STRATEGIES
Just as physical exercise increases strength, flexibility, and endurance to support the regular activities of your life, mindfulness exercises develop skills of attention that nurture a deep and mature level of personal contentment.

To feel better physically, you can try to move a little more and eat little less. To prevent your satisfaction with your life from being determined soley by possessions, moods, thoughts, situations, other people, and the weather, you can try to notice more, struggle less, and maybe even help make the world a little better in the process.

DISCOVERIES
"After several years of patient empiricism, Raichle began outlining a mental system that he called the default network, since it appears to be the default mode of thought. (We’re an absent-minded species, constantly disappearing down mental rabbit holes.) This network is most engaged when a person is performing a task that requires little conscious attention, such as routine driving on the highway or reading a tedious book. People had previously assumed that daydreaming was  a lazy mental process, but Raichle’s fMRI studies demonstrated that the brain is extremely busy during the default state.

~ Jonah Lehrer from Imagine: How Creativity Works

‎"You hold this one raisin right up to your mouth, but you don’t put it in, and after a moment your mouth starts to water. The teaching point is that your body responds to things outside of it, that there’s a mind-body connection. It links to how we take on situations and how this results in a great deal of stress." 

~ Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, describing a practical mindfulness exercise that got his attention

"The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting.

It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will."

~ Sam Anderson, from "Just One More Game...," The New York Times Magazine

CLASSES