Mindfulness: An Upstream Approach
Mindfulness training can help us cultivate the fundamental skills needed for a paradigm shift that might reduce or eliminate the primary causes of human suffering.
Entries by OPS
Mindful Eating: Nourish Bowls
Mindful eating is a wonderful way to practice mindfulness while fulfilling a basic need, repairing an unhealthy relationship with food, and improving attunement to the body’s requirements and signals.
My Mindfulness Teacher Training Journey: Embodiment of Gratitude
Cathan Kabrelian tells about her mindfulness teacher training journey and the insights she experienced along the way
Practice Equals Pressure Plus Persistence
MAM teacher Shane Ledford discusses the importance of patience, persistence, and perseverance in the practice and teaching of mindfulness
Are You an Upstander?
Being an upstander requires us to be mindful and observant, willing to bear witness to the suffering of others, and open to taking wise and compassionate action to help reduce that suffering. It involves an attitude of looking out for one another and taking an active role in co-creating a more just world.
Mindfulness of Values
Mindfulness can play a key role in connecting our actions with our values through practicing sustaining closer objective attention to what is actually happening in our lives, rather than relying on assumptions or wishes.
Mindfulness of Empowerment
When things feel completely out of our control, our mindfulness practice can help us see where we are truly empowered.
Mindfulness of Ego
Through a dedicated mindfulness practice, we are increasingly able to notice the ego at work, reduce our reactivity to ego threats, and make choices about how to respond in a way that is skillful – not just for ourselves, but for the benefit of all.
Mindfulness at a Crossroads
In times of great change, our mindfulness practice can empower and fortify us to be activists for a better world, in a sustainable way, for the 10,000 mile journey ahead.
Patience Now, My Friends
We can cultivate the attitudes of mindfulness, such as patience and trust, through the most humble of life’s lessons when we’re open to it – including in the blooming of the last lotus of the season.
Bearing Witness
Bearing witness requires that we remain open to all that life brings us; birth and death, beauty and ugliness, joy and pain, beginnings and endings.
Cultivating Contemplative Skills
Contemplative learning and practice integrate introspection and direct experience, cultivating wisdom through the development of fundamental skills supporting individual and collective wellbeing. Mindfulness is an essential component underlying all of these skills.
Is Mindfulness Christian?
Mindfulness and the foundational determinants of wellbeing it supports, such as emotional regulation, attentional control, and resilience is an attitude, a practice, a state, a trait, or a way of living that doesn’t belong to any religion, but to humanity as a whole.
Mindfulness of Worthiness
What if we measured worthiness through prosocial qualities such as kindness, compassion, empathy, and respect for others, rather than extraordinary abilities or achievements? These qualities can create beneficial feedback loops, helping others feel worthy through our own embodiment of unconditional love and positive regard.
Meet the Teacher: Shane Ledford
Meet Shane Ledford, CYT, Core Community Teacher for the Midwest Alliance for Mindfulness, Yin Yoga teacher, student of walking meditation (“Kinhin”) and Forest Therapy (“Shinrin-Yoku”), and avid movie buff.
A Mindfulness Center in the Midwest: Three and Thriving
The Midwest Alliance for Mindfulness is rounding out our third year as Kansas City’s premier nonsectarian mindfulness and meditation center. The challenges of 2020 required us to practice patience, flexibility and courage in the face of uncertainty.
Mindfulness of Renunciation
We all desire relief from the background of unease, dissatisfaction, or restlessness that tends to accompany us everywhere we go when we are in a mind state of wanting, or its mirror image twin not-wanting. Renunciation, or deciding not to act on our wanting, uncovers truths that may typically be camouflaged by our unexamined drives and habits.
Is Mindfulness Working for Me?
How can mindfulness teachers and practitioners embrace trauma sensitivity and welcome the diverse spectrum of human needs, while avoiding being overprotective or inadvertently reinforcing a mainstream, culturally sanctioned “me first, right now” attitude?