This document is the April 2013 issue of Mindful magazine. It includes articles on using mindfulness in healthcare, raising inner-city children, and applying mindfulness in business. It also features interviews with neuroscientist Richie Davidson and author Pico Iyer. Additional sections provide mindfulness tips, recipes, and commentary on cultivating awareness in various aspects of life. The issue aims to celebrate the growing mindfulness movement and support individuals interested in incorporating presence and caring into their daily lives.
1. IS MINDFULNESS
GOOD FOR BUSINESS?
Doctor Not Listening?
5 ways to change that
How a Mother Stopped Teens
From Hurting Themselves
Healthy Mind
Healthy Life
How Working with
Your Mind Is the
Key to Well-Being
P
rem
ier
Issue
The Science
of Changing
Your Brain
DIGITAL SAMPLER
View selected pages from
Mindful’s April 2013 issue.
Subscribe at mindful.org
2. 65 In Practice
66 Techniques
Take a Moment to Get Grounded
67 At Work
Avoid the Office Minefield
Dealing with generation gaps at the office
and a boss who talks trash
68 Ask Ms. Mindful
A husband who spends too much •
A fiancé with cold feet • What to do with
a gloomy teen
70 Insight
Meditation: Start Here
Sharon Salzberg offers practical tools
to deepen concentration, mindfulness,
and compassion
4 Contributors
6 From the Founders
Being Mindful: Now is the Time
9 Now
How one mother fights for teens • Learn
how to change your mindset • New film
documents the work of neuroscientist
Richie Davidson • It’s time to redefine
winning • Research Roundup • Art that
looks back at you • What they don’t
teach at the police academy • Get
mindful reminders on your phone
20 Bookmark This
The writings, recordings, and apps that
are capturing our attention now
22 Mindful–Mindless
Our take on who’s paying attention and
who’s not
24 One Taste
Crunch & Spice
Angela Mears reconsiders the radish
Recipes by Béatrice Peltre
28 Body/Mind
Diving Deep
Scuba diving triggered fear for Elizanda
de la Sota, but she didn’t let it stop her
30 Mind/Body
Mind vs. Brain
In her first column, Sharon Begley
compares “brain talk” to “mind talk”
80 MindSpace
Maira Kalman draws on meditation for
her first illustration for our back page
“So many times
our perception of
what’s happening
is distorted by bias,
habits, fears, or
desires. Mindfulness
helps us see
through these.”
Sharon Salzberg
Coming in the next
issue of Mindful:
A profile of Congressman Tim Ryan,
author of A Mindful Nation
Sallie Tisdale on the joy of goofing off
A Dose of Dirt: The natural world as medicine
What’s sex got to do with it? A peek at
meditation in the bedroom
Ed Halliwell, author of The Mindfulness
Manifesto, on how meditation can take us
way beyond stress reduction
2 mindful April 2013
PHOTOGRAPHBYBÉATRICEPELTRE,ILLUSTRATIONBYADRIANJOHNSON
contents
70
24
4. Carsten Knox
Mindful’s associate editor, Carsten Knox,
went to Baltimore to profile the founders
of the Holistic Life Foundation, who work
with inner-city children and youth (p. 42).
“I’m a fan of the HBO TV series The Wire,
so I asked Ali, Atman, and Andy what
they thought,” he says. “They liked the
show’s story but said the reality of living in
Baltimore is far worse.” Knox’s writing has
appeared in The Globe and Mail, the Ottawa
Citizen, and the National Post.
Maira Kalman
“I love the marriage of word and image,”
says Maira Kalman, frequent contributor to
The New Yorker, author of many children’s
books, and Mindful’s regular illustrator
for MindSpace (p. 80). Kalman started a
mindful practice in order to inspire her work
on our back page. “The aim is to do a course
of meditation and share my thoughts. It’s
been very helpful in the hectic days to calm
me down.”
Jeremy Hunter
Jeremy Hunter explores the question:
Is mindfulness good for business? (p. 52).
