Health Journal Online

Tag: Healing

  • A Guided Meditation for Collective Healing

    A Guided Meditation for Collective Healing

    In this guided practice, we cultivate collective healing amidst the ways we are all shaped by our experiences, fears, and hopes.

    Key Points:

    • The mindful practice of deeper understanding can help us when we seek to find common ground with people who seem different from ourselves.
    • This meditation helps us to see that we are all shaped by our experiences, fears, and hopes, despite our differences.
    • By reflecting on our experiences and shared humanity, we can better understand others and take meaningful action for collective healing.

    In today’s interconnected yet paradoxically divided world, the path to understanding each other requires more than just good intentions. To truly connect and heal, we need something more: the cultivation of a deeper understanding. The path forward isn’t about eliminating differences—it’s about building bridges of understanding across them.

    In this gentle yet powerful meditation with Shalini Bahl, we experience how we are all shaped by our experiences, fears, and hopes. Deep understanding is like diving below the illuminated surface to deeper waters. By understanding both what floats on the surface and what lies in the depths, we can begin to shift our habitual patterns and make choices that arise from genuine wisdom rather than reactive impulses.

    A Meditation for Collective Healing

    1. In today’s practice, we’ll move through three steps. One, returning to a non-judging awareness; two, listening for deeper understanding; and three, beginning to take mindful action. 
    2. Let’s start by taking a few minutes to simply pause and return to our non-judging awareness. Come to a comfortable sitting position, feeling the elongation along the back of the spine. Gently lift your shoulders up, back, and down, so that the breath can move at ease. Feel the support under your feet. 
    3. You may lower or close your eyes. Bring your attention to your breath. Notice how it moves in and out of your body effortlessly. If it’s deep, let it be deep. If it’s shallow, let it be shallow. Simply invite your mind to be here with your breath and your body. If you like, let your attention rest in the region of your heart, feeling the spaciousness in your chest with each in-breath, and a gentle release with each outbreath. 
    4. Gently bring to mind the situation causing tension or conflict. See it clearly as if watching from a slight distance. Notice what arises in your body. Perhaps there’s tightness in your chest or belly, or your breath becomes shallow. Notice with kindness that all the sensations are rising and dissolving in your body, and make room for all your sensations, all the emotions. Whether it’s grief or anger, frustration, sadness—notice with kindness, without trying to fix or suppress anything. 
    5. Now, notice what thoughts are underlying these emotions. See the people involved, their expressions or words or tone of voice. Feel this spaciousness in your mind, like a vast sky where all the thoughts arising are passing by like clouds. 
    6. Once you feel a little more space in your mind and your body, you can move to the next step: listening deeply. Set an intention to understand not just our experience and needs, but also extending that same understanding toward others involved. 
    7. If you need some support getting into this posture of deep listening, here are some questions you can explore. If you need a little more time, you can always pause the recording or try some journaling. Begin with, What are your core needs in this situation? Perhaps you long for safety, acknowledgment, a healthy environment, respect for your values. 
    8. Next, connect with our shared humanity with others. Silently reflect, Just like me, this person wants to be happy and healthy. Just like me, this person also cares for their family. Continue on your own with your shared similarities with this person or people. Just like me…. 
    9. From this place of connection, seek to understand what lived experiences might be shaping their current stance or actions. What assumptions or beliefs are you bringing to this situation? 
    10. Continue to breathe deeply to create more space in your mind and body. Breathe out any rigidity or tension you may be holding. What else might be possible here? No need to search or strive for answers, just trusting our intention for a deeper understanding and seeing our shared humanity, knowing we will be guided to clarity with this inner compass. 
    11. Feel free to pause this recording to go for a mindful walk in nature or do some journaling to create room for a deeper understanding. As clarity emerges, you may notice a release of tension. It might be a very subtle shift in our body or your breath becoming deeper or easier. 
    12. From this place of connection with your intention and insights, you can move to the last step: considering possibilities for intentional, mindful action. These are small steps you can take to create more understanding and harmony in this situation. Let this intentional approach extend beyond this specific situation. For example, how might your choices around consumption—what you put into your body, how you source things—all support a mind and body guided by your intention and values?
    13. Remember, you can return to this practice whenever you need, using these three steps: return to your non-judging awareness, listen for deeper understanding, and begin to take aligned actions. Let’s take a final breath together. As we exhale slowly, may this practice benefit us and benefit all beings.



