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.

I sit and I meditate, and remember what is most important. That remembrance settles me into the type of knowing that allows me to face the unknown and the discord and have faith in our capacity for goodness.

I don’t have the answers, but I do have faith in our connection.

Join me for today’s mini meditation as we cultivate faith in our capacity for goodness.

One of the tenets of a mindful meditation practice is non-judgment. We talk about this idea of not judging ourselves, our thoughts or our emotions quite often, but what about our judgment of others.

We are so entrenched in our sides, our tribes, our ideological beliefs, that it feels almost impossible to comprehend how someone could feel or believe differently. Take any political issue, and my guess is that you can’t even believe how someone on the other side could think their choice is a good one, and yet -

Even in this inability to comprehend, we know that ‘they’ are thinking the exact same thing about ‘our’ beliefs and choices. It blows the mind, doesn’t it? How is resolution or unity possible?

In our meditation practice, we are invited into the present moment. But the cool thing is that the present moment isn’t a static place. In fact, the present moment is more like a precipice, an edge…

As part of our practice we celebrate our continual renewal. It is our chance to see ourselves exactly as we are and as we are becoming. Join me for today’s mini meditation celebrating our personal renewal.