With a decade of experience teaching in
MBA programs specializing in executive
management, he has gained some insight
on the topic. “It’s not just mind your breath,”
he says. “It’s let’s look at why you’re doing
what you do. It’s about taking a step back,
reassessing, and creating other choices
for yourself.”
Sharon Begley
“This three-pound piece of tissue inside our
skull can do amazing things. And science
is discovering so much more about it every
day,” says Sharon Begley, the senior health
and science correspondent at Reuters. “But
it’s important to remain humble in the face
of the many questions science has only
begun to ask, no less answer.” In the first
installment of her column in Mindful, she
explores the interplay between the brain and
the mind (p. 30).
Illustrations by Jessica McCarthy and Maira Kalman (self-portrait)
Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer, who writes about the clarity he
finds while traveling (p. 60), is no stranger
to the departures level. “From the age of
nine, I was flying alone six times a year,
back and forth between my parents’ home
in California and my schools in England,”
he says. “So I guess I decided early on that
movement was only as good as the stillness
that lies beneath it.” Iyer is the author, most
recently, of The Open Road and The Man
Within My Head.
Béatrice Peltre
Chef, food stylist, and photographer
Béatrice Peltre developed the recipes and
photographed the radishes featured in this
month’s One Taste department (p. 24). “This
kind of food—healthy and organic—is what
I do,” says the Boston resident who grew
up in rural France. “Whatever you see is
what I eat. If that means it’s not as pretty or
glossy, that’s fine.” Peltre is the author of the
cookbook La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes
for an Inspired Life.
4 mindful April 2013
contributors
5. from the founders
Something important is happening
in our society today: people are being
mindful. More often. In more ways. And
in more places. In our view, the simple
act of being present has the power to
change everything—how we approach
ourselves, our challenges, our relation-
ships, and our communities. We believe
being mindful is an idea—actually, a way
of being—whose time has come. We
are launching Mindful to celebrate and
support this growing movement.
Mindfulness is not obscure or exotic.
It’s familiar to us because it’s what we
already do, how we already are. It takes
many shapes and goes by many names.
In his basketball days, former senator Bill
Bradley called it a sense of where you are,
and for many athletes today it’s being in the
zone. For caregivers, it’s attention and em-
pathy. For soldiers and first responders, it’s
situational awareness. For business leaders,
it might be presence or flow. Artists see it as
spontaneity and thinkers as contemplation.
Mindfulness is not a special added
thing we do. We already have the capacity
to be present, and it doesn’t require us to
change who we are. But we can cultivate
these innate qualities with simple practices
that are scientifically demonstrated to ben-
efit ourselves, our loved ones, our friends
and neighbors, the people we work with,
and the institutions and organizations we
take part in.
When an idea’s time has come, it’s
part of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.
Living mindfully is one such idea. Solu-
tions that ask us to change who we are or
become something we’re not have failed
us over and over again. We’re ready for an
approach that recognizes and cultivates the
best of who we are as human beings.
Mindfulness is not only timely. It also
has the potential to become a transfor-
mative social phenomenon, for these key
reasons:
• Anyone can do it. Mindfulness
practice cultivates universal human
qualities and does not require anyone
to change their beliefs. Everyone can
benefit and it’s easy to learn.
• It’s a way of living. Mindfulness is
more than just a practice. It brings
awareness and caring into everything
we do—and it cuts down needless
stress. Even a little makes our lives
better.
• It’s evidence-based. We don’t have to
take mindfulness on faith. Both sci-
ence and experience demonstrate its
positive benefits for our health, happi-
ness, work, and relationships.
• It sparks innovation. As we deal with
our world’s increasing complexity and
uncertainty, mindfulness can lead us to
effective, resilient, low-cost responses
to seemingly intransigent problems.
Being Mindful
Now is the Time
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Subscribe at mindful.org
April 2013 mindful 6
6. Contents
News 10
Research Roundup 15
Bookmark This 20
Mindful–Mindless 22
“What’s going on with
these teenagers?
They’re constantly in
crisis mode—reacting,
not responding.”
