excerpt from The Healthy Gut Workbook by Victor S. Sierpina, MD

These SuperFoods and their sidekicks will make your eating choices even more varied, enjoyable, and healthy. Include these in your diet plan for snacks and as part of your meals, and you’ll feel better in the short term and in the long run.

excerpt from Present Perfect by Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

Acceptance isn’t passivity or surrender. It’s an active engagement in reality, in real time, on its terms. As such, acceptance is realism and requires existential courage rather than an escapist flight into what theoretically could be. Accepting reality as it is now means just that: accepting the reality as it is right now. If you don’t like the way reality is right now, change the future. You see, acceptance isn’t approval, it’s just an acknowledgment of what is (more about this below). If you don’t acknowledge what is, what will you be improving?

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.

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

Sometimes, we get stuck in a rut and just can’t break out. We need a little extra help to disengage from automatic pilot. We might resist sitting in meditation, or find ourselves too distracted when we actually do sit down to meditate. At these times, it can really help to turn to something we previously created or compiled to support mindfulness practice. It might be a collection of songs, a photo album, or a poetry compilation. You can also create a “mindfulness first-aid kit” to use in such situations.

During my clinical internship, I worked with gifted psychologist Lorraine Allman, who used mindfulness in group therapy for people with chronic mental illnesses. As part of the program, she advised participants to develop a “sensory first-aid kit” (Allman 1999, 30), which included items that appealed to each of the person’s five senses (that is, sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch). For example, one participant loved to go to the beach, so she put together a box of things reminiscent of her favorite place, including a postcard (sight), a CD of ocean sounds (hearing), suntan lotion (smell), and saltwater taffy (taste). She then filled the box with sand (touch). When she felt stressed or overwhelmed, she went through her kit and spent several minutes immersing herself in the sensory experience of these objects. Like other people in the group, she not only found herself feeling less stressed, but also really enjoyed taking time out for her mindfulness practice. In fact, she came to see feeling stuck as a positive thing, because it meant it was time to deliberately practice mindfulness! Here are some tips for creating your own mindfulness first-aid kit:

excerpt from Yoga for Pain Relief

Reflect on different parts of your body with gratitude and appreciation. Practice:

• Anytime to repair your relationship with your body. .
• When you are feeling discouraged by pain or illness, or critical about your body, to consciously choose friendliness toward your body. .
• After a medical appointment, to remind yourself that your body is more than its symptoms and diagnoses.

A full practice will take five to ten minutes, but you can practice the essence of this reflection anytime by simply reminding yourself of one reason you are grateful to your body.

excerpt from Healing Yoga for Neck and Shoulder Pain by Carol Krucoff E-RYT

Just as postural habits, such as forward head, can contribute to neck and shoulder pain, our psychobiological habits, how we respond emotionally and physically to stress, may also play an important role. For example, when we’re faced with fear, anxiety, or other stressors, one of the most common reactions is to tighten muscles in the upper back, shoulders, and neck—in effect, lifting the shoulders up toward the ears. It’s almost as if we’re trying to protect our heads the way a turtle draws its head and limbs into its shell. Other common reactions to stress that involve the neck and shoulders include teeth grinding, lip pursing, and other facial grimaces, along with finger drumming, thumb twiddling, and various forms of fidgeting.

excerpt from Transformative Yoga by Wade Imre Morissette

In the world of yoga, a healthy body and a healthy mind go hand in hand to create spiritual fulfillment. The physical practice of yoga offers great healing potential and health benefits. Yoga postures involve a lot of stretching, for example, which increases your overall flexibility and reduces muscular tension. Opening your body in this way also cultivates heat in the body, which aids in detoxification and expands your breath. The more deeply and easily, you’re able to breathe, the more you increase vitality in your body by bringing oxygen to your muscles. You’ve probably noticed how exercise—whether it’s a workout at the gym, brisk walking, or yoga—makes you feel more energetic.

It’s important to spend a good amount of time in regular physical practice, not only for the outward benefits but also to strengthen your internal confidence, which may weaken if you have a negative relationship with your body. A solid practice also helps ward off harmful influences, such as the stresses of our technological world or toxins from food or the environment, all of which can lead to an unhealthy body—and mind and spirit.