When youth worker Troy Landrum struggled with burnout and imposter syndrome, a mindfulness retreat for educators that are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color helped him find his way back to himself and his community.
A year ago, exhaustion decorated my bones like a graffiti-tattered wall. For 10 years I had worked in youth development and education, specifically focused on young people who were incarcerated or marginalized in another way. I had struggled with bouts of secondhand trauma, survivor’s guilt, and hopelessness for the future of our young folks. I had seen the struggles of these young people as they tried to survive a justice system and various institutions that are not made to meet their needs. All of this work had led to deep emotional wear and tear as I sacrificed myself to the point of burnout.
During that time, I advocated and supported young people and their families through the legal system, employment, education, and mentored them through hardship. At the time, I wasn’t ready to recognize that, just as their motivation and hope had to come from within them, my motivation and hope had to come from within me. That sense of hope moves us to seek out the help and support that we need, to be honest with others and ourselves about our personal struggles, to believe in the sense of community that will bring about healing, and to act on our plans for our futures. I knew my job was to remind young people that they are the captains of their ships and the writers of their own stories. It was vital for them to be surrounded by a village that would support them to believe this about themselves and help them live into that belief. I wasn’t ready to see that the same was true for me.
I knew my job was to remind young people that they are the captains of their ships and the writers of their own stories. It was vital for them to be surrounded by a village that would support them to believe this about themselves and help them live into that belief. I wasn’t ready to see that the same was true for me.
Then I went to my first meditation retreat for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) educators with the non-profit Space Between, which supports schoolchildren by integrating mindfulness practices into school communities.
Taking My Place at the Retreat
As I prepared myself for the retreat and a full day of reconnecting to my body, I hoped I’d find a sense of optimism I’d lost to feel better prepared to continue the work of educating young people. At first, I questioned my right to take up space in a place for educators, a role that I felt to be sacred.
I grew up in a family full of teachers and principals, so I understand the commitment of these roles. To me, an educator meant a teacher, professor, or an administrator—someone committed to specifically educating youth and preparing them for higher education. As a youth worker who went in and out of these young people’s lives—staying just long enough to get them out of trouble or to complete an internship—I felt like an imposter. From the stories I had heard from my mother and grandmother after full days in the classroom, I felt that my work didn’t compare. I was exhausted, but they had it worse.
It was a place that I could instantly lay down whatever heaviness I had brought with me on the yoga mats and bean bags. I felt an instant peace.
It was a Saturday morning when I walked into the retreat and was greeted by the smell of coffee and the smiles of some familiar faces. I felt a warmth that I think only BIPOC people could recognize, a silent language that gives a nod of recognition that we are in a similar fight to be seen as fully human in society. It was a place that I could instantly lay down whatever heaviness I had brought with me on the yoga mats and bean bags. I felt an instant peace.
The facilitators gave us time to eat snacks, connect with other folks, and get situated for a day of connection with fellow sojourners, to ourselves, and to the present moment. We sat down in a big circle of about 10 people from all across the state of Washington and took turns introducing ourselves. I went last. As everyone presented their occupations, their exhaustion, their burdens, the imposter syndrome rolled off of me like beads of sweat in a sauna.
Reconnect With Love
The time we spent together was a meditative rest for our souls, between the sweet rhythmic sounds of singing bowls, meditative walks, the connectedness of our weary voices through profound conversations. It turned out to be a place for those who self-identified or wanted to identify as lights in dark tunnels for others. Here, I understood that there are so many different contacts with young people, so many different ways of connecting oneself to education, so many ways of defining “educator.” The retreat wasn’t exclusionary; it was a place for those who needed to be reminded of the light that they had inside them.
We had all come to the retreat exhausted, no matter our occupations or connection to educating young people. I’d worn that exhaustion like a badge of honor. Maybe it was to prove that I belonged, or maybe it was a symptom of the myriad injustices society has placed on BIPOC folks, to live our lives as the burden bearers of a system we never created.
What this time brought to me was revolutionary to my mind, body, and soul. That day whispered into my ears and said, “Rest and bring all of who you are, no matter who you are. Live out this day and the rest of your days loving yourself, nurturing yourself, listening to yourself so that you may love others just as you love yourself and serve as a reminder of that love for those around you.”
They are the basis for most of our positive outcomes in life. They determine how often we practice mindfulness, our exercise patterns, our ability to place our full attention on our work. They bolster our capacity to interact with the people around us from a sense of compassion and full presence.
Our habits also create most of the problems we encounter in life. They keep us stuck in self-defeating patterns like eating that full pint of ice cream, getting lost for hours on social media, or “checking out” instead of being present for the people we love.
As you begin this New Year, it’s easy to get caught-up thinking only about goals, outcomes, and New Year’s resolutions. These are important. But we think it’s even more important to consider the underlying habits that either keep you stuck or allow you to experience profound changes.
How do you nourish healthy habits? Here are three proven steps:
3 Science-Backed Strategies to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
Step 1: Take an Inventory of Your Current Habit System
Edward Deming, one of America’s leading management scientists in the 20th century, declared, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Allow that to sink in for a moment.
The idea here is that your current system of habits is “perfectly designed” to produce the negative, self-defeating, patterns you wish you could change. If you struggle to exercise, it’s because your current habit system is perfectly designed to keep you from working out. If you can’t find time to meditate, it’s because your current habit system is perfectly designed to prevent you from training your mind.
Which existing habits are standing in your way? Which new habits will allow you to make the changes you would like to see?
And that raises an important question: what results do you wish you were getting? For instance, do you want to be more mindful, less distracted? Do you want to be kinder, less agitated? Do you want to spend more time exploring the things that matter most to you, less time binge-watching shows on Netflix? These are the outcomes you want to change.
Next, look one level deeper, at changes in habits that will help you achieve these outcomes. And this begs a second question: Which existing habits are standing in your way? Which new habits will allow you to make the changes you would like to see?
Step 2: Build New Habits By Stacking Them on Habits You Already Have
By now, you should have a few new habits in mind that will help you achieve the changes you’d like to make. The question then becomes: how do you build these new habits?
In our work with high performers and executives, we’ve found that the best way to build new habits is to, in the words of habit expert James Clear, “stack” them on top of existing habits.
