Mindful

We’re bringing our content to life with Mindful Live—a series of in-depth, online conversations, and events featuring mindfulness experts on how we can enjoy better health, cultivate more caring relationships, and create a more compassionate society.

Nova Scotia-based graphic designer Melissa Lloyd founded Doodle Lovely in 2016 to draw our attention to the here-and-now—creatively. In addition to a range of guided doodle journals and workbooks, in 2020 Lloyd also began facilitating Doodle Breaks:

Dr. Sará King has an idea she wants you to hear: Wellbeing and social justice are the same thing. King is a neuroscientist, medical anthropologist, and meditation teacher. She founded MindHeart Consulting and is a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Na

A recent viral tweet offered this definition: “A state of being in which you are employed and healthy during a pandemic but you’re also tired and depressed and feel like trash all the time.” Try this: Take a moment for gratitude. Focus on one thing p

An authentic life is a happy life. When we follow the world’s cues, we move farther away from our authentic self—that wise, all-knowing part of ourselves I like to call the “higher self.” Your higher self knows you well. It recognizes your highest go

Endangered Thai elephants are safe in rescue worker Mana Srivate’s care: He revived a wild baby elephant using CPR after it was struck by a motorcycle (the rider wasn’t badly hurt). After a medical check, the baby was reunited with its mother. In Sal

I love clothing. And shopping. But shopping for clothing has rarely been a pleasure. I’ve always been hard to fit—short and fat, with a large differential in my waist and hip measurements. So pants that fit my hips gape at the waist and trail well pa

Creativity Is for Everyone and it feels great. Kids know this, but adults often forget: Making stuff is really fun. And if fun isn’t motivating enough for you, working with your hands on a creative endeavor also reminds you of your capacity for probl

The pattern goes some-thing like this: You feel exhausted and unwell, so you open a search engine and type. Your symptoms are common enough that every condition seems possible, and you go down one rabbit hole after another in search of what’s wrong.

A global pandemic is a very inconvenient time to fall into the arms of cancer, chemotherapy, and hospital hijinx. And yet there we were, my husband and I, suddenly facing zillions of jagged little decisions and challenges. Meanwhile, everyone we knew

For many, gossiping ranks among the great sins. Saint Paul placed whispering and backbiting on a par with murder, deceit, and fornication as vices deserving of capital punishment. Teachers routinely ask middle-school students to not gossip or whisper

Compassion is a kind, friendly presence that allows us to stay in contact with the pain we may feel when we’ve caused harm, so that we can deepen into it rather than turn away from ourselves. It has the same connecting quality as empathy, but has a d

When I was 23 and just starting out in journalism, I made an awful mis-take. While covering a high-profile trial in San Jose, California, I wrote that a woman who hadn’t been charged with any crime had plotted a murder. The woman I’d wrongly incrimin

STEPHANIE DOMET: How can mindfulness help us work with failure and shame? VINNY FERRARO: Mindfulness can help interrupt the shame response that can overwhelm us with its historic baggage. Mindfulness brings me back to the present moment and helps me

A decade ago I set out to write about compassion. In our increasingly connected world, I believed compassion was going to be very important if we wanted to preserve human creativity, health, and prosperity. So I decided to write about that. I wasn’t

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on how the brain predicts everything we do—how it’s creating our perceptions of reality—helps us see how we cocreate the conditions that we are all trying so desperately to transform. When the brain predicts what’s goi

Death is a natural part of life. From the beginning to the end, life is constant change and nothing stays fixed. And that gives life its vitality. But it also causes a certain heartbreak when we face the difficult truth of impermanence. Grief is a re

From the moment you’re born to the moment you draw your last breath, your brain is stuck in a dark, silent box called your skull. Day in and day out, it continually receives sense data from the outside world via your eyes, ears, nose, and other senso