Share “Try this embodiment exercise: savoring sensuality. Think back to the moment where you experienced the most pleasure and indescribable joy. Was it when you laughed until your belly hurt and your eyes watered? Was it when your tongue savored the juicy goodness of a food that fueled your body, connected you to culture, and brought you into community with others? Hold this memory in your mind and revisit the goodness of that experience. The moments that we experience the most pleasure tend to come from living in the moment, not overthinking ...

Mindfulness with teens sounds amazing, but how do we get past the eye rolls and resistance? Over the years I’ve thought a lot about this, with a few successes and many failures. So, I’m sharing these five Rs as tips to help get things started. Relevance A lot of well-intentioned adults believe teens need mindfulness for mental health or for stress relief. For many teens, though, mental health stigma or other priorities can get in the way of trying something new. Like trying to teach kids anything, we need to make mindfulness relevant to their y...

Share Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court Decision and a watershed event in American history. It marked a turning point in the civil rights movement. The justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children, known as "separate but equal" education, in public schools was unconstitutional. The case began in Kansas in 1951 when Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education after his daughter was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools. Brown claimed that schools...

Share The Pulitzer-Prize winning author, activist, oral historian, and broadcast pioneer Studs Terkel was born on this day in 1912. When the immensely popular television comedian John Stewart met this free spirit and creative genius he said, "It's truly an honor to meet you. You're the premier chronicler of American life." Terkel was a great believer in the art of listening. He was one of the lucky ones who landed a radio interview job in Chicago and then managed to expand his curiosity in a series of oral histories of unheralded Americans. He ...

Share Jon Kabat-Zinn is a member of our Living Spiritual Teachers Project. He often leads workshops on stress reduction and mindfulness for doctors and other healthcare professionals. Some of the content of this book began as an audio CD released by the same publisher in 2010. Kabat-Zinn wants to change how you see your pain and suffering. He writes specifically for people whose lives are “shaped by pain in one way of another,” adding, “it is possible to learn to live with pain that does not easily diminish or go away.” Chapter 1 is titled, “Le...

Share “When you wake up, don’t jump out of bed right away. Instead, give yourself a few moments to realize and let it sink in that you are awake and that this is a brand-new day, full of new opportunities for not missing your moments and for residing in them with gladness and openheartedness directed not only toward yourself but also toward others. As best you can, position yourself in a comfortable posture, perhaps lying on your back, and give yourself over to riding on the waves of your breathing for a few minutes, becoming aware of the whole...

People who practice mindfulness say it fundamentally changes how they experience life. For the past 40+ years, researchers have been attempting to explain this in biological terms. Studies reveal that mindfulness may reduce anxiety and depression, boost your immune system, help you manage pain, allow you to unhook from unhealthy habits and addictions, soothe insomnia, reduce high blood pressure, and even change the structure and function of your brain in positive ways The most respected scientists who study the effects of mindfulness practices ...

Share “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” is an enchanting screen adaptation of Judy Blume’s best-selling classic 1970 young adult novel. The film has been praised by Blume as being true to her book and intentions. A coming-of-age story, it has spoken not only to young women but also to other generations who have been charmed by its depiction of universal experiences in different stages of life. Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) is a serious eleven-year-old in sixth grade. As the story opens, she’s just learned that her parents, Barbara (Rachel...

Share We are aware that to some people, Mother's Day seems to be a holiday concocted by the greeting card and floral companies, a cultural holiday dominated by consumer pressures. For those whose mothers have died or are distant, and for those who have never been mothers, the day touches other sensitivities. But we think any "problem" with Mother's Day is just because typically it is defined too narrowly. There are many mothers in all our lives and many kinds of mothering experiences. Here, then, for that very special day, Mother's Day, are spi...

Share Stephen Colbert became the eleventh child of an Irish Catholic family on May 13, 1964. He was raised in South Carolina, educated at Northwestern, and trained at Second City, where he honed the playful, fearless improv sensibility that led to his big break as a conservative correspondent on The Daily Show. When that conservative correspondent was given his own show, The Colbert Report was born and Colbert went from up-and-comer to national treasure. The host of the Colbert Report (not to be confused with Stephen Colbert the comedian) was a...