For example, let’s say you want to build the habit of spending less time distracted by your phone. You could try to build this habit from scratch by saying, “I am not going to look at my phone at all in the evening.”
Stacking this new habit on top of an existing habit is a much more effective strategy. For example, you can say: “After I walk through my front door and take off my jacket in the evening, I’m going to put my phone on Do Not Disturb mode.” This approach increases your likelihood of building the habit not only by tying it to an existing habit (taking off your coat as you walk in the door) but it also includes a specific action, which the research says is another important strategy for making habits stick. Instead, saying vaguely, “I’m going to try to look at my phone less,” it’s based on a tangible action, “switching my phone to Do Not Disturb.”
The path to changing your life is more about the process of building the habit than the specific habit itself.
There are numerous ways to enact this strategy in everyday life. You could use your walk into the office as a time for practicing present moment awareness, use slowing down in your car at stop signs or stop lights as a cue to take one or two mindful breaths, or use beginning meals as a cue for expressing one thing you are grateful for.
The possibilities here are endless with this simple strategy: Stack the new habit you wish to create on top of an existing habit so that it becomes integrated into the midst of your everyday life.
Step 3: Build and Sustain Your New Habits Using the Four C’s
The final step uses what we call the Four C’s of habit formation to weave these new habits deep into the fabric of your everyday life.
Commence Small. This first critical tip builds on Stanford professor BJ Fogg’s research, which suggests you start with a goal you can realistically achieve. For example, it’s better to start with 5 minutes of meditation each day than to set yourself up for disappointment by trying to meditate for an hour. Be careful of setting unrealistic New Year’s goals that risk failing in mere days because they are too big. Remember, the path to changing your life is more about the process of building the habit than the specific habit itself.
Commit. Make a 100% commitment to building your new habit. It turns out that it’s actually easier to commit to building a new habit 100% of the time than 99%. That 1%, after all, can make you miserable. It fuels that voice in your head that says, “I’ll skip it just this once.” But by making a 100% commitment to a tiny habit, you end this mental argument. We have seen over and over again with thousands of people that this is really the key tip for creating new habits.
Create a consistent Cue. Going back to the idea of habit stacking, where creating a “cue” helps you remember to act. Use one of your existing habits as your cue, as a trigger that helps you remember to build the new habit. If you want to spend less time mind wandering and more time noticing the sights, sounds, and sensations of the present moment, for instance, come up with a regularly repeating cue that reminds you to practice, a cue like waking up, going to bed, walking upstairs, stopping at stoplights, riding in elevators, or standing in line at the store.
Celebrate. All you have to do to celebrate is savor the experience for just a few seconds. Savor the exquisite feeling of connecting to your breath. Savor the feeling of pleasure that you derive from doing the activity you made a 100% commitment to carry out.
So, while the world hammers on about goals, outcomes, and New Year’s resolutions over the next few weeks, remember that real change and progress only happens when we carefully construct a system of habits that make new outcomes possible.
Poetry can seem intimidating, but all it really asks us to do is slow down, get curious, and notice. It’s a lot like meditation! Here are seven mindful prompts to help you discover the nurturing practice of reading poetry.
Poetry is a quiet sanctuary for the mind. Its rhythm and vivid imagery invite us to immerse ourselves. By exploring the depths of a poem, we embark on a journey of self-discovery, connecting with emotions, sensations, and the underlying wisdom within the words. This exploration can be a profound practice in mindfulness, cultivating peace, clarity, and a deeper appreciation for life’s complexities.
Reading poetry isn’t just an intellectual pursuit. We encounter poetry in our everyday lives, whether on a meditation retreat, in quotes or videos on social media, and sometimes in everyday interactions with others. So, how does poetry differ from anything else we read, and why does it deserve special consideration?
While poetry may seem intimidating, all it really asks of you is to be curious, present, and open to listening to your intuition so you may connect with the words on the page.
Poetry has a more challenging job than a novel that is typically linear in its construction. Most poems compress meaning into various poetic structures while using tone and literary devices to express ideas and emotions. When we pay attention to these details, we can better unpack a poem and the multifaceted meanings that exist in it. The sometimes more abstract language of poetry also engages our intuition in a unique way, tapping into our emotions. Poetry also allows for ambiguity and uncertainty about its meaning, making more space for each reader’s individual experience.
While poetry may seem intimidating, all it really asks of you is to be curious, present, and open to listening to your intuition so you may connect with the words on the page. There’s no right or wrong way to read or experience poetry, much like there’s no right or wrong way to experience meditation.
Mindful Prompts for Poetry Reading
When you read a poem, try asking yourself the following questions to gain deeper understanding of both the poem and how it affects you:
What mood does this poem evoke?
What emotions are coming up for me?
What is this poem describing?
These questions can serve as helpful entry points for any poem. Checking in with our emotions can be an easy way to notice a poem’s effect on us.
Next, you might ask yourself:
What stands out immediately?
Or, as Allen Ginsberg used to say, “Notice what you notice.” You may notice a repeated text pattern or a specific description of an object, a shift in tone, or a point of view. Simply identify something specific that sticks out to you.
Last, ask yourself:
Who is speaking in this poem?
Who or what is the poem addressing?
What questions do I have after finishing the poem?
When you’re done, consider what these prompts bring to light. Did you gain some kind of understanding? Explore your beliefs? Something else?
Explore Your Experience
Now that we’ve explored the prompts to help us better understand poetry’s qualities, we can put them into practice by taking a closer look at the following excerpt from poet Catherine Barnett’s “Critique of Pure Reason” from her collection Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space.
Inspired by the work of philosopher Immanuel Kant, this poem helps explore the existential. Barnett typically asks deep, abstract questions about the quotidian parts of our lives while keeping an intellectual curiosity about human existence and our habits and behaviors. Barnett’s poems often invite a sense of internal dialogue or philosophical rumination. Considering the addressee in her poetry opens a conversation about intimacy, self-awareness, and uncertainty. Let’s take a closer look at an excerpt from the poem:
With him pressed so close beside her, she couldn’t sleep. Perhaps it was his skin, or the rain. It kept raining.
She lay there trying to remember exactly how many thoughts she could have. Was it 30,000 or 70,000? Per hour?
