12 Minute Meditation

• A Body Scan Meditation to Prepare Mind and Body for Sleep

  If you’ve been having trouble falling asleep lately, this body scan meditation with Diana Winston offers a gentle, soothing way to be with the tension in our minds and our bodies. Take a deep breath, let go, and ease into rest.   Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center and author of several books including The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering your Natural Awareness. A quick note: Since this is a sleep meditation, you won’t be hearing a closing bell or statement like usual, but instead just a drifting off into silence. The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.  Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter:  mindful.org/signup Show Notes Find more from Diana Winston here. Go Deeper Reconnecting with our body and its signals is a key part of being able to drop into full relaxation and rest. Here are two more articles that can help you increase body awareness:   How to Befriend Your Body The Science of Embodiment: Connect to Your Body’s Wisdom For more practice, here’s another meditation to try: A 12-Minute Body Scan Meditation for Letting Go of Stress and Falling Asleep And more from Mindful here: More episodes of 12 Minute Meditation   Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing [email protected].

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• A Meditation to Be At Peace with How Things Are

  In this week’s meditation, Dr. Mark Bertin walks us through a practice that is both concrete and compassionate. It guides us to take note of our tendency to either deny or try and “fix” what’s going on in our lives, and then find a third way—one where we aim to see things as clearly as possible, so that our decisions are filled with awareness, skill, and care for everyone involved. Mark Bertin, MD, is a pediatrician, author, professor, and mindfulness teacher specializing in neurodevelopmental behavioral pediatrics. He’s a regular contributor to Mindful.org and Psychology Today. He is the author of How Children Thrive: The Practical Science of Raising Independent, Resilient, and Happy Kids (Sounds True, 2018). Dr. Bertin resides in Pleasantville, New York. For more, visit developmentaldoctor.com. Together with ADHD Life Coach and Certified ADHD Educator Dana Crews, Dr. Bertin is leading a retreat October 10-12, 2025, to support adults navigating life with ADHD. Hosted at the Menla Retreat Center in the serene Catskill Mountains, Held and Whole is a restorative and educational three-day ADHD retreat that will offer practical, mindfulness-based tools to strengthen emotional regulation, deepen self-awareness, and foster authenticity.  You can get more information and reserve your spot here. Plus, listeners to this podcast can claim a 15% early bird discount when they enter code “Mindful” at checkout, good through August 15th.    The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.  Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter:  mindful.org/signup More About Our Contributor Find more from Dr. Mark Bertin and his work here. Go Deeper Being with reality exactly as it is, without judgment or denial, is one of the core principles of mindful practice. It is also one of the most challenging. If you want to learn more about what this principle looks like in practice, including fostering mindful awareness with neurodivergence, check out these additional articles: Wise Engagement with the World: What to Do When You Wish Things Were Different   Three Ways Acceptance Helps You Work with Difficult Emotions  Mindful Parenting for ADHD  And for more practice building calm awareness in meditation, here are other meditations to try:  A Guided Breathing Meditation to Cultivate Awareness  A Mindfulness Practice for Nonjudgmental Awareness  More from Mindful here: More episodes of 12 Minute Meditation Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing [email protected].

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• A Loving-Kindness Meditation to Expand the Warmth of Your Heart

  Loving-kindness meditation, also called metta,  springs from a basic understanding of human nature: On one hand, we might truly believe that  compassion makes the world better—and on the other, we might struggle to offer it to ourselves and to others for various reasons.  Metta practices, like the one Dr. Emma Seppälä leads this week, offer a simple, structured way to help us  gently expand our capacity to both give and receive love.  As a bestselling author, Yale lecturer, and international keynote speaker, Emma Seppälä teaches executives at the Yale School of Management and is faculty director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program. A psychologist and research scientist by training, her expertise is the science of happiness, emotional intelligence, and social connection. Her bestselling book The Happiness Track (HarperOne, 2016) has been translated into dozens of languages. Her new book is Sovereign (Hay House, 2024). Seppälä is also the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.  Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter:  mindful.org/signup Show Notes Find more from Dr. Emma Seppälä here. Go Deeper If you want to understand more about the practice of loving-kindness, why it matters, and how to build it—even with difficult people or in times when you aren’t feeling very compassionate—here are some articles to get you started:  Wise Engagement with the World: What to Do When You Wish Things Were Different Loving-Kindness Meditation with Sharon Salzberg For more practice, here’s another meditation to try: A 12-Minute Meditation for Self-Compassion and Loving-Kindness. And more from Mindful here: More episodes of 12 Minute Meditation Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing [email protected].

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• Transform Shame to Self-Trust

  Shame is one of the most complex and difficult human emotions to experience and process.  This week, we’re refreshing a meditation from Dr. Patricia Rockman, who offers a practice to meet shame with courage, tenderness, and curiosity. The more we can sit with these difficult emotions, the more we build resilience, self-knowledge, and self-trust—which are the most powerful natural antidotes to shame. Patricia Rockman, MD, CCFP, FCFP is a family physician with a focused practice in mental health. She is the senior director of Education and Clinical Services at the Centre for Mindfulness Studies, Toronto. Rockman is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Family Medicine, cross appointed to Psychiatry. She has extensive experience practicing individual psychotherapy, leading therapy groups, and training healthcare providers in mindfulness-based interventions, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and change management for stress reduction. She is a freelance writer, yoga teacher, and meditation practitioner. The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.  Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter:  mindful.org/signup Show Notes Find more from Dr. Patricia Rockman here. Go Deeper Shame is a universal and challenging human experience. If you’d like to learn more about where it comes from and how mindfulness can help heal the wounds of shame, these three articles can help: Feeling Lonely? 4 Ways to Release Shame and Build Healthy Relationships Tame Your Money Shame The Downward Spiral of Shame For more practice, here is another Meditation for Working with Shame. And more from Mindful here: More episodes of 12 Minute Meditation Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing [email protected].

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• SOS Meditation to Unwind Anxiety

  In this week’s guided meditation, teacher and author Melli O’Brien offers a practice that uses gentle, steady awareness to help you find your calm center again when you’re feeling wound up with stress or anxiety. Melli is a mindfulness educator and mental health coach with over two decades of experience. She is also cofounder of Mindfulness.com and the Mindfulness Summit—the world’s largest mindfulness conference. Melli has distilled and synthesized her knowledge on resilience, stress management, peak performance psychology, positive neuroplasticity training, and mindfulness into The Deep Resilience Method, released as her book Deep Resilience in February 2025.  Starting July 15th, Melli is hosting The Deep Resilience Experience, a 30-day online course that will help you build unshakeable inner strength in 15 minutes a day.  The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.  Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter:  mindful.org/signup Show Notes Find more from Melli O’Brien here. To learn more about Melli’s upcoming Deep Resilience Experience (and how you can get $350 in bonus gifts when you sign up before July 15th), click here.  Go Deeper Want to understand more about the connection between practicing mindfulness and easing anxiety? These three articles are a great place to start: Unwinding Your Anxiety Habit Loop  Most Habit-Change Tools Fail With Anxiety—Here’s One that Works Why Does My Anxiety Keep Coming Back? For more practice, here are 5 Guided Meditations for Panic and Anxiety that you can try when you need support. And more from Mindful here: More episodes of 12 Minute Meditation Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing [email protected].  

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