Meet Noa Jones, the author of How Do You Know What You Know? Noa is the executive director of Middle Way Education and is currently working in Asia, advising on projects aimed at starting schools and sharing curriculum across different cultures.

With his new book, Into the Mirror, Andy Karr brings ancient insights to the 21st century, showing how Buddhist principles can help liberate our minds from the stickiness of materialism and delusion.

To many Western eyes, monasticism looks about as “real world” as a Jane Austen novel. But to teacher/author Oren Jay Sofer, who spent two and a half years in a Thai Buddhist monastery as part of his spiritual training, the skills of contemplative practice are ideal preparation for living in a flawed, fast-moving world. Even the title of his new book—Your Heart Was Made for This—affirms his view of embracing the world, not escaping it. In many ways, it’s a natural follow-up to his first book, Say What You Mean, which applies mindfulness and meditation skills to effective communication. By deepening that skill set, Sofer now shows how we can live with hope and gratitude in our complicated world of AI, war, climate change and click-bait—all of which became a lot more immediate and personal to Sofer himself when he recently became a first-time father. 

When he wrote The Mindful Teen: Powerful Skills to Help You Handle Stress One Moment at a Time, adolescent medicine specialist pediatrician Dzung Vo couldn’t have envisioned the Zoom classrooms, social isolation, and ferocious college competition of today’s pandemic era. Then again, he didn’t have to. Today’s stressors may be unprecedented, but for teens, the path to mental health resilience—mindful self-care and self-compassion--has always been clear. That’s one reason Vo’s book has continued to sell strongly since its publication in 2015, and no doubt will gain more adherents in the post-pandemic era to come. Here, Vo talks about what he’s witnessed among his teenage patients over these rough times and what he hopes for in the years ahead.

“Perfection isn’t possible,” says psychologist/author Shauna Shapiro in her TEDx Talk, The Power of Mindfulness. “Transformation is.” That’s something Shapiro learned firsthand when her own “perfect” high-school life—volleyball captain, homecoming princess—came to a skidding stop. At age 17, emergency spinal surgery put her flat on her back in a hospital bed for six months. Emaciated, deeply depressed and scarred, Shapiro found a lifeline in a book her father gave her, Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. From there, she trained in Thailand, earned a PhD, and spent the next 30 years teaching, speaking and writing about mindfulness and neuropsychology. “That book changed my life, and made me believe in the power of books,” she says today. Now, with her first children’s book, Good Morning, I Love You, Violet, Shapiro, a mom and stepmom of four young adults, shows how one simple, mindful practice can be a game-changer for kids (and adults) to become more resilient, compassionate and self-aware.

Let Nature Calibrate Your Nervous System

It’s simple: by shifting our physical environment, we can shift our mental state. We can change both the content of our thoughts and our thought processes. For many people, this shift is almost automatic when they place themselves into the natural world: the mind moves from conditioned thought patterns—rapid thoughts, negative self-talk, anticipating what’s next—to discursive thought, which is slower, calmer, creative, curious. Immersion in nature immediately reduces the amount of human-created sensory stimuli we are used to—from screens, information, urban sounds. It enforces a mental break. It’s a sanctuary environment that calms the mind and eases the body. Yes, we can train the brain to do this in our typical environment (through mindfulness practice, for example, as we discussed), but nature is a quick way to do it, and it comes with a whole host of other benefits for our mental state and nervous system.

IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We)

Exploring the nature of how our experience of what we call “self” emerges across the lifespan.

For a calmer, healthier, better-focused brain, neuroscientist Amishi Jha offers this succinct advice: “Pay attention to your attention.” As one of the first scientists to research the links between mindfulness and attention, Jha, a neuroscientist and psychology professor at the University of Miami, is known for her pioneering mindfulness work with soldiers, firefighters, medical trainees, and others for whom attention is a matter of life and death. Now, with her new book, Peak Mind, she’s bringing her healthy-attention message to parents, CEOs, accountants, teachers, managers—essentially anyone whose work and decision-making feels like life and death. In this interview, Amishi talks about the challenge of creating focus in a world of constant distraction—and why breaking up with your cell phone won’t work!

You don’t need to know Spanish to catch the enthusiasm of Mindful Kids Mexico, the five-year-old program created by Guadalajara mindfulness instructors Tania Villaseñor and Diana Urrea. The two women bring inventive fun into yoga, breathwork and art classes for kids and families at all socioeconomic levels, gently promoting the value of mindful awareness in a tradition-oriented society. They’re also working on a Spanish-language mindfulness app, due out later this year, while continuing to teach at the nonprofit Atentamente, where Villasenor instructs teachers in how to work with children, and Urrea works directly with the children themselves. As her five cats and “gordito” pet pig, Francis, snooze in the background, Villaseñor shares by Zoom her thoughts on kids, families and mindfulness in Mexico.

