Today, the accelerating pace of life poses real challenges to our wellbeing. At the same time, new understandings about meditation are shedding light on how its transformative powers can improve our daily lives. A Joyful Mind pulls back the curtain on what it means to meditate, on what modern science reveals about its benefits, and on how meditation and mindfulness can be used in workplaces and schools. This groundbreaking film serves to clear up the confusion around meditation perpetuated by the media. It features the experiences of both novice and master meditators, highlighting Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, whose teachings have touched people around the world with their clarity, wit and personal insight into how meditation can have a positive impact on our daily lives.

Kristin Lothman, a mind-body counselor with Mayo Clinic's Department of Integrative Medicine and Health, provides a meditation example for coping with anxiety relating to COVID-19.

A meditation to help you be less overwhelmed and more centered.

Sheri Johnson, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, explores neurobiological, cognitive, emotional, and social triggers of mania, with a focus on the reward system.

It is often remarked that though it may seem that we face numerous global crises of different kinds – environmental, social, political, cultural, economic, psychological, and so on – these crises are interrelated. The term ‘metacrisis’ has been invented to describe this predicament. However these crises are not merely adventitiously interrelated because each has an impact on and reinforces each of the others – though that may be true – but because they share roots at a deeper level in a way of thinking about ourselves and the world. What are these roots? Hemisphere theory, deeply grounded as it is in Darwinism and subsequent neuroscientific research, shows us that a new, far more complex, and more nuanced, appraisal of the bipartite brain – the product of the last 30 years of research – brings new insights into the human condition.

Can we break bad habits by being more curious about them? Psychiatrist Judson Brewer studies the relationship between mindfulness and addiction — from smoking to overeating to all those other things we do even though we know they're bad for us.

In response to a subscribers request, I have created a short video that can be used to educate friends and family on the nature of the motivation deficits that plague people with ADHD.  I start by pandering to the propensity of Internet viewers to love dogs and cats by giving a brief cameo to our dog, Moose, a Coton de Tulear.  That said, this video discusses how ADHD as a disorder of self regulation and executive functioning leads to problems with the sense of time and anticipation of the future.  That creates a high time preference, which is a greater desire for immediate over delayed rewards.  That can then lead to serious problems in self motivation when work or other unrewarding tasks have to be done.  While this motivational deficit is clearly neurobiological in origin, people with ADHD must find ways to compensate for it in order to succeed in the demands of work, school, home etc.  I give several suggestions for refueling the motivational tank at the end of this clip.  Note that ADHD medications, especially stimulants, can also help compensate for this motivational issue by enhancing the reward value of environmental events related to the task to be done.

Joseph Goldstein has been leading meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, and the Forest Refuge. Since 1967, he has practiced different forms of Buddhist meditation under eminent teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet.

Rasmus Hougaard about Mindfulness Training at Mindful Leadership Summit, Washington DC.

Jay Sanguinetti is a research scientist at the University of Arizona and Research Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico, where he directs the Nice (Non-Invasive Cognitive Enhancement Lab). The NICE lab explores how neuromodulation can augment cognition in humans using a variety of established tools, including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), transcranial electrical stimulation (tDCS/tACS) and also novel methods like transcranial focused ultrasound (TFUS) and near-infrared light stimulation (photobiomodulation). Jay is presently investigating whether focused ultrasound can be used to augment meditation practice.