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  • Collective Healing Starts with Deeper Understanding

    Collective Healing Starts with Deeper Understanding

    In today’s interconnected yet paradoxically divided world, the path to understanding each other requires more than just good intentions or calls for unity. While practices like loving-kindness meditation can help soften our hearts, true bridge-building demands something more: the cultivation of a deeper understanding.

    What Is Deeper Understanding?

    Mindfulness practices, including compassion meditations, settle the mind and prepare us to see the bigger picture beyond our immediate judgments. Yet a common mistake we all make is that once we feel calmer, we rush back into our worlds and don’t make time to gain a deeper understanding of the dissatisfactory situations we find ourselves in. If we don’t know the root causes for these situations, we can’t find the right solutions to resolve them.

    Meditation is an important first step. It’s like shining a light on the surface of a lake—it illuminates our immediate thoughts, reactions, and judgments without our getting caught in them. This initial glimpse brings us closer to our present moment experience and is a starting point for discovering what is underlying our reactions.

    Deep understanding is like diving below the illuminated surface to deeper waters, where light gradually dims. Through patient listening to ourselves and others, we begin to uncover hidden layers of meaning:

    • The root causes of our behaviors
    • The subtle biases that shape our views
    • Our needs and intentions
    • The complex web of interconnections between our experiences

    As we venture deeper, each level reveals new insights previously concealed from view, from our personal patterns to our shared human experiences.

    When we take time to listen with genuine openness, we can trace surface reactions back to their sources, examining the assumptions and beliefs that lie in deeper waters. This patient exploration helps us understand not just the immediate situation, but the broader context that created it: the historical patterns that shaped it, the various perspectives that surround it, and the potential consequences of our responses to it.

    This process of illumination and deep listening creates space for transformation. By understanding both what floats on the surface and what lies in the depths, we can begin to shift our habitual patterns and make choices that arise from genuine wisdom rather than reactive impulses.

    The Power of Understanding

    We are all shaped by our experiences, fears, and hopes. Our inherent biases may cloud our ability to see our interconnectedness, but they don’t negate it. The path forward isn’t about eliminating differences—it’s about building bridges of understanding across them.

    The path forward isn’t about eliminating differences—it’s about building bridges of understanding across them.

    What might change if we could:

    • Stop rushing to judgment and truly listen?
    • See our own fears reflected in others?
    • Recognize that everyone is acting from their best understanding?
    • Look beyond political labels to our shared humanity?
    • Address the root causes of our divisiveness?

    Pausing to step back for a deeper understanding is particularly important in the modern world to step out of our echo chambers.

    The Echo Chamber Effect

    Our modern information landscape often amplifies our differences while obscuring our common humanity. Social media algorithms, targeted advertising, and news feeds tend to create echo chambers where we mainly encounter views that confirm our existing beliefs (known as confirmation bias). This is not to say that there aren’t real and significant disagreements around some social and political issues. Yet in many cases, this digital architecture of division can transform different lifestyle choices or policy preferences into seemingly unbridgeable moral chasms.

    Breaking free from these echo chambers requires both personal boundaries and intentional engagement. While working with a group of researchers, I studied the lived experiences of young Black women to understand how to navigate these digital spaces more effectively. Together, we created educational materials including a freely downloadable handbook—“The Intentional User”—for empowered social media use.

    While the handbook was designed for young Black women, it contains useful strategies and skills for everyone to benefit from the opportunities social networks offer for skill building, connecting, and getting our message out while creating boundaries to protect our time and psychological well-being. The handbook also shares crucial skills—curiosity and compassion—for engaging across differences, helping users step outside their algorithmic bubbles while maintaining healthy digital boundaries.

    This dual approach—setting personal limits while reaching across divides—offers a path toward using social media in service of both individual growth and broader understanding. However, shifting the ways we engage with social media is only the beginning.

