My wonderful stack of wordless children’s books, thanks to all of your thoughtful and incredibly helpful recommendations! 📚 I am so blown away by how many responses we got, and I wanted to share with you the list of over 80 (!!) wordless books, a collection of yours and my favorites. I wish I could take them all. Thank you Diesel Bookstore for carrying so many of these great titles, just in time for my trip! 🧳 Heading to Nepal brimming with books and gratitude 💌

Compassion toward absolutely everyone doesn’t condone wrongdoing or excuse bad behavior, nor does it ask us to feel differently than the way we feel. All agendaless compassion asks is that we incline our hearts and minds in its direction —that we lean toward the light like sunflowers angle toward the sun.

If you measure what people care about by who's clicking on what, it's no surprise that our readers are most interested in materials to help them share mindfulness and meditation with youth. For your reading, listening, and watching pleasure, here are our most popular links of last year.

Picture books like these are fun springboards into conversations about silence and sound with children. Even better than stories and conversations though, is creating the time and space for them to hear the silence between sounds on their own.

Twenty-seven years ago, our lives were turned upside down when my husband Seth was diagnosed with Stage 4 lymphoma. Our daughter was a toddler, and I was a working mom pregnant with our son. Seth’s prognosis was not great, and without warning, we were catapulted into the most challenging year of our lives. No surprise, it was also the year I learned to meditate.

We began as an all-volunteer, grass-roots initiative with a mission to help families cope with COVID-19 by offering daily online mindfulness lessons that teach the crucial life skills of attention, balance, and compassion. We were committed to offering classes for free or on a pay what you can afford basis. And we did it!

We offer friendly wishes at the end of my classes for children. We start with wishes for ourselves, then for other people, and last for everyone and everything. I thought you would be interested in this transcript of the friendly wishes voiced by the 8 – 12-year-old boys in one of my Zoom classes this week.

In response to George Floyd's death, I feel strongly that my job is to listen and learn. I also feel a responsibility to act, though. Right now, I think I can be of most use by sharing resources online, and in the groups I facilitate. I've found the links posted here to be helpful - they are resources for parents, educators, and caregivers on talking to children and families about social justice. I will update this list as I become aware of other resources.

In response to COVID-19, a group of us formed the Inner Kids Collaborative to offer 30-minute, pay-what-you-can mindfulness lessons three times a day this summer via Zoom. I offer lessons for children together with a caregiver on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at 9 am PST. For the foreseeable future, I'll build those lessons around children's books that focus on universal themes like open-mindedness, interdependence, discernment, kindness, and compassion. In my Thursday morning lessons for caregivers, we'll recap the children's books from that week's classes with children and address the same themes.

To help parents, educators, and caregivers keep informed about the coronavirus, we've posted links to trusted resources for families and schools. Contact us with additional local, regional, or national links and we'll update the page accordingly.

We take pride in shining a light on other people and their excellent work through our newsletter, shout-out profiles, and social media feeds. We also like to point you toward articles, books, podcasts, videos and events that might interest you. Here are the things we think you’d like to know that were included in our March newsletter.

At home, with no vaccine in sight, I can't think of a better time to remember that while we can't change the situation, we have the freedom to choose how we respond. And that, in so doing, we embody the qualities we value and model them for our children.

The point of posting divergent viewpoints is that it gives people an opportunity to engage with ideas they might not agree with, kind of like the op-ed page of a newspaper. I believe that this makes for a more dynamic community and that we can learn from one another. I hope you agree. If you don't, feel free to leave a comment. You can also leave a comment if you do agree.

This Thanksgiving and through the holiday, I hope you go easy on yourself and remember that you've got this. If your self-compassion skills need a little bolstering, here are a few practices to help you through even the most stressful holiday situations.

Through meditation, we recognize inner qualities that bring out the best in us and help us stay on track - real ones like wisdom, compassion, and patience that grow stronger with training and practice. These are the qualities that lead to everyday freedom - to lasting contentment that's not subject to the fluctuating conditions of our inner and outer worlds. It took over a decade of study and practice before I felt more than a glimpse of this type of emotional freedom. To what do I attribute this shift? There's an old saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear," and it took me a while to find mine. 

Can you imagine a school community where every person takes charge of his or her internal world through recognizing and managing their emotions; establishing and maintaining constructive relationships based on empathy, understanding and collaboration; and making responsible decisions to achieve personal and common goals? How would your school and your class work if both colleagues and students had these skills?

Through Susan’s guided meditations, you’ll learn to unclench your jaw, lower your shoulders, and relax into a different way of viewing life experiences. Not the linear, metric – gotta go, gotta do, gotta be – mindset that many inhabit. There’s a broader more expansive way of being that we’re introduced to by these universal themes and when they’re coupled with mindfulness practice who can predict what might happen next. I’m not saying you’re going to find a winning lottery ticket in your pocket because that would be false advertising, but maybe you’ll feel like you did. 

A more perfect union, in a fundamental way, requires us to become a more mindful one. "Democracy dies in darkness" is more than a slogan, it reflects a foundational principle of both Democracy and mindfulness/meditation.  A more perfect union hinges on awareness, and that means we must elevate the national conversation to create one. We need to steer the conversation away from fearmongering and back to what matters – to economic growth, to taking care of one another, and to helping those who need help.

Through the remarkable structure of her book, Allio offers readers a visceral experience of disassociation. Happiness is elusive for Allio's characters, but they find comfort in connection and understanding. As evidenced by hashtags like #SpiritualAbuse, #MeTooChurch, and #MeTooGuru, this type of healing is trying to happen in the real world too. In the ongoing war against the abuse of power by clergy, Allio’s disturbing novel is an urgent bulletin from the front. 

What does consciousness do, what is it for, and what does it have to do with artificial intelligence? In the summer of 2017, I was honored to present at one of a series of eight workshops organized by SRI International’s computer science laboratory that looked at these and other questions related to technology and consciousness. Daniel Sanchez and John Rushby’s smart, accessible Technology and Consciousness Workshops Report is now available. It provides an excellent overview of theories of consciousness, the possibility of machine or technological consciousness, and their potential implications.