Current favourites
Alert Relaxed – Move like a martial artist. Alert, but not rigid. Relaxed but not slumped. Try this short meditation to practice this in the seated posture and then adopt it as you move about your daily activities.
The Transitional Pause – a short practice you can do anywhere to help you train your brain to act with awareness. Take three minutes to acknowledge where you’ve come from and the impact of that activity, how you are right now, and how you intend to be in the next interaction.
Mindfulness of the Posture – this practice is so good for you on multiple levels. Good for your musculoskeletal health (especially those working remotely or in coffee shops or shared work spaces), good for your mental health (an alert, relaxed body means helps the mind to be alert and relaxed), and is a way you can train mindfulness wherever you are.
A meditation on stillness and motion. Watch this as a short meditation to reflect on how we can SLOW DOWN, PAUSE and really understand why we are rushing.
A meditation on Nature. Loving this amazing video. Make this your five minutes meditation today and be amazed by Nature
Voice of Reason is a fantastic new short advert 59 seconds of applying the principles of mindfulness in every-day life. It was produced for Transport for London as one of a range of campaigns designed to help reduce the number of collisions on the road.
Free Mindfulness Bell app for android phones The mindfulness bell is a great free app for android phones. You can set it to ring at random moments during the day to remind you to bring yourself back into the moment.
Short body scan Dr Tamara Russell leads an audience with Ruby Wax and Claudia Hammond at the Barbican Centre, London.
Innovations in the pipeline
Technology assisted mindfulness program Dr Tamara Russell working with her student Chris Jack on the recordings for his new technology assisted mindfulness program. They are working out ways to encourage and support the development of mindfulness through the use of technology. Although sometimes we think that the technology is the MOST mindless aspect of our life, the reality is that we sometimes really struggle to put it down, and especially our young people. So, why not include the technology in the practice?
Chris is interested in exploring ways in which the digital technologies at our fingertips can be supportive of learning mindfulness, rather than a hindrance to it. Working with Tamara Russell, and inspired by her kinaesthetic approach to learning mindfulness, Chris is presently developing an interactive, gesture-based mobile app. It is designed to support beginner meditators in cultivating focused attention and awareness of mind wandering. This is the focus of his PhD research at Queen Mary University of London. Chris’s other work ranges from sound art to robotics and he I particularly enjoy cooking up hair brained arts/research projects involving technology and human perception.
Talks by Dr Tamara Russell
Below are links to various videos talking about mindfulness and related topics.
This is Dr Tamara Russell at the Symposium with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Sao Paulo, Brasil.
This is Dr Tamara Russell at the Barbican Festival of Neuroscience with Ruby Wax.
This is Dr Tamara Russell in a short film by the Wellcome Trust about Martial arts and the mind.
This is Dr Tamara Russell talking about mindfulness at Croydon Heartworks.
This is Dr Tamara Russell talking about floatation tank and mindfulness.
Ted Talks
Catherine Kerr: Mindfulness Starts With the Body: A View from the Brain. Director of Translational Neuroscience, Contemplative Studies Initiative Assistant Professor (Research), Department of Family Medicine.7
Krista Tippett: Reconnecting with compassion. At a special TED, deconstructs the meaning of compassion through several moving stories, .
Robert Thurman: Expanding your circle of compassion. It’s hard to always show compassion develop compassion for our enemies with a seven-step meditation exercise to extend compassion beyond our inner circle .
Joan Halifax: Compassion and the true meaning of empathy
in the face of death and dying, and a deep insight into the nature of empathy.
Matthieu Ricard: The habits of happiness
What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Biochemist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says we can train our minds in habits of well-being