Or was it per minute? She’d heard from someone who’d heard from someone
who listened to the number, whatever it was, from an HVAC specialist.
Take out a notebook and pen or open a word document and reflect on this poem with the help of the prompts:
What mood does this poem evoke?
What emotions are coming up for me?
What is this poem describing?
What stands out immediately?
Who is speaking in this poem?
Who or what is the poem addressing?
What questions do I have after finishing the poem?
Meditation and poetry ask us to use the same tools:
Slowing down
Being a curious observer of our experience
Connecting our body and mind
By reading poetry mindfully, we can gain a deeper understanding of both the poem and our inner landscape. Approaching poetry with curiosity and mindfulness opens the door to deeper understanding and richer engagement. Next time you read a poem, try using these prompts to discover what resonates for you.
In this guided mindfulness practice, we release what no longer serves us and anchor in our inner wisdom, peace, and freedom.
While the new year often inspires reflection, January isn’t the only time we can release what no longer serves us. Resetting can happen in any moment—simply by connecting to the rhythm of our breath. In this meditation, journey inward to release, reset, and anchor into our inner wisdom, peace, and freedom. “Every inhale is a new moment, a sense of total renewal. And every exhale is an opportunity to arrive in the space, free. Totally free.”
A Meditation to Reset and Let Go
Prepare for this practice by finding a quiet place and a comfortable seat. If you wish, you can also lay down. Whichever you choose, find connection and grounding with the space that you’re in. If you’re seated in a stool or a chair, plant both feet on the ground. If you’re seated on the floor directly or on a meditation cushion, sit with a straight spine. If you’re lying down, lie flat in a way that you feel grounded and connected to the space you’re lying on.
Close your eyes and start to bring awareness to your breath. Start to notice and be a witness to life flowing through your body, which is your breath. Notice the pace of your breath and tune in to its rhythm. Use each breath as an opportunity to arrive here, to shift your focus away from what might have happened earlier and towards the space you’re in, to this recording, this meditation, this practice that we’re all sharing together.
Breathe in and out through your nose to start. Notice if anything is still arising from what might have happened before you came into this practice. If so, just acknowledge it and then consciously shift your awareness back to your breath.
Now breathe in through your nose and exhale out through your mouth. Notice if you feel any release throughout your body with that long, deep exhale. Let’s do that again, breathing in through our nose and out through our mouth. Deep exhale. Again, just notice what arises or what releases in your body. One last time, let’s breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth.
We can carry weight energetically, physically, mentally. With total awareness and non-judgment, let’s be a witness to what might be coming up. With every exhale, ask, Can we let this go?
Notice if you feel tension somewhere in your body. Bring awareness to that space and take a deep inhale into that space that feels tense. Then, exhale to try to release that tension that you might feel. Remember, the tension might be a reoccurring thought or situation that’s presenting itself. Keep going through this process of being a witness if something’s coming up for you—physically, mentally, energetically—and then use the power of your breath to slowly bring some relief, some release, with your breath, with your exhale.
We might not be able to control everything happening on the outside, but we always have the power to be aware and shift what’s happening on the inside. You can use this practice of connecting to your breath to release as a means to create a subtle shift, lessening that tension of everything that’s not serving you in this present moment. You can invite a sense of freedom and liberation, even for one breath cycle. Notice the shift it creates throughout your entire being. At any time, you can use your breath to reclaim your inner power, your inner peace, and your inner wisdom. You don’t need to carry the past with you.
If you’re having any trouble with really being present, I encourage you to place one hand over your heart, one over your stomach. Use this physical reminder to connect with the rhythm of your breath and the beauty that your breath holds in helping you release and lighten your daily load. Every inhale is a new moment, a sense of total renewal. And every exhale is just an opportunity to arrive in the space free, totally free, of everything that ever was.
Start to bring awareness again to the space you’re in. Offer gratitude for yourself for showing up today, for embarking on this inward adventure. Honor yourself, your journey, and your willingness to release and let go of what no longer serves you.
Take a deep inhale in, a big exhale out, and ever so slowly, open your eyes. Stay connected to the space you’re in. How are you feeling? Has anything shifted from the moment we started this practice? Remember that this practice to reset and let go is available to you every day, throughout the day if you need. Your breath is a powerful ally to help you in your journey to release and let go. Thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to next time practicing with you.
This guided mindfulness practice helps us relax and see the full scope of the possibilities in front of us.
When we feel stressed, anxious, irritated, or angry, one of the things that happens to the mind is that it shrinks down and zooms in on the challenge at hand—the stressful moment, the emotion we don’t want to feel. There’s a researcher, Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who calls this “the soda straw view” of the mind. This is the view of stress. When we’re stressed, our perspective becomes small and possibilities fade away. All we can see is the thing that we want to get rid of, or that we want to change, or that we wish wasn’t happening in our lives, or even in the world.
One of the most powerful mindfulness practices we can do is intentionally and consciously expand our perspective, expand the size of our awareness.
One of the most powerful mindfulness practices we can do is intentionally and consciously expand our perspective, expand the size of our awareness. Research shows that we can do this by adjusting our visual focus. When we shift from an intensely focused stare to something more like a relaxed gaze, taking in a panoramic awareness of our environment, we’re actually shifting the nervous system itself. It has a similar effect as taking a few deep breaths.
We’re going to play with this shift in this guided meditation. You can think of this shift as going from a small, contracted, tight mind to a relaxed, wide open, big mind. From here, we can begin to create this habit in our lives, intentionally creating an experience of relaxation, especially during tense moments. Stress, moments of discomfort, irritation, and anxiety, are often like looking up into the sky at a dark thundercloud, and all we can focus on is the dark cloud. What we’re going to do in this practice is zoom out from that one small cloud and begin to see that surrounding that one small dark cloud in the sky is miles beautiful, clear blue sky.
A Guided Meditation to Expand Perspective and Let Go of Stress
Find a comfortable seat. For this practice, unlike many other forms of mindfulness practice, I actually find that it’s very helpful to keep your eyes open. In addition to that, it can be very helpful to align yourself somewhere where you have a view of something. It could just be a view of your house, a view of your room. Maybe you have a window you can look out of. We’re kind of giving ourselves this visual field that’s going to become part of the practice. This practice is unbelievable when done on the top of a mountain, or sitting at a beach, or at a park, or at sunset—but we’ll take whatever we’ve got.