Fiona Jensen,
founder of Calmer Choice
Photographs by Dustin Aksland
now
7 mindful April 2013
7. now
Watch the trailer at
mindful.org/freethemind
WATCH A POT BOIL
Boiling some water for pasta or tea? Watch it. It can
be relaxing. Find more on Twitter @mindinterrupter
OVERHEARD
“Too much of
the education
system orients
students toward
becoming better
thinkers, but there
is almost no focus
on our capacity
to pay attention
and cultivate
awareness. We
can learn to bring
together the body’s
various systems to
fine tune the body
and mind, so we
can navigate life’s
ups and downs
in a way that
minimizes stress
and maximizes
well-being.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn,
in conversation
with Stephan
Rechtschaffen,
cofounder of the
Omega Institute
Brain Wave
A child begs to take the stairs
because he’s terrified of elevators. A
soldier tries to reintegrate at home after a
tour of duty in Iraq. They have one thing
in common: both of their brains have been
affected by trauma.
But as neuroscientist Richie Davidson
points out in the film Free the Mind, to be
released in the U.S. this spring, “We can
shape our brains in ways that increase
happiness and well-being and also
promote pro-social behavior. The brain is
built to change in response to experience.
It’s transformable.”
Named by Time as one of the world’s
100 most influential people, Davidson
founded the Center for Investigating
Healthy Minds at the University of Wis-
consin–Madison in 2008 to unite rigorous
neuroscience research and applications
of that research in real-world settings.
Free the Mind, directed by Phie Ambo
and produced by Danish Documentary
Productions, charts one of Davidson’s
studies: the effect that learning medita-
tion and yoga has on the lives of veterans
and children with ADHD. ●
“Winning isn’t everything.
It’s the only thing.” Those
words from Vince Lombardi,
legendary coach of the Green
Bay Packers during the 1960s,
have been repeated by coaches
to thousands of players ever
since, from Pee Wee football
and Little League to the NFL
and Major League Baseball. It’s
a credo not only for the field but
also for life.
Jason Dorland, author of
Chariots and Horses: Life
Lessons from an Olympic
Rower, was raised on that kind
of thinking. He lived by it. He
thought of it as the only path to
excellence. He passed it on to
others. But when he reached
the pinnacle of his sporting
career—in a race where seconds
and nanoseconds make the
difference between victory and
also-ran—he came to see that
philosophy as an obsession that
hurt him mentally and physically.
An Olympic rower, Dorland
was a member of the 1988
Canadian eights crew heav-
ily favored to take gold in
Seoul. On race day, the team
faltered and fell out of medal
contention. Dorland went into
a tailspin. “It defined me,” he
says. “Every time I walked into
a room I assumed everybody
thought, ‘There’s the guy who
came sixth at the Olympics.’
When the race goes sideways
and the outcome isn’t what you
anticipated, and you don’t have
the tools to deal with it, you fall
down pretty hard.”
As Dorland gained perspec-
tive over time, he didn’t like
what his winning-at-all-costs
attitude had turned him into—
someone addicted to anger as
the path to excellence. When he
started coaching he decided to
take a different tack. Dorland
coached the Shawnigan Lake
School senior boys’ rowing
crew in British Columbia to
four national championships,
but he taught his athletes that
the excess stress that comes
from obsessing about winning
can actually decrease perfor-
mance—not to mention create
pressure to use performance-
enhancing drugs.
Today Dorland counsels his
athletes to find satisfaction
within, to strive for excellence
that isn’t based on comparison.
“You could not create a more
destructive and constricting
message than telling kids that
only winners are worthy of
celebration,” he says.
And Lombardi would likely
agree.
As he looked back on his
legacy, the iconic coach said
of his most famous dictum, “I
wished I’d never said the thing.
I meant the effort. I meant hav-
ing a goal. I sure didn’t mean
for people to crush human
values and morality.” ●
A Winning Strategy
PHOTOGRAPHS(TOP)BYMITCHELLMEDIA,(BOTTOM)COURTESYOFCENTERFORINVESTIGATINGHEALTHYMINDS
April 2013 mindful 10
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8. Recipes and photographs by
Béatrice Peltre. Find more of her
work at latartinegourmande.com24 mindful April 2013
9. Crunch & Spice
By Angela Mears
White Icicle. Bunny Tail. April Cross.
