How Sudden Illness Taught Me Mindfulness

                                               by Michelle Maiellaro Back in 2014, my mind heeded none of the signs as my body rebelled against me.  For more than a month, a slight fever clung to me, my heart hammered at any physical exertion, and my knees threatened to buckle when climbing stairs. Convinced this ailment would eventually disappear, I ignored […]

Heartbreak: How Mindfulness and Meditation Helped Me Heal

by Desire Klingensmith For anyone who’s experienced grief, the pain of waking is familiar. Of course, it’s not actually waking up that’s painful, but reality washing over you again. You wake up and your memories blossom one moment later. My eyes opened onto the walls of my run-down, one bedroom apartment. It was early July. […]

Practicing Mindfulness Every Day

by Matthew Jones It was 5 a.m. when I found out the results of the 2016 election. The sun had yet to lift its head above the horizon, and the narrow Barcelona alleyway where I lived was still dormant. I’d fallen asleep before the results were official on the other side of the pond, and […]

Freedom In Captivity: How Mindfulness Has Helped Me Cope With Life In Prison And Transformed My Life

by Scott Brooks Long before I ended up in prison, I wasted so much time abusing myself.  I had a professional’s ranking in the guilt game.  From childhood, I had been conditioned to believe that guilt was an unavoidable factor in punishment.  I couldn’t let it go, because I felt obligated to writhe in it.  […]

Wise Resistance: The Role of Mindfulness in the Trump Era

by Joel Groover Helen Barnes Vantine is seeing a new syndrome of sorts among her psychotherapy patients in Atlanta—an upwelling of anger, anxiety and sadness stirred by thoughts of President Donald Trump. “A number of my patients just cannot stop talking about how upset they are, their outrage and what they’re going to do about […]

Shame and Fear in Thailand

How could I look at my wife and son when I was about to let them down in one of the worst ways possible? Shame and fear so overwhelmed me that even the sound of my child’s laugh was a reminder of my failure. I hid away in the bedroom desperately waiting for some miracle […]

How Mindfulness Helped To Hush My Negative Thinking

By Anna Alapatt My negative self-talk has been within me for as long as I can remember. When I was a little girl, it would manifest in many different ways: my grades at school, my dance classes, or my singing lessons. From the time I was twelve, I remember thinking that I was never good […]

Nothing stays as it is, everything changes and mindfulness is the gift that helps us accept that

By Singhashri Gazmuri Here’s a truth. If you think you’ve got it wrong, you’re right. You’ve got it wrong. You’ve got it absolutely wrong. I learned this hard truth at age 16 when the relief of death finally came for my mother – and for me. We weren’t particularly close, in fact we fought endlessly. She […]