    Deeper Understanding to Intentional Action: A Three-Step Framework for Collective Healing

    In polarized times, meaningful change starts with how we show up in our communities. We don’t have to wait for the elections or the next big incident to start taking action, individually and collectively.

    If the above statement feels impossible for you right now, know that it’s OK to feel this way. When emotions run high and uncertainty prevails, we first need a framework for processing our experience and beginning to heal within. And, as we know, true healing also calls us to move beyond self-care to engage in dialogue and intentional action based on deeper understanding.

    Below, I share a mindful framework to return, listen, and begin taking practical steps to move from division to connection. The three steps are cyclical and work together.

    Step 1: Return to Non-Judging Awareness

    The first step, before responding on the spot or making decisions, is to return to our non-judging awareness of our present moment experience. Depending upon the situation and available time, choose from mindfulness-based practices such as the ones below:

    i. Pause and Center

    This is an invitation to simply pause and return to centered awareness before responding:

    • Take a few conscious breaths. 
    • Feel the breath moving and creating spaciousness in your body
    • Ground yourself physically—for example, feel your feet on the ground
    • Practice mindful walking, stretching, or being in nature

    ii. Inner Awareness 

    Turn your attention towards your inner experience with non-judgment and curiosity: 

    • Notice physical sensations (tension, racing heart, clenched jaw)
    • Observe thoughts without getting caught in them 
    • Name emotions as they arise, without trying to avoid, justify, or fix them (“There’s anger,” “There’s fear”)
    • Watch for automatic reactions and habitual patterns

    iii. External Awareness

    Once you feel centered in your own experience, direct your attention outward, with non-judgment and curiosity:

    • Observe others’ facial expressions and body language
    • Notice tone of voice and choice of words
    • Pay attention to the broader environment and context
    • Watch for collective emotions in groups
    • Notice what’s being said and what’s left unsaid

    Step 2: Listen for Deeper Understanding

    Once we feel connected with our inner and outer awareness, we can start to listen for a deeper understanding beyond surface reactions. When we hear someone express views that differ from ours, our first instinct might be to argue or dismiss. Instead, try these approaches:

        i. Practice Active Listening

    We use the filters, or default biases, shaped by our past conditioning to listen and react. It is helpful to rehearse strategies for disrupting your default biases and listen with an open mind:

    • Count to five before responding
    • Use phrases like “Help me understand…”
    •  Use phrases like “What I hear you saying is…” to check understanding
    •  Notice when you’re planning a rebuttal instead of truly hearing
    • Ask follow-up questions that deepen understanding rather than pose a challenge

         ii. Acknowledge Valid Concerns and Shared Values

    In my capacity as a town councilor, I worked in a community that was highly polarized on many critical issues. Yet, we shared legitimate fears of change and uncertainty, along with care for our loved ones and the community. In that, we were more similar than different. Experiment with the following suggestions:

    • Instead of “They don’t understand,” ask “What experiences shaped their view?”
    • Shift from “They’re wrong,” to “They’re responding based on their lived experiences”
    • Focus on common desires: safe communities, good schools, economic security
    • Identify mutual concerns: healthcare costs, environmental changes, children’s future

    Instead of “They don’t understand,” ask “What experiences shaped their view?”

       iii. Move Beyond Stereotypes

    No matter how good our intentions are to view situations in a balanced way, each of us brings a conditioned lens which automatically focuses on certain aspects of the situation while leaving out others. Here are a few practical ways to disrupt our stereotypes:

    • Question your assumptions about “those people”
    • Look for individual stories behind group labels
    • Remember times your own views have evolved
    • Seek out diverse perspectives intentionally
    • Notice binary thinking and expand possibilities

       iv. Explore Creative Solutions  

    When we let go of our attachments to our beliefs and assumptions, we make room for new possibilities. Trust that you will know what you need to know. Here are a few suggestions to engage fully and intentionally:

    • Engage with both/and instead of either/or thinking to explore new possibilities
    • Consider multiple truths existing together
    • Focus on shared aspirations
    • Build on others’ ideas

    Step 3: Begin Taking Action

    While our good intentions and deepening understanding are essential, the challenges we face call for engaged action aligned with our intentions and insights for collective healing. In our fast-paced, polarized culture, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed and step back from difficult situations. We might find ourselves avoiding uncomfortable conversations or disengaging from collective challenges that feel too complex or contentious.