Snow Bell. Plum Purple. Red King.
Easter Egg.
You may be surprised to learn that
these names were given not to nail pol-
ish, paint colors, or candies but to diverse
varieties of a single vegetable. Most rad-
ishes, once planted, mature in less than
four weeks, yielding edible roots in the
gentlest pastels and brightest jewel tones.
White or black, fist-sized or pebble-
shaped, mild or punishing, no vegetable
springs from its seed so readily or in so
many disguises as the radish.
Perhaps we have this generosity of
form to thank for its association with
some of literature’s hungrier heroines.
Scarlett O’Hara, upon eating a radish
straight out of the dirt at Tara, swore
she would never go hungry again. And,
according to some accounts, Rapunzel’s
mother yearned so powerfully for the
radishes in a witch’s garden that she
surrendered her infant daughter just to
satisfy that craving.
If you’ve ever bitten into a raw radish,
you know the assertive pungency unex-
pected in such a pretty morsel. The sharp-
ness comes from sulfurous molecules and
enzymes that produce, when chewed, a
stinging, almost funky flavor also found
in mustard and wasabi—a fact that makes
radishes a very divisive vegetable.
I’ve seen children flee from them. I
did. The tacquerias I once visited with
my father offered mountains of Red
Belles to snack on, trimmed and soaking
in pools of ice water. They were mostly
tasteless with an occasional hint of that
punishing sharpness. I was not averse to
vegetables as a rule, but I was averse to
punishment.
But then something happened. I
bought a clutch of French Breakfast rad-
ishes from the farmers’ market, oblong
and dirt-caked and streaked with pink.
Eaten plain, they were nose-burningly
hot. But, when enjoyed thinly sliced with
good salt and creamy butter, the effect
of their pungency was not unlike that of
a ripe French cheese, and soon the burn
seemed more pleasing than punishing.
Strong cheeses are, of course, an
acquired taste. But then so are radishes,
and I seem to have acquired a permanent
craving for them. I say craving because
that is really the only word that will do.
Radishes are not refreshing like lettuce,
not hearty like kale, not sweet like beets.
They belong, for me, somewhere to the
left of the produce section. They savor
of dirt, brie, yellow mustard. They are
intense and unpredictable and hard to
refine. Yet for all this personality and
swagger, a single Red Belle or French
Breakfast offers only one calorie of burn-
able energy.
Beautiful. Biting. Basic.
Radishes at play in a salad, or getting
top billing between two slices of bread:
whatever you choose, eat with the kind
of gusto you’d normally reserve for some-
thing richer. Notice how your hunger
ebbs, and how quickly it surges again. If
only Scarlett O’Hara had enjoyed hers a
little bit more. ●
Makes 4 tartines
4 ounces soft fresh goat cheese
4 slices of bread of your choice
8 to 10 pink radishes, finely
sliced (use a mandoline if
you have one)
⅓ cup cooked edamame
Sprouts, to taste (try arugula
or broccoli sprouts)
Olive oil, to drizzle
Pepper
Fleur de sel
Spread the cheese on top of the
slices of bread. Arrange the sliced
radishes on top (about 2 radishes
per tartine). Add the edamame
and sprouts. Drizzle with olive oil.
Season with pepper and fleur de sel.
Serve with soup or a side salad.
Radish, Edamame, and
Goat Cheese Tartines with
Fleur de Sel
Angela Mears writes about food at
thespinningplate.com
April 2013 mindful 25
one taste
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10. Diving Deep
Scuba diving triggered fear
for Elizanda de la Sota, but she
didn’t let that stop her.
As told to Carsten Knox
Photograph by Sarah Wilson
Name: Elizanda de la Sota
Age: 62
Activity: Scuba diving
Location: Austin, Texas
Read the rest of this article in Mindful’s April 2013 issue.