As always, I like to start by just feeling the sensations in the body. Feeling a sense of relaxation trickle down from your head, through your neck, into your torso, your hips, your legs, all the way down into your feet. Relaxation, it turns out, is the key to this practice. You might also notice the breath. Notice the sensations happening with each inhale and exhale.
Now let’s turn our attention to the first element of this bigger view: the big mind. And that is the visual field. So just for fun, let’s start by picking an object in your visual field. One small, tiny object. Maybe it’s a tree outside. Maybe it’s a chair in your room. It doesn’t matter what it is, but we’re going to start with the opposite of the wide view that we’re trying to cultivate. Focus in on this one small thing as intently as you possibly can. Bringing all of your visual perception to this one small dot of awareness. Let’s do it for about ten more seconds…and now drop all effort.
Let your eyes relax. Notice that almost automatically, after a moment of focus like that, the mind just sort of relaxes into this wider, bigger view. Notice what it’s like now to see the panoramic view of whatever’s in front of you. You’re not trying, you’re not effort-ing. You’re just allowing yourself to take in this view, to gaze at what’s in front of you. In a relaxed way, you can even imagine the edges of your visual field slowly expanding. It’s like you’re now the wide-angle camera on your phone. And we do this from a spirit of allowing and receptivity. You’re just allowing yourself to be in this state where you’re gazing at the world in panoramic awareness. The big view.
Now let’s add one more piece to this. Begin to notice sound. We’re now going to add auditory perception. Just notice sounds that are close by from this open, receptive, relaxed state. You might even notice the sound of each breath. And now allow the scope of your hearing to expand. Noticing sounds in the room. Maybe there’s the sound of ventilation.
And now in a relaxed and gentle way, allowing yourself to notice soundseven further off into the distance. Maybe the sound of the breeze outside, the sound of birds, just relaxing into this wide, big view. Eyes relaxed and open. Ears relaxed and open. And now we might add one more sense. As you hold this wide open gaze and you hear the sounds you might also notice that sensation is happening in the body. That’s also part of this view.
Now see what happens when you just allow the sensations of the body to be part of this view. Noticing that your awareness, the scope of your mind, keeps getting bigger, broader, wider, vast. Noticing the visual field. Noticing sounds. Noticing sensations. No attempt to change. Relaxing into things as they are. Seeing this moment with this totally fresh, wide open view.
Chances are, if you’re new to a practice like this, it takes a little bit of effort and concentration to stay with this kind of a wide open perspective. So the invitation for the next minute or two is to drop that effort. Don’t try. But see if you can still stay connected in some way to this wide open view. If you feel even the slightest part of yourself wanting to push your eyes open or your ears open, or expand the size of your mind, let that go. No effort, but staying in this relaxed, receptive view. Now see if you can just stay in this effortless open view for the next 30 seconds or so. And now, before we come back, I want to give you a few moments just to explore and investigate this bigger perspective.
Staying where you are, just noticing any differences between the way you ordinarily see life or the world, and the way you’re seeing it now. Comparing and contrasting the big mind that we’ve been trying to cultivate to the small mind, which, for most of us, is our home base.
Now you can bring yourself here. We never really left. For me, when I enter that state of mind, or that mindfulness practice around opening awareness, the scope of the mind, it often feels like my mind becomes almost like a security camera, that I’m just watching the feed of this camera, listening to the feed of the microphones, watching whatever’s happening. It tends to be really boring and not very interesting, but it starts to become incredibly interesting the more my perspective widens.
One of the things I’d like to do before you go is to give you a practice that you can take with you for the rest of the day, a way of integrating this shift from the small mind to the big mind into your everyday life. The way to do this is really quite simple. It’s to imagine several times throughout the rest of the day that you’re seeing whatever it is that you’re seeing from the perspective of a mountain top. Or maybe it’s the perspective of a beach. Pick your favorite natural metaphor. The basic idea is that if you catch yourself feeling stressed out, or if you notice that you’ve spent the last 45 minutes scrolling Instagram on your phone with a tight-gripped stare, just take 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, to see whatever’s happening from the mountain top. In fact, it can be quite interesting to bring this big perspective into something like email, or the document you’re working on, or surfing the news, or whatever it is. It’s actually so radically different that it can change your entire perspective of some of these things that make up a big part of our day. So that’s the homework for the rest of the day: three moments where you are seeing whatever’s happening in life from the mountaintop, and then see what happens.
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Don’t miss these 10 mindful books from 2024 that help us nurture ourselves, one another, and the world we share.
Throughout 2024 we’ve been treated to mindful books that fueled our minds and our hearts. This past year brought us an abundance of new titles, with topics and perspectives that matter—from motherhood to workplace well-being, from self-compassion to collective flourishing. Reminding us that mindfulness is about more than individual wellness, these authors deliver the information and inspiration we need in challenging times. Enjoy perusing the list below—we hope you’ll love these books as much as we did.
In Mothershift, writer and doula Jessie Harrold offers a supportive, affirming road map to help women navigate the identity change and transformation that often come with motherhood.
In Just One Heart, cardiologist and mindfulness teacher Jonathan Fisher explores the science of the mind-heart connection through the lens of his own journey from burnout and anxiety to healing and joy.
In Return to Mindfulness, mindfulness researcher and former town councilor Shalini Bahl illuminates a pathway to reconnecting with what matters and truly living our practice in each moment of our busy lives.
In Flourishing Kin, contemplative researcher and teacher Yuria Celidwen identifies seven key principles from Indigenous traditions, revealing how this wisdom invites us to meet the world with a joyous commitment to collective flourishing.
In The Self-Compassion Daily Journal, psychologist and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) trainer Diana Hill offers powerful writing prompts to help you let go of harmful self-criticism and welcome kindness and forgiveness toward yourself.
In Breaking Bias, lawyer and researcher Anu Gupta takes us on a journey to explore human identities and identity-based biases and offers a unique toolkit to help us dismantle learned bias, within ourselves and in the world.
In Mindfulness in the Workplace, meditation teacher and mindfulness program developer Andrew Safer shows how we can cultivate clarity and well-being at work—even in the midst of chaos, competing demands, and rapid-fire change.
