Savor Meditation

Take a strategic pause. This is your life. Savor it.

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"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," neuroscientist and meditation researcher, Richard J. Davidson told the Washington Post. "Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance."

How You Can Train Your Brian to Do The Impossible, by  Carolyn Gregoire, The Huffington Post 8/5/2013

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The practice of mindful leadership gives you tools to measure and manage your life as you're living it. It teaches you to pay attention to the present moment, recognizing your feelings and emotions and keeping them under control, especially when faced with highly stressful situations. When you are mindful, you're aware of your presence and the ways you impact other people. You're able to both observe and participate in each moment, while recognizing the implications of your actions for the longer term. And that prevents you from slipping into a life that pulls you away from your values.

Mindfulness Helps You Become a Better Leader, by Bill George, HBR Network Blog, 10/26/2012

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Cultivating a mindfulness practice has allowed me to better regulate my thoughts and become less reactionary. Instead of my thoughts going wildly at 800 mph in 10 directions, I can calm my thoughts and focus. I’m less likely to mindlessly react to external events. I can take a moment, gather my thoughts, assess the situation, and decide how I want to act.

Jeena Cho on Zen Lawyering, by Chris Bradley, lawyerist.com, 6/24/2013

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Every organization has a different need – and opinion – about mindfulness. In my experience, listening and framing accordingly has been more successful than pitching a one-size-fits-all program. When you try to understand what the actual business and organizational needs are, the usefulness of mindfulness approaches to their obstacles and opportunities becomes more obvious.

Introducing Mindfulness to Organizations, by Daniel Goleman quoting Mirabai Bush via LinkedIn, 7/28/2013

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Micro is about the moment and it’s about having an idea, or having writer’s block and just trying to get through those moments. . . Don’t just say, ‘Oh, I need to work on that.’ Say, ‘I need to work on this element of that.’

How to Be Prolific:  Guidelines for Getting It Done from Joss Whedon, by Ari Karpel via fastcompany.com

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Cultivating a more positive outlook is a better way of boosting creativity than indulging a tortured genius, according to consultant psychologist and professor Neil Frude who has begun working with ad organization Havas Worldwide London to provide "positive psychology" training to the agency’s staff.

Happiness Means Creativity:  One Company's Bet on Positive Psychology, by Meg Carter via fastcompany.com

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Mindfulness is one approach to shift away from distraction. One of the things that we work with in the course is to simply build in a moment – one minute, two minutes – where you just stop and let your attention come back to where you are. It doesn't look weird in the office. You’re simply stopping, pausing, taking a breath, and letting your attention recollect into the here-and-now. That’s a relatively easy way to regain your focus.

How to get from Distraction to Satisfaction, by Daniel Goleman via LinkedIn, 6/20/2013

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“This is the first time meditation training has been shown to affect emotional processing in the brain outside of a meditative state,” said Gaelle Desbordes, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and at the Boston University Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology. “Overall, these results are consistent with the overarching hypothesis that meditation may result in enduring, beneficial changes in brain function, especially in the area of emotional processing.”

Meditation's Effects on Emotion Shown to Persist, by Traci Pedersen, psychcentral.com 6/23/2013

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Yes, Google asked the most renowned living Zen master launch to their Mindful Lunches. But that doesn't mean all the Googlers are renouncing their earthly searches--they're just getting mindful to get productive.

3 Reasons Why Everyone at Google is Meditating, by Drake Baer via Fast Company

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Aetna, Merck, General Mills--the list goes on--all are exploring how meditation can help their leaders and employees agilely thrive in today's fast-paced business environment. And the benefits are widely publicized: sustained attention span, improved multi-tasking abilities, strengthened immune system, increased emotional intelligence, improved listening skills...And there is science behind such claims. Research is fast concluding that sitting still for defined periods of time is a very healthy thing to do.

Meditating Your Way to More Effective Leadership, by Michael Carroll, Fast Company, 1/9/2013

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"If you want to transform an organization it's not about changing systems and processes so much as it's about changing the hearts and minds of people," says [Pamela] Weiss. "Mindfulness is one of the all-time most brilliant technologies for helping to alleviate human suffering and for bringing out our extraordinary potential as human beings."

Developing Mindful Leaders, by Polly LaBarre, HBR Blog Network, 12/30/2011

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“The harmful effects of stress on health are not inevitable,” [Kelly] McGonigal says. “How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience.” So while she obviously wouldn’t ask for more stressful experiences in her own life, she does have a new appreciation of the condition. ”When you choose to view stress in this way, you’re not just getting better at stress, you’re actually making a pretty profound statement,” she concludes. “You can trust yourself to handle life’s challenges. And you’re remembering you don’t have to face them alone.”

The upside of stress: Kelly McGonigal at TEDGlobal2013, via TED.com blog, 6/11/2013

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“When you’re showering, check you’re in the shower, or are you allowing your work emails to come into the shower with you? Before you know it, everyone at work is in the shower with you. Be aware and rest in your own awareness; put a welcome mat out for things just as they are.” [Jon Kabat-Zinn]

Mindfulness is sweeping the western world, by Naomi Tolley, Positive News, 4/20/2013

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The first time I ever tried a loving-kindness meditation, I was overcome by a feeling of complete… futility. Mentally extending compassion to others and wishing them free from suffering seemed nice enough, but I had a hard time believing that my idle thoughts could increase kindness in the real world. Turns out I was wrong.

How to Train the Compassionate Brain, by Jason Marsh via Mindful.org

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“I stay calm myself to get the best out of my clients, to get the best out of opposing counsel,” says [Timothy] Tosta, now a partner at McKenna Long & Aldridge who writes and speaks about applying a contemplative perspective to the law. As Tosta was learning to still his mind, a similar shift was occurring across the profession as a growing number of lawyers discovered mindfulness practices and, more important, began talking to each other about it.

Mindfulness in legal profession is going mainstream, by Becky Beaupre Gillespie, ABA Journal 2/1/3013

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Studies have shown that a high emotional quotient (or EQ) boosts career success, entrepreneurial potential, leadership talent, health, relationship satisfaction, humor, and happiness. It is also the best antidote to work stress and it matters in every job — because all jobs involve dealing with people, and people with higher EQ are more rewarding to deal with.

Can You Really Improve Your Emotional Intelligence?, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic via Bloomberg.com, 5/29/2013

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Meditation and Neuroscience: Workshops with Rick Hanson

Rick Hanson is a neuroscientist and wrote the book:  Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom.  He has a couple workshops coming up that look totally rad. 

From his newsletter:

People sometimes ask if I teach longer programs. If you're interested, I'll be at the Cape Cod Institute, June 17-21, teaching Positive Neuroplasticity: The Practical Science of Turning Good Moments into a Great Brain. If you live on the west coast, I'll be at Esalen, California, July 21-26, with Jan Hanson (who wrote the Appendix in Buddha's Brain on Nutritional Neurochemistry) to teach Lighting up the Neural Circuits of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. Both workshops offer CEUs, and are held in gorgeous settings with lots of free time.