Today’s mini meditation is a special self-care practice. You will hear poet James Crews read his poem, Self-Care, and then I will share his invitation for reflective journaling. Grab a notebook, a pen, and a cup of tea. Settle into a comfortable seat and join us!

For quite awhile now, I have wanted to bring a conversation about poetry to The Mindful Minute. Over the years, I’ve found more and more a connection between reading poetry and my meditation practice, and today, I get to finally explore this connection with poet James Crews!

Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neurotheologist, shares a short practice with us of defining our innermost values and making sure that our actions support those values.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, one of my favorite former guests, is back with us today to talk about mindfulness, spirituality and our mental well-being. I’ve just wrapped a meditation series, Can Meditation Unite Us, that has reflected on the overlap of several spiritual traditions, and I thought it would be interesting to talk to Dr. Newberg about what happens in our minds and our bodies as we engage with spiritual practices.

2+ years into a pandemic, when we’ve been enforcing various levels of separation in our daily lives, we are mentally and emotionally unwell. And we find ourselves in this moment with time, space and nature all reminding us that to heal is to connect.

Join me for today’s mini meditation as we invite in a sense of unity.

Within this series, we are exploring the concept of unity through our meditation practice. So often, we look at our meditation practice through the lens of its 3 tenets: presence, non-judgment, and compassion. Most of the time, I break these tenets down into their individual practices so that we can explore them each in a deeper way - BUT, this can create the mistaken belief that we can ONLY focus on one tenet at a time, or that if we tried to do it all we would have to meditate for an hour.

The truth is these elements are inseparable.

Being a mom; trying to become a mother; or not becoming a mother is likely one of the most difficult experiences of your life. We love our children, we worry endlessly, and we often experience the vast extremes of emotions with them or with our own seeming successes or failures.

Happy Mother’s Day, mamas! This short meditation is a chance to sit and be with it all. Being a mother is its own complex mess of emotions, feelings and thoughts. And, we are here for it. All of it. Celebrating the joys, the sorrows, the triumphs and the defeats. Celebrating the mundane and the magnificent. We are here for it. We are here for each other.