In Consider This, therapist and relationship expert Nedra Glover Tawwab helps us stay true to who we are and grow more fully into ourselves through setting boundaries, expressing ourselves with clarity and integrity, and more.
Dr. Kristin Neff and Dr. Christopher Germer Guilford Press
In Mindful Self-Compassion for Burnout, Mindful Self-Compassion founders Christopher Germer and Kristin Neff share empathetic stories, along with quick and effective ways to recharge your batteries, de-stress, and be kind to yourself—so you can be there for others.
In Open, philosopher and mindfulness entrepreneur Nate Klemp examines why we close down when faced with stressors or threats and how we can train ourselves to open up to the fullness that life offers—even when frightened, outraged, or heartbroken.
Based out of the UK, Vidyamala Burch is an award-winning teacher whose courses and work in the field of mindfulness and pain management have been recognized for the measurable ways they have served the common good. She recently launched a new program, HEALS, which offers a comprehensive, holistic approach for managing and living with chronic pain and illness.
As a writer who loves interviewing, I came to my conversation with Burch with my list of questions and a healthy dose of journalistic curiosity. I felt a little starstruck to get to meet her.
If I’m honest, though, these weren’t the only things I brought, because this conversation also felt personal.
So many people I know, myself included, have had experiences living with chronic pain and illness. I was nearly 40 years old when I finally found healing from more than 20 years of recurring and increasingly debilitating low back issues. I have many friends, some just in their 30s or 40s, who deal with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, recurring migraines, and other adrenal and nervous-system challenges.
My mother survived polio as a young child and lived with relentless chronic conditions for her entire life as a result. She passed away suddenly a decade ago, at the young age of 67. Polio wasn’t technically the thing that killed her, but I knew from many conversations with her in her final years that the long slogging decades of complications, disability, and pain made her long for relief. I was with her when she took her last breath, and I felt the surrender in her body, finally.
To suffer ourselves, or to watch people we love suffer over long periods of time, often without real answers or effective treatments—the questions that bubble up aren’t academic. They sit close to the bone and the heart.
Why did this happen? Why did it go on for so long? Why does it feel so lonely? Where do these ailments come from, and why are they often so mysterious and so intractable, even in the face of intense medical interventions? Can practices like mindfulness reallyoffer anything meaningful into this complicated, messy world of living with chronic illness and pain?
Yes, I wanted to talk to Vidyamala, the expert on mindfulness and pain management. But I also didn’t want to waste the opportunity to talk to Vidyamala, the human being who has traveled this long road herself, and who understands intimately that the clinical ways we think and talk about physical suffering can’t meet us fully where we need to be met.
The clinical ways we think and talk about physical suffering can’t meet us fully where we need to be met.
Siri Myhrom: I’m curious about where the HEALS Program got its start for you. How do you see it as unique from and also working together with your other programs?
Vidyamala Burch: I developed Mindfulness for Health, which is our eight-week mindfulness program for people living with chronic pain and long-term health conditions. So the seeds for HEALS were way back in 2000, when I started running that [Mindfulness for Health] as an experimental course in 2001.
In my own experience as somebody who’s lived with chronic pain and disability for nearly 50 years now, mindfulness has been absolutely crucial to that journey because my life, my quality of life now, is really pretty good, notwithstanding my disability.
So mindfulness is foundational. And when I look at my own journey of reclaiming my quality of life, I realized that it was mindfulness-plus. So what I’ve done is I’ve worked on my nutrition. I’ve worked on how I move. I’ve looked at my sleep habits. I try to have time in nature. So if I looked at what’s worked for me, it was mindfulness plus these other dimensions. I felt that it would be really helpful to come up with an applied mindfulness program.
This is my vision, that people come through either doorway. You might come through the HEALS doorway or you might come through the Mindfulness for Health doorway. I see them as definitely complementary and as two doorways into the same room.
SM: Mindfulness talks a lot about awareness, and I have a question around that that’s maybe more personal. The people I know who live with chronic pain would likely say, I’m already very aware of my pain. I’m curious how you understand that word awareness, especially within a mindful context, and how does that serve to alleviate the suffering, rather than creating a focus on it?
VB: That’s an excellent question because it’s very counterintuitive. People might think, I’m very, very aware of it. And I don’t want to be more aware of it. And maybe people might think, The last thing I want to do is become aware of my body. My body is my tormentor. I want to just split off from my body.
So those are all very reasonable things to think about. What we do is right up front in both Mindfulness for Health and HEALS, we talk about how by using awareness, you can investigate this experience that you label pain. Investigate that and realize that it’s got two components. One component is your basic unpleasant sensations.
The other component is all things that you do to create extra suffering when you resist those basic unpleasant sensations. What most people call pain would be that whole set of sensations, plus resistance, plus depression, plus anxiety, plus secondary tension, plus breath holding, plus poor sleep.
Most people think that’s what their pain is. But actually, the only thing that’s a given in any moment are the unpleasant sensations. Everything else is added through our reactions. So you’re learning to accept the unpleasant sensations with kindliness, tenderness, to soften the resistance, and a lot of that secondary stuff can fall away. You’re just left with unpleasant sensations. People find that a very optimistic message.
We put that right up front in all our programs. Week one, we talk about primary and secondary suffering. The other thing about awareness that we really strongly emphasize— again, in week one—is that it’s awareness that gives us agency. If we’re aware, we have choices. If you’ve got no choices, you know, you’re just swept along by this thing that’s ruining your life as if it’s a kind of enemy.
Awareness doesn’t make it pleasant. I think this is one of the ways people misunderstand this: that if I’m mindful, I’m aware, then suddenly I’m going to love my pain. You probably aren’t, because your pain is unpleasant, but you’re going to learn to relate to the unpleasantness with much more spaciousness, much more kindliness, more acceptance.
One of the things I say is by coming closer and examining this experience, you realize it’s a process, not a thing. One of the ways I talk about that is to experience it as a river rather than a rock, because everything is changing all the time. Most people relate to their pain as a solid lump, like it’s a big boulder that’s kind of taken up residence. But it’s amazing to be able to experience it as a river rather than a rock. Just let it flow through the moments and then have this less-reactive mindset. That’s very liberating.
SM: Do you attract people who already have experience with mindfulness, or is it a mix of people?
