Jon Kabat Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, defines mindfulness as: “The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.” Therefore, if you’re not paying attention to whatever it is you are [...]
One of the biggest stressors in our lives can be when we are not living in congruence with our core values. To identify your core values, choose five values from the following list. Your choices should be based on what’s important to you. There are no bad choices, only your choices. Be honest with yourself [...]
We all deal with stressful situations in our lives, but Olympic athletes probably have more experience with high-stakes situations than the rest of us. From watching the Rio Olympics on TV, the athletes looked so calm that it was hard to tell they were nervous at all. They made flips, jumps, and sprints look like [...]
Stress is an often misunderstood word in our culture. In reality, it is simply a physiological response in reaction to a trigger, which manifests much the same in everyone. Examples of stress triggers include a traffic jam, confronting a co-worker, worrying about something you said, fear of being mugged, or imagining something bad is going [...]
If you’re like most people, your life is spent working toward accomplishments. Whether it’s sending one more work email, running errands, or cooking dinner, we are constantly moving from one task to another. Mobile devices and social media make it easier for us to stay connected and accomplish even more while we rush through our [...]
The first and often overlooked step to creating awareness is paying attention, stopping to notice what is happening right now in front of you, around you, and within you. Due to our natural preoccupation with things that have already happened and for fantasizing about what might happen in the future, you can go for long [...]
A little mindfulness can go a long way. When we start to see the thoughts and intentions that create our actions and words, we soon start to see how those patterns play out in our lives and determine our approach and mindset to just about everything we do. Are you busy, tempered, hurried, deliberate, pre-occupied, [...]
Why practice gratitude? I asked myself that question several years ago when my partner, Warren, and I assigned our Yoga Teacher Training students to keep a gratitude journal. I had recently read several well-researched books on the subject, so I decided to keep a journal myself to see if I could experience the benefits. I [...]
There are many daily tasks that become routine and don’t require much thought. Although it’s easy to think about the past or what might happen in the future, it’s good to be fully present with whatever you are doing at the moment. This awareness—or mindfulness—has a range of benefits including stress reduction, clearer thinking, and [...]
You are always making a choice—even if it is to do nothing. There are days when this seems to be the very furthest thing from reality, where circumstances seem to be conspiring against you and you can’t see any alternatives. Days when it seems as if the best choice for the day is to go [...]
