Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World

If we look carefully at our actions—what we say or do, what we refrain from saying or doing—we can sense within them an urge toward wholeness, toward happiness.

Agency takes over when it isn’t enough to simply feel bad about a situation, write a disconsolate tweet, or vaguely note that something should be done.

Sometimes how you solve a problem is as important as solving it. Mindfulness has taught me how to stay with the conversations that have the scary potential to shift the whole way I see myself or the way I’m working.

We’re conditioned to turn away from anger or guilt, blame, jealousy, and so on. Feeling angry—at ourselves, at others, at experiences that come upon us—is undoubtedly intense, and we might fear that intensity will be all-consuming. So to avoid the rabbit hole of anger, our culture teaches us to find safety in repression. But there is a profound dif

When we are trying to assess the value of our actions in everyday life, we typically do so in terms of expectations. Did we do the good thing we envisioned in the time frame we anticipated? While self-awareness and setting goals is a powerful practice, becoming too rigid about achieving results can lead to a relentless kind of expectation. Then bur

Efforts toward change are an expression of our own innate dignity and testament to the belief that what we do matters in this world. We engage not only to try to foster change right now, we engage to enliven what we believe to someday yet be possible.

We don’t all share the same degree or type of pain, but we share the vulnerability of loss, of change. We can lie in bed feeling helpless and unseen.

THIS SENSE OF agency to remake our own lives or the world that we see can happen at any time, at any age.

When we care, and when we know we are worthy, we can be agents of change—for ourselves and for others.