VB: I iteratively develop my programs with potential audiences. The first one was a six-week program with people who know about mindfulness, who have a health condition and have worked with us before. I really wanted them to have a sense of co-creation. They gave me lots of feedback. Out of that, I made it longer, 10 weeks.
My second cohort was with people who didn’t know anything about mindfulness, but did have a health condition. It was people who were recruited from a cancer charity and a fibromyalgia charity, and that was very interesting as another test case. It went down very well with both those audiences.
Then the third pilot was with physicians from a primary care medical center. A lot of them didn’t know anything about meditation, didn’t have a health condition, but were trying it out for themselves, thinking about their patients. Again, very positive feedback. So I feel confident now that you don’t need to know anything about mindfulness to do this program.
SM: Where does HEALS fit into general medical care?
VB: I don’t know what it’s like in the States, but certainly over here there’s a crisis in our healthcare system—not enough money, aging population, multiple chronic health conditions.
Western medicine is particularly good with acute care. But with multiple chronic conditions all happening at the same time, Western healthcare isn’t brilliant. There’s more of a move towards a recognition that lifestyle has an enormous impact on our health and well-being, particularly with people being sedentary, eating a poor diet, scrolling on their phones late at night, not being able to sleep, all these kinds of things. There’s a whole field emerging of what’s called lifestyle medicine over here, which is called integrative care in the States. So we’re very well placed to be able to offer this program.
What’s unique about our program is that it’s got mindfulness as the foundation. I think a lot of people know what they should be doing for their health and well-being. They’ve got the information, but they don’t know how to make it stick. So my thesis is that mindful awareness is really crucial to that, because you have to know what you’re experiencing to have some facility and agency, instead of just being swept away by habitual behaviors. These people in general practice who tested the program said, “You’re absolutely on the right track. You’re ahead of the field. Keep going.”
SM: I notice, again relating to other people I’ve known with chronic conditions, that there’s an emphasis on tiny steps. Why is that effective?
VB: This has come out of my experience, and what I’ve observed is that a lot of people think you need to make big changes all at once—get another job, change your diet, change the way you exercise. When you do these big changes all at once, you don’t sustain any of them. You don’t know what’s affecting what because you’ve changed too many variables all at once. Very often you just need to change a tiny thing. In the program, I use a model called Tiny Habits, which is developed by B.J. Fogg. It’s a lovely model where you have a prompt, a behavior, and a celebration.
For example, for me to do a little bit more strengthening in my arms outside my office, I’ve got some straps. Every time I go in and out my office door, that’s the trigger. I go to my straps. It might be three to five movements, just a few. That’s the behavior. Then the congratulations, and you get a little dopamine hit, and then you’re going to want to do it again.
One of the things I’ve really learned from my own life, and this is a very important point, I think, is that you can bring about major transformation through tiny little nudges across a broad front for a long time. I always say to people that we won’t do any of these things perfectly, but if you’re doing all of them adequately, you’re going to experience change.
SM: It looks like the most recent cohort for HEALS is October 25th? Is that right?
VB: Yes, the first course booked out in 24 hours. That seems to be going very well. One of the things we’re doing in this program is using buddy groups testing. We divide into groups of four or five people based on geography. They decide for themselves how they want to keep in touch. Most of them are using WhatsApp. The idea is that they will contact each other daily, ideally so they can let people know how they’re getting on.
SM: Is the buddy system partly addressing the sense of isolation that can come with being in pain?
VB: Yes, I think so. Also, with these online programs, it helps to have something that’s more intimate, a daily reminder so that people are really forming connections. I think that’s very helpful in this tiny-habits method for behavior change.
SM: If someone came to you looking for help, but they were feeling skeptical, how would you describe this work in a way that would open up the possibility for them?
VB: We’ve used validated questionnaires in our three pilots and we’ve got hard data. Doing this work has measurable results. It makes people catastrophize about their pain less. It makes people able to function better in daily life. They’re less depressed, less anxious.
For people who live with chronic pain or health conditions, I say just try it and see what you think. You can have your pain and your illness and be miserable and have a very difficult life. Or you can have your pain and illness and be happier and have a more fulfilling life. So which one would you rather have?
By doing these very simple, evidence-based approaches, we know that it can help you reclaim your life. It doesn’t take long, 10-15 minutes a day, with a very supportive group for 11 weeks. We know that people are experiencing quite a strong improvement in quality of life. So it doesn’t seem like a big risk. It’s training and getting your mind working with you rather than against you. Most people don’t even realize that their mind is working against them. In the untrained mind, 75% of our thoughts are negative. It’s staggering. 95% of our thoughts, we’ve had before. We’ve got the same old undermining rubbish, just going around and around like the spin cycle on a washing machine, and you can do something about that. You can do something about it through these small changes across a broad front.
Would that be convincing to you if you were skeptical?
SM: Well, I dealt with chronic low back pain for about 25 years. I went to all kinds of different doctors. I tried all sorts of different modalities, and it was not an uncommon experience to go to an allopathic doctor and kind of feel like they don’t quite believe you. Especially in the US, there’s a tendency to prescribe opiates or recommend surgery, which I knew had a very low success rate.
For me, finding contemplative practice really did make a difference. But I think being able to speak to the exhaustion is important, because a lot of people who have been dealing with chronic issues, especially for a long time, it’s not that they want to give up. It’s that they’ve already tried 10 or 15 different things that haven’t worked.
VB: Yes, absolutely. Something we do at Breathworks is we believe people first, because I’m not interested in your diagnosis. I’m interested in your experience. With chronic health conditions, it’s sometimes hard to get a diagnosis. People are often not believed, and it’s awful. If someone says they’re suffering, I believe them. I think it’s really important that it’s an experience orientation rather than a diagnostic orientation.
We all have our habits of sort of resisting and fighting our experience. We can all learn to be more at peace with whatever’s happening. In my own case, you know, I’ve still got disability, I’ve still had all the surgeries, I’ve still got pain, but my overall pain has massively improved.
A lot has gradually fallen away over the years. My breathing is much more regulated, soft, and open. I’m fitter, I’m stronger. You get out of a downward spiral into a more opportunistic spiral.