Subscribe at mindful.org
28 mindful April 2013
body/mind
11. Mind vs. Brain
Let’s try a little experiment. Using
your right index finger, point to your
brain. Now using the same finger, point
to your mind. Not so easy. We don’t
necessarily think of our brain and mind
as being exactly the same thing. One is
not as easy to pinpoint, and this has led to
two distinct ways we have of talking about
mental activity: mind talk and brain talk.
To those of us without a degree in
neurobiology, it seems completely natu-
ral to refer to the mind. We talk about
feeling this way and thinking of that, of
remembering one thing and dreaming of
another. Those verbs are examples of
mind talk. Using mind talk, we would say,
“I recognized my first-grade teacher in
the crowd because she was wearing the
necklace with the beetle scarab, which
was so unusual I still remembered it after
all these years.”
We would not say, “A barrage of pho-
tons landed on my retina, exciting the
optic nerve so that it carried an electri-
cal signal to my lateral geniculate body
and thence to my primary visual cortex,
from which signals raced to my striate
cortex to determine the image’s color and
orientation, and to my prefrontal cortex
and inferotemporal cortex for object rec-
ognition and memory retrieval—causing
me to recognize Mrs. McKelvey.” That’s
brain talk.
That there is an interplay between
mind and brain may seem unremark-
able. The mind, after all, is gener-
ally regarded as synonymous with our
thoughts, feelings, memories, and be-
liefs, and as the source of our behaviors.
It’s not made of material, but we think
of it as quite powerful, or even as who
we are.
Scientists insist on
talking about the brain
while the rest of us
talk about the mind.
In her first installment
of this column, Sharon
Begley sizes up the two
sides of the mind/brain
conversation.
Sharon Begley is the senior
health and science correspondent
at Reuters, author of Train
Your Mind, Change Your Brain, and
coauthor with Richard Davidson
of The Emotional Life of Your Brain.
April 2013 mindful 30Illustration by Malin Rosenqvist
mind/body
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13. Stacy Brindise, 30, was eager to have
children. But after trying for several
years to conceive, she and her husband,
Mike, were still childless. Like millions
of couples, the Brindises were faced with
what doctors refer to as “unexplained
infertility.”
Couples diagnosed with unexplained
infertility are typically active, health-
conscious people of childbearing age
who find themselves—for no apparent
reason—without a crib or a bottle in the
house. Like many, the Brindises followed
a familiar route, first consulting doctors
who recommended hormone treatment,
which Stacy reluctantly decided to try.
The arduous six-cycle program involved
daily medications, self-administered
hormone shots, and monthly intrauterine
insemination with a catheter.
But the Brindises still couldn’t get
pregnant.
Physicians next suggested that Stacy
try in vitro fertilization. It would involve
doses of medication, a considerable price
tag (starting at $12,000), and increased
chances of her having twins—factors that
gave the couple considerable pause.
Nothing had worked and it was time,
Stacy decided, to change her approach.
“When people have a medical problem,
everybody seems to jump right to drugs →
$34B
Americans spent nearly
$34 billion out of pocket for
alternative treatments in 2007,
according to a National
Institutes of Health survey.
Health Care
New &
Improved
A new generation of patients and doctors
is changing the face of American medicine.
It’s about more than curing disease now—
it’s health for the whole person.
Story by Emma Seppala
Photographs by Cameron Wittig
April 2013 mindful 35
health
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14. What do kids growing up
in the toughest parts of
inner-city Baltimore need
most? Three guys returned
to find out—and changed
lives and a neighborhood
in the process.
Story by Carsten Knox
Photographs by Mark Mahaney
Raising
Baltimore
One child at a time
community
15. Baltimore is a city of corners and alleys.
At night, the corners in the Western District are lit
by the blue glow of police cameras, a crime deterrent.
The alleys run through the middle of block after
block of Baltimore’s famous row houses, providing
sheltered places for kids to play and a quick exit for
those with something to run from.
The uncharitable might call it a ghetto. The West-
ern District in particular has been beset by poverty,
drug abuse, and violence: 34% of the children here,
most of them African American, live below the
poverty line, compared to 14% in the rest of the
state. And while some of the homes here are well
kept—the paint fresh, lawns mowed—many blocks
are punctuated with abandoned properties, “the
vacants,” their windows boarded.
