when you study ancient tantric & buddhist texts, not to mention so many indigneous cultures across the world, we learn of the universe as a metaphor for the internal experiences of consciousness. The macrocosm and the microcosm… As goes the outside, so goes the inside… And the more time I spend connecting my meditation practice with the natural world, the m...

Deborah Eden Tull guides through a short practice from her new book, Luminous Darkness. This practice is an opportunity to connect with the mystery, with the unknown, and to both offer and receive lovingkindness from this endarkened teacher.  While doing this practice, I was immediately reminded of Rilke’s famous words -  “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the qu...

“I believe it is time to let go of our current obsession with enlightenment and include the teachings of endarkenment. That is, it is time to commit to turning toward rather than away from darkness and to learn to perceive with the heart.”  The words above are included in the introduction to a new book, Luminous Darkness - An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown, written by Deborah E...

In this mini meditation episode, I am sharing some big news - my upcoming meditation challenge: Building Political Resilience! And, then we will share in this week’s mini meditation: One of the biggest stumbling blocks in our meditation practice is when we find ourselves either falling asleep or daydreaming our way through practice. Conversely some of us might discover meditation is the time we ha...

This month, as kids are transitioning back to school in the Northern Hemisphere, I thought it would be fun if all of us meditators also ‘go back to school’ and revisit some of the key teachings {and primary obstacles!} that help us recommit to and deepen our meditation practice.  Within this meditation series, we have been dissecting 3 of the most common stumbling blocks when it comes to a meditat...

In this mini meditation, you will hear me talk about what it takes to make safe spaces both in our practice and within communities like my new Awakened Heart Meditation Community. The meditation today guides us through a primary practice and reminds us of the vital instructions for a deep meditative experience:  What do we do with our bodies? With our breath? With our minds? This practice is a gre...