Sign up for the free 21-day Summer Sanity Challenge, starting July 27th, to establish, reboot, or reinvigorate your meditation habit through daily guided meditations and videos, either solo or with friends and family.
Engage in meditation, even when it feels counterintuitive, as there is immense value in “doing nothing” to create space, reset, and return to actions with more clarity, presence, and appropriate responses.
Dedicate 10 minutes a day to sit still, relax the body, and ease the mind, as this structured practice can lead to transformation.
Adopt a skills-based approach to meditation, recognizing that every session, regardless of length or comfort, builds equanimity, clarity, and concentration, making every meditation a form of progress.
Continuously find ways to release, relax, and let go during practice, balancing effort like tuning a stringed instrument—not too tight to snap, nor too loose to be ineffective.
When strong emotions arise, use mindfulness to be with the experience, paying attention and meeting it with kindness or non-judgment, allowing the emotion to release and resolve.
Acknowledge that emotions are non-negotiable and ever-present; pretending they don’t exist will lead to them controlling your behavior blindly.
When experiencing depression or feeling down, naturalize the physical sensations (e.g., achiness, low energy) as your body’s attempt to rest, separating them from mental storylines of suffering to make the experience more manageable.
Reframe periods of feeling down as beautiful, healthy, and caring actions by your body, which can change the entire experience of those moments.
Use your mindfulness practice to become aware of what affects your mood (e.g., news intake, social media, types of conversations) and consider mitigating or eliminating those factors to support your well-being.
Use meditation to see unconscious biases and cultural conditioning clearly, understanding they are patterns, not your inherent self, which allows you to release their hold rather than be owned by them.
When experiencing anxiety, bring awareness to what’s happening with a quality of allowing and acceptance, avoiding judgment or tension, and instead, bring kindness to yourself.
When feeling anxious, use mindfulness to clarify the specific worry, then take concrete action to address it, such as communicating boundaries or protocols with others.
When caught in repetitive rumination or worrying, ask yourself “Is this useful?” to jar your mind out of the loop.
To ease anxiety, practice deep belly breathing with long inhales and long exhales, or even sigh, to bring calm and ease to the body.
When your mind wanders during meditation, relax and recognize that your awareness of the wandering means you are not lost in it; allow it to be there without judgment.
When the mind wanders, try meditating on the thoughts themselves by noticing their auditory or visual aspects and observing them with curiosity, which can sometimes cause them to subside.
During meditation, notice the gaps or pauses between thoughts, as this practice can reveal more mental space and expand your awareness of these spaces in other contexts.
Use your meditation practice as a space to allow strong emotions of grief to arise, recognizing and allowing them, and exploring what’s going on underneath.
If you find yourself in a deep, chronic mental health loop and feel unresourced, seek extra support from specialists like trauma therapists who can provide frameworks for working through it.
Recognize that grief is complex and may require more than just formal meditation; seek therapeutic processes or community rituals for processing it.
Practice both guided and unguided meditations to develop a versatile skill set; guided practices offer structure and new techniques, while unguided practice builds self-reliance in applying meditative skills to daily life.
When undertaking a challenge, use its structure and impetus for motivation, but maintain a relaxed attitude and perspective, allowing for missed days without getting discouraged.
If focusing on the breath is triggering or challenging, choose an alternative meditation object such as sound, sensations in the hands, or the overall posture of sitting.
If you find yourself controlling your breath during meditation, don’t make it a problem; simply observe both the breath and your act of controlling it without judgment.
To address anxiety and open up breath capacity, deliberately practice breathing more into the belly.
To promote greater body and breath relaxation, try meditating while lying down, as this posture can reduce physical constriction often held when sitting upright.
Cultivate compassion and self-compassion not only through meditation but also by reading narratives, learning, and hearing people’s stories, which expands insight and understanding.
When encountering biases, remember the core understanding that every human possesses an indelible, dignified, and beautiful essence, obscured by ignorance, and hold this compassionate view alongside clarity.