A narrow approach to mindfulness isn’t sustainable. A flexible approach will help you inhabit the richness of life more fully and with less internal friction.

Habitually prioritizing the care of others over your own isn’t sustainable. If we don’t work on treating ourselves the way we treat the people we care about, we’ll inevitably get bogged down by resentment, burnout, and bitterness.

We have such a limited attentional budget that spending it listening to external sounds leaves less to allocate to the internal sounds of our mental chatter.

I'm not a snob about contemplative practice. I see zero shame in scrolling through Instagram during moments like these. I'm not trying to maintain monastic levels of composure throughout the day.

I just decided to explore what would happen if I fell back on what has proved paradoxically comforting in the past when waiting for potentially terrible news.

“Life is so very messy! I have spent most of my life trying to control this messiness with all my imperfections. Recently I discovered that no matter how hard I try, it would bring me more anguish in my attempts to control it. Everything is temporary and some things are just out of our control!“

Kalyn Jolivette

“Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end
of his life, found the names
of familiar objects escaping him.”

Lawrence Raab

Without direct experience, the impact of habitual mindfulness practice seems too simple to be beneficial.

“I want to be drenched in cold water,
to be fully saturated,
to explode into a nap,
to share a piece of truth so true
that it shakes the schemas we've schemed —
most of all the divisions.”

Jane Klinger

A year of streaming my weekday morning meditation practice during the pandemic.

“Mindfulness is about stepping outside yourself, looking at yourself, and knowing that it’s going to be okay.”

Dr. Jeffrey Smith

Mindfulness doesn’t provide some kind of magical exemption from discomfort. Not at all. It's actually the opposite. It means when practiced consistently—with or without meditation—we can sometimes change the degree to which we fight against some present discomfort.

“Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.”

Lynn Ungar

“The world is too grand to reshape with babble.”

Jim Harrison

“A little broken, a little new.
we are the impact and the glue.
Capable more than we know
to call this fixer-upper home.”

Sleeping at Last

It wasn’t until I stumbled clumsily toward a daily mindfulness practice in my mid-thirties that I discovered that there were ways I could get better at feeling my feelings.

Before intentionally working on my attentional skills, I had no idea how often I escalated my unpleasant feelings and zipped past the pleasant and subtler ones.

The kind of self-awareness that mindfulness exercise develops has helped me become more objective about my subjective experiences.

"Linguistic repetition, you learn from an early age, can give form or take it away, because it forces a confrontation with the malleability of language and the world we build with it, build upon it."

Ben Lerner

Flying provides a steady stream of frustrations: the crowded isolation of DIY check-in, the sock-footed walk on eggshells through TSA, the hypervigilant tracking of an elusive ETA.

All the inevitable discomforts of air travel make it a fertile attentional fitness opportunity. I’ve been developing a strategy that transforms the situation from hell into heaven.

Okay, maybe more like a really productive purgatory.

When remembering to notice that we're alive becomes a habit, we begin to erode the internal friction that obscures our view of the richness we're swimming in every day.

Three big obstacles to establishing a consistent mindfulness routine are finding time to practice, being distracted by thoughts, and feeling bored. I discovered an exercise that obliterates all three simultaneously, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to hate the idea of it.

Birds lack the words to get tangled up in the whys.