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.

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

MAM teacher 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

Protected: Facing Our Dark Side with Skillful Means: Mindfulness and Morality

How might mindfulness help us face the dark side of humanity so that we can communicate skillfully across differences and work together to create a more just and peaceful world?

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.
raven on the wind

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.