Mindful Speech: The Power of Words
The words we choose to communicate our experience to ourselves and others can help facilitate intimacy when we are mindful – or they can widen the gap when unexamined.
Entries by OPS
Mindfulness of Greed
A dedicated practice of mindfulness can allow us see through our insatiable wanting and greed to a more sustainable mindset of sufficiency.
Mindfulness of Social Anxiety
Mindfulness can help us reduce social anxiety and increase interpersonal trust so that we can cultivate more intimate connections, even across difference, toward a more compassionate world.
Mindfulness of Interpersonal Warmth
The skills we gain through mindfulness practice and the resources we share in our practice communities can help us cultivate the beneficial trait of interpersonal warmth.
Mindfulness of Mortality
Contemplative practices and skills such as mindfulness and self-compassion can help resource us to face mortality with wisdom, live our lives with greater appreciation and presence, become more skillful supporters of our dying loved ones, and prepare for our own deaths in ways that decrease unnecessary suffering.
Mindfulness of Mirroring
Practicing mindfulness of mirroring can help us meet difficult social experiences with greater wisdom and skill.
Why Mindfulness is Important in the Midwest
The US Midwest possesses unique gifts, resources, and vulnerabilities that impact the rest of the country and ripple out into the world. Mindfulness may help us relate to them more skillfully, to everyone’s benefit.
Who Decides? Mindfulness of Multiplicity, Interdependence and Agency
We like to believe we are the authors of our own actions, but research is showing us behavior is complicated. Fortunately, mindfulness can help us make the subconscious processes that drive our impulses more conscious and intentional.
Mindful Life Lessons from the Beatles
Shane Ledford explores how the Beatles documentary “Get Back” offers some mindful lessons that can be adapted into everyday life.
Do Not Fall Into Despair: Mindfulness as Antidote
Any one of the profound difficulties we are facing as a species might cause us to abandon hope. Fortunately, mindfulness can help resource ourselves to face these challenges with wisdom and resilience.
Breaking Down the Gates and Welcoming In the Wilderness with Mindfulness
Certified mindfulness teacher Julia Grimm discusses the wisdom and refuge of her practice as well as the fruits of her mindfulness teacher training experience.
Seven Years of Ashtanga Yoga
Reflections on 7 years of Ashtanga Yoga, a mindful movement practice that heals the body, purifies the mind, and prepares the practitioner for the stillness of meditation.
Moved by Love: Kama Muta
Kama muta, a Sanskrit word for a feeling of oneness, is not just a pleasant emotion. Experiencing it motivates us to commit to communal sharing relationships that anthropologists credit for our survival as a species.
Mindfulness of Self-Referencing
Though self-referencing is a cognitive ability that can be useful for our survival, the unexamined mind can create unnecessary suffering when we react to this tendency in a habitual way.
Mindfulness and Social Courage
In this time of polarity and division, cultivating social courage can give us the resilience to work effectively together to help make the world a more welcoming and thriving place.
A Mindfulness Center in the Midwest: Four and Fabulous
January 1, 2022 marked the fourth “official” anniversary of the Midwest Alliance for Mindfulness (MAM), Kansas City’s premier secular mindfulness and meditation center.
Relinquishing the Uncontrollable, Unhelpful, and Unowned
Mindfulness can help us recognize when our hanging on isn’t skillful and cultivate the skills we need to let go of what is uncontrollable, unhelpful, or unowned.
A Path to Freedom
The eightfold path offers a method for awakening to the fragility of life and the precariousness of our future, as well as an ethical framework for living together in harmony in a flourishing world.