The Religion News Service (RNS) is an independent, nonprofit, and award-winning source of global news on religion, spirituality, culture and ethics, reported by a staff of professional journalists. Because of its objective reporting and insightful commentary, it is relied upon by secular and faith-based news organizations around the world. That’s one reason we looked to RNS to see what’s being said about Pope Francis after his first ten years as Pope. Thomas Reese’s “The Legacy of a Decade of Pope Francis” is a rounded, hopeful, and comprehensi...

Share We are living in a time when filmmakers all around the world are creating stories drenched in blood and gore. Murder mysteries fill the screen every night, streaming death and destruction into our bodies, minds, and souls. We have grown used to the twisted portraits of mass-murderers and freakish family members who find clever ways of avoiding capture. With so much crime afoot, it is no wonder that cops, detectives, FBI agents, and zealous believers in law and order are paraded in front of us as heroes. They seem to be willing to do all t...

Share When author Glenys Nellist's grandchild Xander was three years old, he stood at the window one snowy Thursday afternoon and asked her, "Where's God?" This book arose in honor of his question. Sacred writings from around the world encourage us to be aware of God's presence in all places and times. Here are just a few examples: "One day in winter as [Brother Lawrence] was looking at a barren tree, stripped of its leaves, and considering how in a little while these leaves would reappear, green, followed by flowers and fruits, he received a p...

Share This book will give hope to many, showing us how to stand up for what we believe and what’s right. The author knows that this is something to which many aspire, and few achieve. Author Mariann Edgar Budde is the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC, which includes Washington National Cathedral. She’s been in this role since 2011 and has had close contact, as a result, with the last three U.S. presidents, several Congresses, and Supreme Court justices. She opens her book recounting a moment from the Trump presidency that many of us would lik...

Share “All those called to a life of faith come to rely upon those spiritual experiences and moments of illumination that give our lives meaning and direction. Without them, faith is reduced to a set of obligations to meet and rules to follow, or worse, a theological framework that only reinforces our own views and inclinations. “Yet much of the spiritual life — as life in general — is lived not on the mountain, but in the valley, when the sense of God’s presence is far less dramatic, if we sense God’s presence at all. The challenge then is to ...

By Onkar Borde I still remember the way my grandma narrated the stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, some of the most popular mythological legends, when we used to sleep on the roof on hot summer nights. There was something about the stories which excited my soul, or maybe my grandma was just so skilled in her narration of these legends! These ancient stories usually began with a king. Some bad guys might trouble the good king and try to destabilize the administration. The villains torture the good people. Finally, the story usually introdu...

Flexibility that bends toward just one perspective in the return-to-work debate is not flexibility. I discovered this the old-fashioned way: By listening to our employees face-to-face.  During these discussions, some of our new hires communicated a lack of social connections at work, fewer new friends, which led to feelings of exclusion from the company culture. Why? Because remote work meant the office was primarily empty. This isn’t an argument around the pros and cons of returning to the office but the state of our teams’ mental wellness. Fo...

Share Paul David Hewson was born to a Protestant mother and a Catholic father in Dublin, Ireland, on May 10, 1960. When he was a teenager, buddies nicknamed him Bono Vox after a hearing aid store in town. The name stuck, and he is now known simply as Bono. He is a lobbyist for the world’s poorest people, three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and front man for one of the longest-running and most successful bands, U2. Like many other rock stars, Bono lent his name, fame, and talent to various causes, notably Band Aid and Live Aid in the 1980s. Si...

The Daily Meditation with Paul Harrison Consciousness Expanding Meditation - Live MORE / 10:38 In this guide, I will share a powerful consciousness-expanding meditation and discuss the science behind both consciousness and meditation. But first, the all-important (and maybe impossible) question: What exactly is consciousness? Consciousness is everything. It’s that feeling you get when you hug a loved one. It’s the taste of chocolate. It’s the sound of water… everything that we experience, we experience via our consciousness. Hence, if only we c...

Share We were very impressed with writer and director Zach Braff’s 2004 spunky romantic comedy Garden State in which a shut-down man is transformed by an enthusiastic young woman; it was wonderful to watch him come alive due to the good medicine of her presence. In Braff’s inspiring and spiritually edifying second film, he takes on the challenge of exploring the complicated virtue of human goodness. Despite our living in a world of twisted violence, unending suffering, and ever-present tragedies, we can identify with the poet Walt Whitman who a...