The house at 2008 North Smallwood lies in the
middle of one of these blocks. This is where broth-
ers Ali and Atman Smith grew up. And it’s here
that, with their friend Andres “Andy” Gonzalez,
they formed the non-profit Holistic Life Foundation
(HLF) in 2001.
Starting with 20 fifth-grade boys, the foundation’s
after-school program introduced yoga, mindfulness,
urban gardening, and teamwork to children in the
neighborhood in an effort to revive the community
through its youngest, most vulnerable members. In a
city where the dropout rate for high school students
is routinely higher than 50%, 19 of those first 20 boys
graduated and the other got his GED.
Hundreds of youngsters have now passed
through the program. And researchers from Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and
Penn State University have begun to study the work
being done by the guys at Holistic Life. They’re pay-
ing special attention to the program’s effect on chil-
dren’s moods, relationships with peers and teachers,
and emotional self-regulation. After more than a
decade, Ali, Atman, and Andy’s work is getting no-
ticed beyond the blocks of the Western District.
Down a narrow alley off North Smallwood is
The Quiet Place. It’s a former vacant lot, hidden by
rows of old houses and decaying cement walls, trans-
formed into a park. HLF did this. There are benches,
barbecue grills, garbage cans, blue rain barrels, and
a vegetable garden growing tomatoes, basil, beets,
cucumbers, peppers, watermelons, cantaloupes, sage,
cilantro, lilies, lavender, and a whole bunch of mint.
“The city cuts the grass but they’re being kind of
slow about it this year,” Ali says.
At 36, he has a large presence, laid-back but seri-
ous. He’s bald, with a beard that frames his cheeks
and chin. He dresses casually. On this hot summer
day, he’s in a T-shirt and shiny gold basketball shorts.
Ali’s cell phone rings. “Killer Cam!” he says, smil-
ing. “Hey, you comin’ tomorrow, right? Just listen to
your mother, please. Just listen to your mother so you
can come tomorrow.” Tomorrow is a cookout at The
Quiet Place, organized by HLF, a chance for the →
The founders of
the Holistic Life
Foundation, from
left: Andy Gonzalez,
Ali Smith, and
Atman Smith.
April 2013 mindful 43
16. community to get together. Ali signs off, “All right,
that’s what’s up.”
A lean, athletic man, looking like a young Bob
Marley with short, messy dreads, walks up to Ali’s
red Chevy Trailblazer. It’s Atman. He’s 34, with a
radiating calm like his brother’s, dressed casual and
comfortable. The bumper sticker on the back of At-
man’s black Nissan XTerra is a Marley quote: “None
but ourselves can free our mind.”
Atman climbs into the Trailblazer. He says to Ali,
“Thank you, chauffeur.”
Ali says, “You know how I do. Call me Jeeves.”
Then Andy jumps in the car. He’s 33, quick to
smile, with a thin beard and long hair tied back in a
ponytail. Ali points the car downtown, with Kanye
West’s summer smash “Mercy” playing on the stereo.
Ali muses on how long a particular home on
North Smallwood has been vacant. “That one on
the corner, remember the guy who had the dog up
on the roof?” he asks. He estimates it’s been empty
since he was a child. “Maybe there’s two people liv-
ing on this block—at the most,” he says. Occasional
gaps in the rows of homes begin to appear. “These
spaces,” Andy says, “are because the houses just
kind of collapsed.”
The blocks multiply, empty lots increase, and the
city begins to resemble a war zone.
Ali and Atman call their parents hippies. But
when they were growing up, yoga wasn’t something
they talked about with their friends. “If we were
vegan and did yoga now we’d be the coolest kids on
the planet, but back then, nobody was doing it,” says
Ali. It was their father, Meredith “Mert” Smith, a
basketball coach at Southern High School, and their
godfather, Will Joyner, who taught them. Ali says
it was normal to see his father in a headstand down
in the basement. “We walked on past, went into the
TV room to watch Saturday-morning cartoons, and
when he was done he’d come join us.”
