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.

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?

Love, Empowerment and Clarity: The Mindful Trinity

Compassion as love, benevolence as empowerment, and wisdom as clarity are beneficial qualities cultivated through mindfulness that can help us make the world a better place.
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Mindfulness of Dissonance

In this post-fact era when uncertainty seems rampant, mindfulness can help us examine the dissonance that arises when evidence challenges our usual ways of thinking and being.
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Mindfulness of Social Media

It's temping to retaliate with cruel remarks or put-down humor when offensive posts come across our social media feeds. Mindfulness can give us the skills needed to respond more skillfully so that our online presence might become a force for good.

Mindfulness of Miswanting

One powerful benefit of a dedicated mindfulness practice is it can help us see through our problematic human habits and unconscious biases, including the miswanting that keeps us running ourselves ragged on a hedonic treadmill.

True and Authentic Freedom

Mindfulness may be one ingredient in the antidote to conditional freedom. When we cultivate the attitudes and practices of mindfulness in a dedicated and sustained manner, we begin to see through the delusions of ignorance, greed, jealousy, fear and anger that cause us to hold ourselves above, discriminate against, and harm others.

Mindfulness as Antidote

The practice of mindfulness can act as an antidote, helping us to counteract potentially harmful automatic processes such as ignorance, emotional illiteracy, indifference and hedonic adaptation.

Overhauling a Broken System with Mindfulness

The practices of mindfulness can help guide us toward a more profound and lasting kind of change, both individually and collectively, by addressing many of the foundational skills deficits underlying some of society's most pressing problems and adopting attitudes and practices that help us clear away illusions so we can respond from a place of wisdom.
Timo Volz

Mindfulness is Simple, Life is Complicated

Life can be complicated. A dedicated practice of mindfulness can help us open to life's complexities so that we can meet challenges with greater patience, courage and wisdom.

Mindfulness of Anger

Mindfulness of anger helps us understand our habitual reactions to threat, connect with our deepest intentions, and respond in ways that are more likely to get our needs met.