excerpt from Eating With Fierce Kindness by Sasha T. Loring, M.Ed., LCSW

For most people, changing deeply ingrained habits is not easily done, especially with habits that are as personal as those that relate to eating. Research indicates that the approach of self-kindness has powerful and lasting results and supports the kinds of changes that will enable your long-term success with achieving a healthy weight. I like using the term fierce kindness, which is the ability to strongly devote ourselves to changing thought patterns, beliefs, and behaviors that are ultimately not in our best interest, and doing so out of self-kindness, not self-judgment or criticism. The “fierceness” is the determination it takes to face your personal challenges. The “kindness” is the act of learning to enhance sincere feelings of warmth and caring toward yourself as you go along.

Quick Tip for Therapists by Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of Eating the Moment,Present Perfect and The Lotus Effect .

To help with habit modification and problem-solving challenges, encourage your client to cultivate a baseline of choice awareness, which is a habit of noticing available options, through process-mindfulness.

by guest blogger Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of Eating the Moment

The act of giving thanks is more than just a gesture of gratitude. It is a unique teaching moment. Indeed, by expressing appreciation for this or that we teach the world about what matters to us, about what is existentially significant for us. With this in mind, let me ask you this: what contributions to your well-being will you be reinforcing this year with your gratitude? Will you be showing gratitude for financial, material, logistical help you have received this year or will you be emphasizing the importance of the contributions of support, friendship and companionship?

Pavel Somov, Ph.D. created a mindfulness eating tracker to help people with mindful eating. He says:

For years we've been asked to track what we eat and how much we eat. Mindfulness Tracker allows you to journal (twitter-style) about the how of your eating - about the mindfully-meaningful eating moments of your life. The idea is to track experiential calories. Share (with yourself and the world) a moment of eating presence. You don't have to eat mindfully all the time: just aim to have a mindful at each meal and flag it here: set a precedent of mindful eating! Also, feel free to journal about eating moments lost - i.e. about the effects of mindless eating.

Jumpstart your Thanksgiving holiday by using this Mindfulness Eating Tracker.

excerpt from The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens by Gina M. Biegel MA, LMFT

There are two types of mindfulness practice: formal and informal. In formal practice, you actually set aside an amount of time and dedicate it to being mindful. Informal practice doesn’t require any extra time; the idea is to bring moment-to-moment awareness to everything you already do, to zero in on what you are doing as you are actually doing it.

People often do things without being fully present, as if they were on automatic pilot. Living this way, they cheat themselves out of many moments in their lives. Trying to bring conscious awareness to your body and mind while remaining aware of the task you are engaging in will allow you to experience life more fully. Paying attention to your five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) in your daily tasks can help you be aware in the present moment.

excerpt from The Mindfulness Workbook by Thomas Roberts LCSW, LMFT

With this practice you’ll practice greeting each thought, emotion, and sensation. You’ll watch it, name each with a single word, and then let it go. Some people have told me they find it useful to visualize writing each name on a balloon and then releasing it, or to visualize writing the name on a leaf and letting it float away down a stream. These are just a few ideas. Feel free to come up with your own. Whatever imagery you use, this practice is an effective means of clearing away some of the clutter from the insistent chatter of big deal mind, allowing you to experience more spaciousness.

excerpt from The Lotus Effect by Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

The sacred lotus offers an inspiring rags-to-riches, slime-to-sunshine metaphor of growth and enlightenment. We might consider the lotus to be the ultimate Cinderella story: it cleans all day and never gets dirty. The self-cleaning lotus exemplifies an empowering narrative of integrity. It manages to remain itself, pure and unaffected, and to grow to its fullest amidst the impurity of its circumstance. Unsurprisingly, the lotus flower (padma in Sanskrit) has a position of great cultural and spiritual significance in Asia. In Buddhism, the lotus represents purification and disentanglement from the trappings of conditioned existence (samsara), liberation from suffering, and the achievement of enlightenment. The cross-legged “lotus pose” (padm’asana) in yoga is a universally recognizable symbol of wisdom and serenity. As a visual symbol, the lotus flower is inescapable: it is a core element of Asian iconography. As a sound, the lotus invocation is forever resonated in the om mani padma hum mantra (“jewel in the lotus”).

excerpt from Urban Mindfulness by Jonathan S Kaplan, Ph D.

Many of us drink alcohol. The city’s plentiful diversity of bars, wineshops, happy hours, and events ensures that we can always find a drink when we want one. Usually, our reasons for drinking alcoholic beverages are fairly benign, based on enjoyment of the taste or a desire to unwind (as opposed to a pathological urge to numb emotional pain). The pleasant effects of drinking come pretty soon after we start. By mindfully attuning to the experience, we can continue to enjoy a series of pleasurable moments without drinking too much. When we get disconnected from our bodily feelings, we become vulnerable to drinking excessively. We fail to notice our diminished ability to taste our drinks and don’t observe the decline in our physical, mental, and social faculties. Many religious traditions eschew drinking, especially by spiritual leaders, because they consider it to interfere with awareness, purpose, and divine will. While it might be going too far for some people to consider not drinking at all, most can recall times when drinking led to some poor decision making or a nasty hangover.

Introducing mindfulness to the times when we drink can be an interesting and enriching experience. Consider some of the following activities:

excerpt from Urban Mindfulness by Jonathan S Kaplan, Ph D.

Online dating is a very efficient and convenient way to meet people. You can describe whom you’d like to date, cruise profiles, and screen potential dates by e-mail, online chat, text, and phone before actually meeting in person. You can also consider and develop criteria for your ideal partner. If you want to meet only people who live in your zip code, you can screen out everyone else. If it’s vitally important to be with someone who, like you, loves pugs, you can find that type of person too. And you can do all of this without even leaving your home!

A consequence of this process is spending an awful lot of “alone time” writing (and updating) your profile, selecting the best photo of yourself, and poring through everyone else’s profile. During this time, you’re vulnerable to two very unmindful phenomena: stewing in others’ opinions about you and concocting fantasies about others. In both situations, exercising your judgmental mind can make you easily fall prey to disastrous dating experiences.

Developing your dating profile requires you to articulate who you think you are. Typically, this conjures both positive and negative views of yourself. You might easily identify all of your good qualities, like being honest or having a healthy head of hair. Or you might feel bad about who you are, particularly relative to someone else or an idealized version of yourself. For example, “I’m too fat,” “I’m not successful,” and “I’m not as funny as my friend” are all variations on the “I’m not good enough” theme. Regardless of whether your self-assessment is negative, positive, or some combination, the bottom line is that you spend considerable time and energy being distracted by opinions of yourself.