If you think of self-compassion as gentle and loving, you’re only half right. To be fully self-compassionate is to embrace both yin and yang, tender acceptance, and Mama-Bear fierceness, as Dr. Kristin Neff explains in her latest book, Fierce Self-Compassion. As an associate professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, Neff, a renowned leader in the self-compassion movement, applauds the fact that more women are putting those inner warriors to work, as evidenced by the #MeToo movement and women’s marches. In this interview, Neff talks about the ways in which self-compassion both supports and emboldens self-worth, benefiting not just the individual, but the world at large.

Gabriel Stauring’s organization, iACT, partners with refugees in camps around the globe to create preschools and sports programs—places where children and parents can bond, learn and heal. With programs that have reached more than 34,000 children worldwide, iACT uniquely empowers refugees to act on their own behalf, helping one another to maintain hope and well-being in places scarred by unimaginable suffering. On his 32nd trip to Chad, Stauring recently took a moment to share his experience of working alongside conflict-affected communities.

Meet Senta Greene, a child-development expert, and Kathleen Van Antwerp, a leader in behavioral health and youth-and-family outreach. Their company, Full Circle Consulting, demystifies adolescent behavior for everyone dealing with kids, from parents and teachers to police and probation officers.

It’s fair to say no motivational poster has ever promoted the virtues of aimlessness. But that might change if the world reads Tom Lutz’s latest book, Aimlessness, in which mental wandering is shown to be “a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient … thinking,” according to Columbia University Press.

Lutz, a self-described layabout who chairs creative writing at University of California, Riverside, and publishes the Los Angeles Review of Books, has written frequently about topics overlooked in our achievement-oriented culture, including wandering, crying, and even doing nothing. His new book—as the title suggests—doglegs through literature, philosophy, and cultural studies to show readers that you don’t always need an emotional or intellectual map to get to wellbeing, happiness, or wherever else you’d like to go.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Mallika Chopra, daughter of meditation and mindfulness pioneer Deepak Chopra, is well-versed in wellness habits. Her popular children’s books, Just Breathe and Just Feel, build on her work in seminars and classrooms, bringing mindfulness and meditation to kids on the cusp of adolescence. But in her latest book—Just Be You—Chopra brings something new to the table: individuality. Through creative exercises and suggestions—like inventing your own name—she encourages children 8 to 12 to question labels and explore what makes them unique and special. That’s something Chopra can relate to: Although she has worked with her father and brother in different capacities, including founding The Chopra Well on YouTube, she’s also forged her own professional identity. After earning an MBA from Kellogg and an MA in education and psychology at Columbia, she’s done everything from helping bring MTV to India to launching the Heal the World Foundation to creating her own lifestyle website, Intent.com. Here she discusses why Just Be You brings an important message on helping kids become their best selves.

Margaret Cullen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher. One of the pioneers of mindfulness-based programs, Margaret has created a number of mindfulness programs in health care including introducing MBSR to the Cancer Support Community and combining meditation with nutrition education with researchers at UCSF. Margaret has also helped educators manage stress through the delivery of her “Stress Management and Relaxation Training” (SMART) across Vancouver, BC, Boulder & Denver, CO, and Berkeley, CA. Margaret is currently a Founding Faculty at the Stanford’s Compassion Institute.

Meet Cathy Camper, author of the picture book, “Ten Ways to Hear Snow”. A founding member of the Portland Women of Color zine collective & graduate of VONA/VOICES writing workshops for people of color in Berkeley, California, Cathy Camper is a renowned children’s book author. In addition to writing, Cathy works as a librarian in Portland, Oregon, where she does outreach for students K-12.

Meet Jamie Price and Julie Campistron of MyLife. The two founders know firsthand the power of restorative practices, having previously burned out on their high-stress careers as an investment banker (Jamie) and tech executive (Julie). Five years ago they paired up to create an App that would not only offer the tools of serenity but make them simple, digestible, and even, yes, fun.

Caroline Welch is an author, attorney, and CEO and Co- founder with Dr. Dan Siegel of the Mindsight Institute in Santa Monica, California.

Dinah Lenney is one of our favorite multi-hyphenate creatives. She’s both an accomplished actress and writer. She earned her Bachelor’s at Yale and a Certificate of Acting from the Neighborhood Playhouse School and went on to star in the long-recurring part of Nurse Shirley on NBC’s critically acclaimed series, ER.

Dr. Lonnie Zeltzer is a Professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Director of the Pediatric Pain Program at UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital, and Past-Medical Director of Trinity Kids Care pediatric hospice. Her research covers the development of chronic pain, mind-body-pain connections, and the impact of complementary therapies on chronic pain.