Elisha Goldstein

There have been a number of people and books raising awareness of the importance of cultivating greater mindfulness for the purpose of healing great stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, chronic pain and even creating great joy.

Have you ever been sitting at a meal with someone, or even by yourself, and been halfway through the meal without having tasted the food? In my experience, the odds are likely that you'll be nodding your head up and down.

Just because our brains have been altered by addiction, doesn't mean we're destined to fall into the same habits. With the right skills, community and support we can learn how to break out of routine and into a life worth living.

We can make the argument that it's not the medium of social media that's making people lonelier or helping them feel more connected, it's the way people relate to the medium.

Forgiving does not mean forgetting or condoning! Forgiveness is for the person who was perpetrated, not the perpetrator. It is saying, "I have already been offended against, I am going to let go of this so I don't continue to be burdened by it."

Bring this practice into the moments of your life at home and at work where you notice the habits occurring. Allow it to widen the space of awareness and choose a different response.

Just like signs on the road may help remind us to slow down or remind us of children crossing, we can put up signs with short verses in our day to day to remind us to be how we want to be.

Incorporating just a bit more play in your life, or even changing the way your relate to playful activities that you're already doing, can have great benefits in your life. Choose to sprinkle some of this in today.

One thing we now know is that a very simple type of connection actually reduces activity in the area of the brain that is responsible for releasing our stress hormones.

In today's accelerating business world, people are constantly being told there's no time to "be" and they don't manage their time well, so it's no wonder why more and more people every day are left feeling exhausted, unfocused, unproductive, unhealthy, and burned out.

When it comes to our stress or uncomfortable emotions, the brain mistakenly uses the same approach and unknowingly make our stress and pain worse.

Millions of people, including professionals in mental health, medicine, business, sports, and even politics have begun to integrate mindfulness into their lives. Why? We're a culture that believes in science, and the science is speaking.

As we intentionally practice and repeat having these experiences they get stored as implicit memories. These are the memories that influence our immediate snap judgments and decision making from moment-to-moment.

When caught up in the cycle of addictive behavior, there is an inability to accept whatever is being felt in the present moment and the mind is constantly wandering onto the next "fix."

In this past year I've become acutely aware of the mounting stress that has been rising in our work culture.

Altruistic acts need to be introduced into our mental health plans. If you choose some way to help future generations and you're involved on an ongoing basis, you will absolutely benefit psychologically.

I think we are basically looking for a happiness that isn't going to be vulnerable to changing conditions. So that's what I am calling real happiness. We get it, I think, from happy inner resources.

If our most valuable resource is our attention and much of the time that attention is pulled toward our phones, iPads, computers, etc., then what part of life are we missing out on?

In order to get unstuck, we need to understand that there are perceptions, judgments and opinions that occur so quickly beneath our awareness that we get stuck before we even notice any thoughts arise.

Thoughts simply aren't facts, they are mental events that pop up in the mind and are dependent on our mood.

Mind traps are those habitual thinking styles we get caught in that inevitably trap us into a cascading snowball of reactivity that leads us to greater distress. Look this over, see if you identify with any of them.

Research suggests that parents hate parenting, so with all these built in challenges, is there something deeper besides just the evolutionary push that drives people to become parents?

Mindfulness is about being aware of what lens we're wearing when looking at life, so we can be more intentional.