Happiness – Anchor Mindful Teaching

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The arrival of holiday cards has slowed to a trickle, and our days are once again measured in alarm tones and school bells. The house has settled back into mid-day stillness. It’s January–time to take those new resolutions from dinner table talk to daily practice.

My 2018 promises were about doing: learn Japanese! Organize photos into albums! Start a small business! Well, one out of three ain’t bad, and 2018 turned out to be one of the most challenging but rewarding years of my professional life. I don’t think I’ve experienced a year in my career with more twists, turns, tears, and surprises since my first year of teaching back in 2001, and I’m pleased to know that I can be as adaptable now (with three kids! and a puppy!) as I was back then.

While 2018 was a gratifying year of learning for me (unfortunately not Japanese), I hope to focus 2019 into a year of reflection and well-being. As I wrote in my last post Intentions, I resolve to consider each morning, each meeting, each interaction and experience as a chance to choose who I want to be. I want my accomplishments to be the results of well-articulated, meangingful goals, and not simply items on a checklist to be crossed off and tossed aside. I want to remember each day to be a human being, and not simply a human doing.

To that end, I dedicate this year to gratitude. This article by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center offers evidence-based tips for keeping a gratitude journal to increase daily well-being. The article is brief and helpful, but I offer a few highlights here that were especially meaningful to me:

* Write for only 10-15 minutes a day, 1-3 times a week (too much and it becomes a chore instead of a pleasure).

* Be specific and add details–this will make your experiences more memorable.

* “Be grateful for the negative outcomes you avoided, escaped, prevented, or turned into something positive—try not to take that good fortune for granted.”¹

* Write about the people and experiences that surprised you. Surprises can often be more meaningful than favorites.

Recording gratitude isn’t just for adults–it’s also a meaningful activity for kids to do individually or for families to do together. So I challenge myself (and you!) to commit to the valuable practice of gratitude in the new year ahead.

¹ Greater Good Science Center. “A Simple Weekly Mindfulness Practice: Keep a Gratitude Journal.” Mindful, Foundation for a Mindful Society, 23 March 2016, http://www.mindful.org/a-simple-weekly-mindfulness-practice-keep-a-gratitude-journal/.

Change is in the air and on the leaves. Wild and carefree summer is turning to cozy and contemplative fall, the season of gratitude and tradition.

In this autumn season of scarves and sweaters and pumpkin-flavored everything, school time routines are settling in, the sun and our children are settling earlier, and it is a wonderful time to reflect on our daily intentions.

Jon Kabat-Zinn writes in his 2011 book Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment–and Your Life that today’s adults are so busy multi-tasking that each of us is “becoming more of a human doing than human being.”* It is easy to be swept away with schedules and responsibilities and to forget the value of simply being.

So as our activities move indoors and crackling campfires turn to cozy hearth fires, let us also turn our intentions inward to nurturing our own well-being. This season of transitions is an inviting time to establish new reflections in your family, which can lead to new conversations around the dinner table or during the bedtime routine.

I offer here a lesson I learned during a week-long mindfulness retreat I attended last month. One of our leaders was Eve Ekman, an emotions researcher for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. She shared with us five evidence-based habits that lead to greater well-being if practiced every day:

1. MEDITATE or PRAY

2. EXERCISE

3. Identify three GRATITUDES

4. Perform one random act of KINDNESS

5. Document JOY

These are manageable enough goals for both adults and kids, even in busy family lives. Meaningful meditation or prayer can be done in 10-20 minutes a day, and mild exercise can take only 20-30 minutes a day. My family shares our three gratitudes each night as we tuck our children into bed, so they drift off to sleep thinking about the events in their day for which they are grateful . One deliberate act of kindness every day should be something we all strive to perform ourselves and teach our children. And finally, research shows that noticing joy every day makes a greater impact on our well-being if we share that joyful experience or emotion with another person (perhaps during an evening meal?) or record it in a journal.

Remember when you wake each morning, when you review your schedule of things you need to do, to also set an intention of how you want to be. Every day is a great day to establish new habits, for the happiness and well-being of everyone in your family.

* Kabat-Zinn, J. (2011). Mindfulness for Beginners. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.