When feeling distress, consciously practice loving kindness meditation to sense into physical tension, create spaciousness, and soften reactivity. This cultivates a desire for well-being for yourself and others.
Utilize mindfulness to reduce personal suffering by stilling a fearful heart and countering the tendency to contract or ‘other’ others. This practice allows you to consciously choose not to react from fear or triggers, thereby stopping the creation of more pain.
Practice basic mindfulness by focusing on your breath, and when your mind wanders, notice the distraction without judgment and gently return your attention to the breath. This process cultivates self-awareness and helps you see you’re not owned by your thoughts.
Cultivate cognitive freedom through mindfulness to create a space between stimulus and response. This practice enables you to choose how you respond to the world instead of being pulled by external stimuli.
Once you become aware of biased urges and impulses through mindfulness, consciously stop blindly feeding them. This practice can lead to deconditioning these urges, making them less likely to arise over time.
Practice mindfulness to become more aware of your own biases and urges, such as racist or homicidal impulses. This awareness allows you to observe these thoughts and let them pass, rather than being owned by them.
Dedicate time before dawn for personal devotional centering practices, similar to Rhonda’s grandmother. This routine provides inner support for whatever one might do for the rest of the day.
Integrate meditation into your prayer life to make it more robust. Meditation can help turn down the volume on random discursive thinking, allowing for more focused prayer.
Join a practice community, also known as a sangha, to deepen your understanding of meditation and support your journey. Practicing in community can be quite supportive and foster connectedness with other people.
Integrate contemplative practices like mindfulness and compassion into your professional identity development. This can enhance skillfulness, helping you become a wise counselor and deal well with conflicts in your field.
Apply mindfulness and compassion practices to discern and address bias more effectively. This approach helps in dealing with prejudice through and in law.
Create a spacious and grounded environment when teaching or learning, allowing participants to center themselves and disconnect from distractions. This subtle approach helps in focusing on the material.
Introduce mindfulness and meditation coursework in school settings to help students cope with stress. It is a secular and scientifically validated practice that can be beneficial for young people.
Take the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) at harvard.edu to gain insight into your own implicit biases. This 10-12 minute online test can reveal patterns in how your mind operates in ways you might not explicitly recognize.
Adopt a long-term perspective on societal change, understanding that deep-seated problems won’t be solved overnight. Continuously practice and expand mindfulness within communities to contribute to a gradual shift towards collective sanity.
Actively work to expand the accessibility of mindfulness practices to diverse populations, including non-white communities, recent immigrants, and English language learners. This ensures broader viability and impact beyond current demographics.
Utilize existing platforms to elevate diverse voices and teachers in the mindfulness space. This strategy helps reach groups that might not be accessible through current, often overrepresented, demographics.
Advocate for and incentivize research into the social applications of mindfulness and compassion practices. Encourage PhD students and neuroscientists to explore how these practices can impact education, policing, healthcare, and public health interventions, moving beyond solely personal effectiveness.
Download the ‘10% with Dan Harris’ app to access guided meditations for stress, anxiety, sleep, focus, and self-compassion. A 14-day trial is available at danharris.com.
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