You don’t have to be stuck with what you’ve got. There will be small changes you can make that will have an impact on your quality of life, because this quality of life is the thing that I think is most important, not whether you can walk or run. You know, I can’t walk and run, but I have a quality of life. I find that deeply, deeply moving. It’s unimaginably better than it was 30, 40 years ago.
SM: Yes, being with people who can just be with you and see you—that in itself is humane and tender and can initiate healing.
VB: Absolutely. One of the things that we hear again and again at Breathworks is that there’s a quality of lightness. One woman who came back the second week said, “I feel I’m learning to laugh again.”
She’d done awareness practice. She was in a lot of pain, had a difficult life, quite a lot of sadness, I think. It wasn’t like, Well, I’m becoming more aware. It was, I feel I’m ready to laugh.
I thought, that is so good, because we have a big group of people, many of them with really difficult circumstances. If we can help them find a way to bring some lightness into how they deal with their heaviness, they’re getting a great gift. I think particularly when one lives with difficulty, it is healing to find a way to relate to it in a more light, but not trivial way.
SM: In the process of discovering meditation and studying more deeply, did you have a moment where you thought, I really want to teach this to other people? Or did it happen in a more subtle way?
VB: I always go back to when I was 25 in intensive care in hospital, and I had this really big experience about the present moment, which changed my life. I knew that my pain was only happening one moment at a time and that most of my torment was about the future or the past.
That’s the very short version. I thought, I really, really want to figure out what it means to be present. How can I train in that, and how can I train my mind?
And interestingly that experience rose up out of hell. It was not an experience that happened in the bliss of a meditation retreat. No, it was an absolute existential kind of moment.
I had a social worker who was wonderful. She got me some tapes in the library, sort of beginning to meditate. I became a Buddhist a couple of years later, moved to England to live in a retreat center, and I was finding as I wasn’t really getting much guidance on how to meditate in the painful body. There weren’t many people around who seemed to know how to do that. I was always having to figure it all out for myself. People were very kind and very helpful, but the specifics of, how do you meditate when your back is absolutely screaming? It was a really hard thing to do.
Gradually I worked out how to do that with the help of Jon Kabat-Zinn. Actually, when I came across his book Full Catastrophe Living, that was massively helpful. I realized that I needed to learn to tend towards my experience and soften around it and release all this kind of extra suffering that I’m bringing through my evasion and my craving, really in my grasping for a different experience and my aversion to this experience.
With those two things together, I figured something out here, painfully and slowly over decades. And there’s going to be lots of other people like that young woman in hospital in intensive care, not knowing what the hell to do. There wasn’t any medical solution for my spine at that point. It was just like, we’re going to have to learn to live with it.
That’s why I wanted to teach, because I wanted to offer these to other people who were in the situation I was in so they didn’t have to have this 15 years of long, lonely journey. I was surrounded by incredible friends, and people couldn’t have been more supportive—but the specifics of how to meditate with pain, I wasn’t getting much.
When I started, I just wanted to help people. Now, 25 years later, I just want to help people. It’s a very, very simple motivation. And if I can help one person suffer less, that’s my journey.
When I started, I just wanted to help people. Now, 25 years later, I just want to help people. It’s a very, very simple motivation. And if I can help one person suffer less, that’s my journey.
SM: And it seems like it’s working. The response is there.
VB: It’s just very meaningful. It reframes all my suffering. More importantly, it helps others.
And what I really love about Breathworks and the HEALS program is, it’s not rocket science. It’s not some sort of advanced, metaphysical, complicated teaching. It’s: Be present. Know what’s happening. Let go of aversion and clinging. Release into the flow of love. Breathe and breathe out. And relax your bum. That’s my highest teaching now: Relax your bum.
That’s the whole. That’s it. You don’t really need much more than that. It’s very practical, very pragmatic. You don’t meditate to have a good meditation. You meditate so that you can cope with the moments in your daily life with a little bit more ease and grace and kindness and connection with others.
You don’t meditate to have a good meditation. You meditate so that you can cope with the moments in your daily life with a little bit more ease and grace and kindness and connection with others.
People quite rightly say, It saved my life, and I know it saved mine.
It’s tempting to put off self-care to the New Year. Explore these three practices to help you build resilience during this busy time of year.
When did December 1st become a finish line? Get your presents wrapped, house ready, parties lined up. This quick mindfulness practice—moving, breathing, and sitting—helps you to shift your state to less stressed and more calm, especially in the next few weeks, as things can get a bit ridiculous. What can you do about this time of the year, about our cultural conditioning, that has us running all over the place?
We can do daily short daily practices to help us manage the overwhelm and shift ourselves into a place of feeling more clear and awake yet also relaxed and at ease.
We can do short daily practices to help us manage the overwhelm and shift ourselves into a place of feeling more clear and awake yet also relaxed and at ease. Being mindful doesn’t mean being so chilled out all the time that nothing fazes you. This sense of “being mindful” is about being clear and alert in life and also calm and at ease so when we meet someone in the street in the hustle and bustle of December, you actually pause to look them in the eyes and ask, “How are you doing? How is your mom?”
Build Resilience over the Holidays with this Mindful Movement Sequence
1. Dynamic Mountain
Stand with your feet hip-width distance apart and your arms hanging loose down by your sides, palms forward. As you inhale, extend your arms forward and up toward the ceiling. Exhale, and spin your palms open as you reach out and down. Repeat for 3-5 breaths.
2. Side Sways
Now, inhale and reach your arms forward and up toward the ceiling and exhale toward your right side, tilting gently with your left arm overheard. On an inhale, come back to center, with both arms overhead. Exhale, sway to your left, allowing your left arm to reach down by your side with your right arm overhead. Repeat for 3-5 breaths.
3. Side Bends
Bend your knees and bring your hands on your knees like a baseball player. On the inhale, reach up to the ceiling, bringing your arms up and return to a standing position. Repeat 3-5 times.
4. Twist
Inhale, reach up again toward the ceiling and twist from your ribs toward the right, keeping your hips as square to the front as you can. As you twist, exhale, reach your arms out and let them fall to the sides. As you return to center, lift your arms back up and twist to the left. Inhale and “windmill” back to the right side. Repeat 3-5 times.