    The challenges we face call for engaged action aligned with our intentions and insights for collective healing.

    Yet each of us has the capacity to contribute to positive change, even in small ways. By bringing mindful awareness and a deeper understanding to our various roles—as consumers, leaders, and community members—we can take meaningful steps toward building more connected communities. Here are some practical ways to begin:

    As Conscious Consumers

    Often, we may not see how our daily choices as consumers connect to our deeper values and impact our communities. Yet each purchase we make is an opportunity to support the kind of world we want to create. Our spending decisions ripple out to affect local cultures, environments, and the well-being of our neighbors. 

    Even in times of national division, we can strengthen our local communities through mindful choices about where and how we spend our resources. Here are some ways to align our consumer choices with our values:

    • Support local businesses across community divides
    • Join community-supported agriculture programs
    • Use local financial services that reinvest in your area
    • Participate in resource-sharing networks
    • Consider the values and consequences of the business on suppliers, employees, consumers, and the environment before giving your purchase dollars and attention to that business

    As Leaders

    Leaders have unique opportunities to create environments that foster understanding and bridge divides. Whether leading teams, organizations, or community initiatives, we can use our influence to build structures that support both individual growth and collective healing. Drawing from a deeper understanding of different perspectives and needs, here are ways to lead with intention for collective healing and growth:

    • Model respectful disagreement
    • Build diverse, inclusive teams that bring multiple viewpoints together
    • Create forums for open discussion
    • Implement fair policies that respect different viewpoints
    • Make time and space for developing skills for deeper understanding through workshops, training, and practice sessions
    • Allocate resources for ongoing learning and healing practices within the organization

    As Community Members

    We can seek out opportunities to build bridges across divides by aligning our thoughts, speech, and actions with our insights and intentions based on a deeper understanding of our shared humanity and unique journeys:

    • Join cross-cultural community projects
    • Participate in local government meetings
    • Start neighborhood initiatives that require cooperation
    • Create and join spaces for regular dialogue

    Moving Forward

    True resilience grows through consistent, intentional action emerging from a calm mind and deeper understanding. Each time we return to our non-judging awareness, listen deeply for a deeper understanding, and begin taking action, we create ripples of positive change throughout our communities. The goal isn’t to eliminate differences but to create spaces where differences contribute to our collective strength.

    Remember: Small actions, emerging from deeper understanding and repeated consistently, create lasting change. Start where you are, with what you have, and build from there. Each step toward understanding, no matter how small, contributes to our collective healing.



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  • Can Fasting Be Healing? 

    Can Fasting Be Healing? 

    Where did the idea of therapeutic fasting come from?

    The story of life on Earth is a story of starvation. Ash from massive volcanoes and asteroids blocked out the sun, which killed the plants, which then killed almost everything else. As Darwin pointed out: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving” arose—namely, us.

    “Among apes, humans are particularly well adapted to prolonged fasting.” Evolving in a context of scarcity is believed to have shaped “our exceptional ability to store large amounts of energy [calories] when food is available.” Of course, nowadays, our ability to easily pack on pounds is leading to modern diseases, like obesity and type 2 diabetes. But, without the ability to store so much body fat, we may not have made it to tell the tale.

    Scarcity wasn’t just caused by the asteroids millions of years ago. “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger,” reads an inscription on an Egyptian tomb from about 4,000 years ago, “to such a degree that everyone had come to eating his children…” Just hundreds of years ago, “[p]arents killed their children and children killed parents” and ate them, and “the bodies of executed criminals were eagerly snatched from the gallows.” Hunger wiped out as many as two-thirds of the population of Italy and one-third of the population of Paris. So, we don’t have to go back to ancient history. “Even the most secure and affluent populations of today need only trace their history back a short distance to find evidence of famines that would have impinged on their forebears.” For example, there have been nearly 200 famines in Britain over the last 2,000 years.