Ali and Atman went to a Quaker school in a
middle-class neighborhood, the Friends School of
Baltimore, and his sons, Asuman and Amar, go there
now. “Quaker school was kinda cool. It reinforced
the meditation stuff we’d learned,” says Ali. “We did
meaningful worship, where you had your moment of
silence, where you sat and kinda reflected on things.”
Though Ali and Atman’s mother, Fredine “Cassie”
Smith, and Mert divorced in 1986, they remain
friends. And it was around then, as the brothers be-
came teenagers, that they really noticed the neigh-
borhood change in the wake of the crack epidemic.
“When we were kids, it was like one big family,” says
Ali. “You could point at every house on the block
and say who lived there. But the people who were
making sure good values were being passed on, who
were strong male role models, drugs took them away
from the community. They were either locked up or
dead. And women, too. A generation was raised by
grandparents or foster parents.”
It limited people’s vision of what they could be
in life, says Atman. “Drug dealer, rapper, or athlete.
You weren’t worried about trying to be a scientist,
or mathematician, or philosopher, or…”
“A yoga teacher,” Ali adds.
In the late 1990s, while attending University of
Maryland College Park, they met Andy Gonzalez,
who grew up in Severn, Maryland, the youngest
of five. Andy was a marketing major and musician
with a passion for hip-hop. He started doing yoga
with Ali and Atman and found his personal outlook
changing. “A large part was that self-practice,” he
says. “When you’re inside and you look outside, it’s
like, wow, man, the outside kinda sucks compared to
the inside. Within us is transformative.”
While at college, the guys started an informal
reading group, devouring books on ancient history,
spirituality, astronomy, astrology, and physics. The
books inspired their practice and perspective. “We
were trying to figure out what’s the meaning of life,
why we are here,” says Atman. “Once we started
analyzing that, we realized the purpose is to help
everybody. Selfless service.”
Ali and Andy finished school and moved back
to Baltimore in 2001, with Atman joining them on
weekends until he graduated in 2002. They knew
that their selfless service needed to be here, at home.
The answer was the Holistic Life Foundation. →
Below: Darrius
Douglas, 22, was in
the first Holistic Life
Foundation program,
which was offered
after school at Windsor
Hills Elementary
in Baltimore’s
North Smallwood
neighborhood. He
now teaches with
HLF as a volunteer.
“People wonder why
a lot of black guys
end up in the streets,”
he says. “That’s
cause they don’t
have nothing in their
life.” Opposite: Kaila
Winkler practices her
breathing.
44 mindful April 2013
community
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Subscribe at mindful.org
18. 70 mindful April 2013
in practice insight
Meditation:
Start Here
19. Practicing meditation
doesn’t involve a whole
new set of skills. It
works so well, Sharon
Salzberg says, because
it enhances life skills
we already have.
The most common response I hear
these days when I tell someone I teach
meditation is “I’m so stressed out. I could
really use some of that.” I am also amused
to hear fairly often “My friend should
really meet you!” I’m happy to see that
meditation is known more and more as
something that could be directly helpful
in our day-to-day lives. Anywhere stress
plays a role in our problems, meditation
can have a potential role in its relief.
Meditation practice need not be tied
to any belief system. The only necessary
belief is not a dogmatic one, but one
that says each of us has the capacity to
understand ourselves more fully, and
to care more deeply both for ourselves
and for others. Its methods work to free
us of habitual reactions that cause us
great unhappiness, such as harsh self-
judgment, and to develop wisdom and love.
Meditation gives anybody who pursues it
an opportunity to look within for a sense of
abundance, depth, and connection to life.
Rather than an ornate, arcane set
of instructions, basic meditation consists
of practical tools to help deepen concen-
tration, mindfulness, and compassion. →
Illustrations by Adrian Johnson
Read the rest of this article in Mindful’s April 2013 issue.
Subscribe at mindful.org
April 2013 mindful 71
20. IS MINDFULNESS
GOOD FOR BUSINESS?
Doctor Not Listening?
5 ways to change that
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Issue
The Science
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APRIL 2013
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