5. Seated Meditation
Take a seat, either on the floor in front of you on or a chair if that’s more comfortable. Place your feet on the floor and your hands on your knees and just notice your body for a moment. Notice any tingling or other sensations that surface. Now, shift your attention to your breathing. Inhale for a count of four, and exhale for a count of four. Do this counting for a minute or two. Rest your attention on the rhythm of breathing, the experience of breathing.
Our goal at Mindful is always to bring you the very best from the science, deep experience, and big questions of mindfulness. This past year has been filled with so much uncertainty, and we believe more than ever that mindfulness is designed to meet us exactly where we are to help us live better and experience stronger connections with ourselves and others.
The top articles of 2024 demonstrate the breadth and depth of all these shimmering, unexpected places that mindfulness can find us: anywhere from a children’s television show and our closets and to the books we read and the heavy spaces of disconnection, loss, and healing we’re navigating in our lifetimes.
The Most Popular Mindfulness Articles of 2024
1. The Whole Child Matters—What It Means to Have Mindfulness in Schools
In an age of increasing anxiety, introducing the mental resilience skills of mindfulness to young minds seems more important than ever. Writer Leslie Garrett went directly to teachers and mindfulness leaders to learn how it supports students, teachers, and their wider communities.
2. What to Do When You Feel Like You Don’t Have Enough Time
Free time can feel like a rare commodity these days. Dr. Diana Hill explores what free time really means to us and how our experience of it has more to do with how we’re spending our time than the amount of it we have.
3. Mindfulness for Racial Healing
The May 2020 killing of George Floyd is still having reverberating effects around the US. Educator and leader Tovi Scruggs-Hussein walks through six key ways that mindful practices can facilitate deeper connections by addressing the core emotional experiences at play in racial bias.
Mindfulness can serve as the foundation for powerful conversations, transformational growth, and self-awareness when it comes to race and racism.
4. Nanalan’: The Viral Show That Models How Mindfulness Looks and Feels
Since 1999, Nanalan’ co-creators Jason Hopley and Jamie Shannon have been sharing mindful concepts like empathy, awareness, and acceptance with their young audience. Discover how this heartfelt show (that’s only technically for kids) found TikTok fame and is now reaching and healing people of all ages.
5. How Meditation Supports Health and Healing
Even in an era of unprecedented technical “connection,” the percentage of people who report that they’re struggling with depression, anxiety, and loneliness continues to rise. Studies show that mindfulness is ultimately an effective, low-cost way to manage (and maybe even improve) physical and mental health and well-being.
6. Cultivating Mindfulness Beyond Meditation: How 8 Skills Empower Us in Everyday Life
One of the most common questions people ask about mindfulness is, What does this have to do with my actual life? Shalini Bahl explores eight key ways that mindful practices can impact your daily thoughts, interactions, and choices.
7. Decluttering—Outside and Inside
Letting go is hardly ever easy. Here Barry Boyce examines how decluttering physical spaces can offer gentle insight into how we can also create more lightness and freedom inside our minds.
Sorting through and letting go of physical objects we no longer need teaches us about all the things we’re holding onto. As Barry Boyce realizes, it can also help us find kinder, wiser ways of decluttering our mind.
8. After the Funeral: When Grief is Part of Daily Life
Grief is a universal human experience that’s also not talked about with much openness. In her own uniquely compassionate and humorous way, Elaine Smookler shares her personal grief journey and offers comfort and wisdom for others on the long road of loss.
9. Mindful Reading Guide: Contemporary Authors to Deepen Your Practice
We don’t often think of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry as being an integral part of growing our own mindful practices. Using examples from her own library, poet Angela Stubbs walks readers through how we, too, can identify and connect with mindful themes in our favorite books.
10. Q&A: How Connecting With Our Senses Supports Mental Health and Resilience
Modern Western culture is notoriously disconnected from the body, and this fragmentation has far-reaching effects on our mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Authors Norman Farb and Zindel Segal talk about their new book Better in Every Sense and how reconnecting with our senses can help get us unstuck and find real healing.
Jenée Johnson welcomes us home to our hearts with a guided meditation to rest, replenish, and renew.
This is a practice to usher us home for the holidays—“home” meaning to our inner selves, with love and care. In her book, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection, Sharon Salzberg says, “awareness and love are qualities we can rely on moment to moment…They protect us during whatever storms or blow outs we undergo.”
Awareness and love are qualities we can rely on moment to moment
Jenée Johnson, mindfulness, health, and racial healing innovator, and the founder of the Right Within Experience, guides us in this seven-minute meditation. We will explore a HeartMath practice called Quick Coherence that helps to synchronize the heart, mind, emotions, and body. This practice can help us work on being present with ourselves in an aware, kind, and loving way to take respite from the storms and renew strength and resilience.
A 12-Minute Guided Meditation to Come Home to Your Heart
1. Please be seated in a relaxed, upright position. Drop your gaze or close your eyes and sit with ease. Take a deep breath in and an audible sigh out.
2. I invite you to come home to yourself, come home to your own heart. I invite you to acknowledge any sadness, loss, or uncertainty you may be experiencing. Hold it gently, and hold it tenderly. I invite you to acknowledge your discoveries, your hopes and passions. Hold them lightly and with kindness as well.
Welcome home. Welcome to our hearts to heal, replenish, rest, and renew.
3. Focus your attention on the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart and chest area a little slower and deeper than usual. Inhale to the count of five and exhale to the count of five, or find a rhythm that is comfortable. If you would like, you can place a hand gently over your heart. This can help you center and invite inner ease and coherence.
4. Meet yourself in a compassionate and easy way with language like, “I’m so glad you’re here,” “It’s good to be with you.” Stay with slow, deep breaths through the heart or chest area. Rest here.
5. Now, let’s create an experience of renewal. On the next breath, make a sincere attempt to experience a renewing feeling such as appreciation or care for something or someone in your life. Re-experience the feeling you have for someone you love, a pet, a special place, or an accomplishment.
6. Simply focus on a feeling of calm or ease. Stay with calm easy breaths through the heart and chest area.
Welcome home for the holidays. May you have calm in the storms, ease, and grace.
Making sure our own needs are met is as important as taking care of those we love most. When turning your attention toward yourself feels challenging, there are simple ways to move through the discomfort. Explore our new guide for tips, practices, and reminders on how to engage in self-care. Read More