    Now, we tend to be suffering from too much food, which carries its problems, but “what about the consequences of not ever starving?” This was a question raised nearly 60 years ago. If our physiology is so well-tuned to periodic starvation, by eliminating that, might we be harming our overall well-being? We just didn’t know.

    The lack of research in the area of starvation was attributed to the “difficulty of securing willing human subjects.” So, what little we had may have come from unwilling subjects. Physicians within the Warsaw Ghetto made detailed accounts before they succumbed, and Irish Republican Army prisoners in Northern Ireland starved themselves to death after hunger striking up to 73 days. However, starvation isn’t necessarily the same as fasting, an issue raised in medical journals more than a century ago. “Starvation is normally a forced, mentally stressful, and chronic condition, whereas [therapeutic] fasting is voluntary, limited in duration, and usually practiced by people in adequate nutritional state”—that is, individuals who start with adequate nutrition.

    Therapeutic fasting? Where did we get this idea of fasting therapy? “Fasting for medical purpose”? As I discuss in my video The Benefits of Fasting for Healing, it may have originally arisen out of the observation that when people get acutely ill, they tend to lose their appetite, so maybe there’s something in the wisdom of our body to stop eating. That’s presumably where the whole “starve a fever” folklore came from.

    There was a sense that “fasting affords physiologic rest” for the body—not just for the digestive tract, but throughout—allowing the body to concentrate on healing. It was evidently “an open secret” that veterinarians used to hospitalize dogs with “various dyspeptic and metabolic ailments” only to fast them back to health. So, the theory went, maybe it might work for people, too.

    Beyond just freeing up all the resources that would normally be used for nutrient digestion and storage, there’s a concept that, during fasting, our cells switch over to some sort of protection mode. Why would fasting reduce free radical “oxidative damage and inflammation, optimize energy metabolism, and bolster cellular protection”? It’s the “that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” concept known as hormesis. That’s kind of the opposite of the “let the body rest” theory. It’s more like “let the body stress.” The stress of fasting may steel the body against other stresses coming our way. This was demonstrated perhaps most starkly in a set of cringe-worthy experiments in which mice were blasted with Hiroshima-level gamma radiation sufficient to kill 50 percent within two weeks, but of the mice who had first been intermittently fasted for six weeks before, not a single one died, as you can see in the graph below and at 4:33 in my video.

    It’s these kinds of dramatic data that led to extraordinary claims like therapeutic fasting could drive half of all doctors out of business. You don’t know until you put it to the test, and we’ll explore that next.

    There’s been an explosion in research interest in fasting over the last few years. Stay tuned for The World’s Largest Fasting Study.

    Due to my work on How Not to Diet, I have discussed several studies in videos that are already available to you on fasting and weight loss. Check out the related posts below.



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  • Q&A: Mindfulness and Racial Healing with Tovi Scruggs-Hussein

    Q&A: Mindfulness and Racial Healing with Tovi Scruggs-Hussein

    How mindfulness can support us all in racial healing and coming together with compassion, learning, and unlearning.

    Welcome! This article is a follow-up to our series on Mindfulness for Racial Healing by healer, leader, and one of the 2021 Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement, Tovi Scruggs-Hussein. Explore the rest of the series here.

    1. Can you say more about the role of meditation in racial healing? Meditation feels like an individual well-being practice. What is its role in this context?

    Our society has branded meditation to be an individual well-being practice, but we also have the option to engage in meditation as an act of service. Initially, yes, mediation can create a sense of individual well-being, yet it is also a tool for liberation and empowerment. We’ve continued to see in the research that meditation supports empathy and compassion; these are both qualities and ways of being that go beyond personal well-being and truly support the way we engage with others and ourselves, not so much because we feel good, but because we have the capacity and competence to engage from a more heartfelt place. Racial healing is dependent upon empathy and compassion. In order to heal, we must learn to connect to the emotions of racialized experiences and take action based on those emotions to create a more just and liberated society. Meditation supports racial healing and racial healing supports justice, each building on the other. 

    In order to heal, we must learn to connect to the emotions of racialized experiences and take action based on those emotions to create a more just and liberated society.

    2. In your “Mindfulness for Racial Healing” article, you write about the importance of honoring our connection to ourselves in order to honor our connection to each other. What does that mean? Why does honoring our connection to ourselves come first?

    Racism is a sign of disconnection to ourselves and to others. In fact, all of the “isms” are a sign of deep disconnection from our compassion and of the inability to see our shared humanity. When we are disconnected from that sense of humanity, it’s easier for us to dehumanize others. Racism is dehumanization. The atrocities of slavery and genocides stem from this sense of disconnection. Once we are connected to ourselves, we can deepen our connection to others, but it doesn’t happen unless we connect to ourselves more deeply first. Your embodiment of compassion and mindfulness first gets engrained in yourself and then it is felt outward. 

    Meditation and its importance in racial healing also connects to nonjudgment—and by definition, part of meditation is the practice of nonjudgment. When we are in a state of practicing nonjudgment, we can be more equanimous and not put things or people, including ourselves, into categories of “right or wrong” or “good or bad.” When you deepen your connection to your own worth without judgment, you can begin to do the same for others. Neuroscience supports this growth as a competency that is built over time as you deepen your meditation practice—and we must always begin with self, starting within. Consider the wonderful quote by Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” You must embody it first. 

    3. You talk about the importance of understanding. Can a White person ever really understand the experience of a Black, Indigenous, or Person Of Color (BIPOC)? For allies, does that matter? 

    I love this question!  And I love that I did not have to grapple with responding to this one alone—I have dedicated, racially-conscious White allies in the work who took the lead on responding:  

    Sally Albright-Green, a leader in Racial Healing Allies offers this:

    White people can and should be about the business of actively listening to the voices of BIPOC, centering those voices in any conversations about systemic racism and anti-racism and working hard to understand. In the end, it’s important to shift the focus from words like “ever” and understand the nature of lived experience. Can anyone ever truly understand the experiences of another?

    We are all still unlearning the things we were socialized to believe about racism and learning the truths we were never taught.

    We are all still unlearning the things we were socialized to believe about racism and learning the truths we were never taught. Becoming a White ally really involves asking different sorts of questions based on years of working hard to learn about the world through the lens of someone who is not White. Understanding what it means at a deep level to be White—and the impact white dominance and oppression have had on BIPOC—is the understanding that White allies work towards. When that deep level of cultural humility is reached, then one can say a White person has become anti-racist and works to understand the history of racism so they can interrupt it in our systems and practices. When one can truly work beside BIPOC to interrupt racist practices, and demonstrate that they are motivated to work hard for the good of humanity, recognizing the depth and breadth of BIPOC struggles beyond a standpoint of white saviorism, then they will be close. It’s about recognizing that the work is more about learning the facts and working hard to repair the damage than it is about understanding what it is like to be a BIPOC.

    Grace Helms-Kotre, a leader in Racial Healing Allies, offers this:

    A White person will never fully understand what it means to be a Person of Color. That is not the goal. It’s not like a box we can check or a competency we can achieve. We’ll never have the lived experience of being targeted by systemic racism, so we cannot know fully. But we can engage in the lifelong practice of deepening our understanding by bringing presence and empathy to our interactions with BIPOC and with other white folks. To bring awareness to our racial experiences and systemic racism as it functions in every area of our lives.

    For allies, what matters is that we are showing up with curiosity and humility again and again.

    For allies, what matters is that we are showing up with curiosity and humility again and again. We are not going away. We are staying in the discomfort of racial awareness in order to challenge White supremacy culture in all its manifestations, through us and around us.

    4. What does cultural-responsiveness mean? Where does mindfulness come into play here?

    Cultural-responsiveness means: practicing learning from, valuing, and relating to people from different cultures with respect. To take it a step further, I view it as having an awareness and ability that allows us to engage with and honor the backgrounds, values, customs, and norms of groups different than our own. Again, this can be applied beyond race. Meditation and mindfulness support us in growing our awareness of ourselves, others, and our impact. Meditation and mindfulness invite us to practice pausing before responding so that our response can be skillful rather than habituated. The practice is not allowing our triggers to take hold of us, and connecting to others from a place that honors who they are. My heart swells with gratitude for a practice that can be done in both isolation and community to provide deep individual well-being as well as deep connection so that the future of humanity is held in love.



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