Basic Training in Mindfulness Techniques

From Mindful Direct: 

According to a recent Institute of Medicine report, mental health issues among the veteran population are rising. The number of active-duty service members diagnosed with a psychological condition has increased by over 60 percent between 2001 and 2011. An estimated 22 veterans commit suicide each day. 

An increasing number of veterans are turning to mindfulness to cope with combat-related PTSD. And if Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) has anything to say about it, mindfulness will be offered as a treatment option to every U.S. veteran. 

"There's a chance that a lot of these men and woman will kill themselves, and, to me, that's unacceptable," says Ryan. Ryan helped introduce a bill that would support bringing integrative health to Veterans Affairs and mindfulness techniques into the military as part of basic training, making members of the military "more proficient in how to deal with trauma"—a concept investigated recently by research on Marines and mindfulness. 

Learn more...

Tim Ryan: A Mindful Coalition from Mindful Direct on Vimeo.

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See also: "Jennifer Michael Hecht — Hope for Our Future Selves," On Being, March 27, 2014

Powerful Empathy Machine

Roger Ebert's remarks when he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Thursday, June 23, 2005:

When I started, I was asked, how long do you think you can remain a film critic? I said I should be able to hold out about five years. Now I’ve been film critic for 38 years and I think it's a worthy way to spend a lifetime, writing about films. They're not only entertainment. When they are entertainment that's not a bad thing, but sometimes they're more than entertainment.

We are born into a box of space and time. We are who and when and what we are and we're going to be that person until we die. But if we remain only that person, we will never grow and we will never change and things will never get better.

Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else's life for a while. I can walk in somebody else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I'm not just stuck being myself, day after day.

The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people.

That's what I've tried to support and that's what a great many of the people in this audiences have tried to support especially the many filmmakers who are here, the film artists who are here, the filmgoers who are here. It makes a difference, and what's why we do it and that's why this is wonderful day for me.

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See also:

• Ebert, R. (2011). Life itself: A memoir. New York: Grand Central Pub. (library)
• Life Itself (film)
• "This is Not Only Your Film," by Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com, January 17, 2014  

They Would Not Understand

A Hole Is to Dig: A First Book of Definitions byRuth Krauss, pictures by Maurice Sendak

The Face
by Franz Wright, from Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems

Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then   
its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant   
by sights that ought to strike the sane   
unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute   
with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth   
at any given time: and if
you got the chance to ask them how they do it,   
they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you
with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile
the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret   
preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure   
one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;   
or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,
to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

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See also: "Small Thoughts in Big Brains," from This American Life, July 22, 2004

To Be Fully Alive

Double-crested Cormorants traveling over Lake Champlain, July 6, 2014

Excerpt from "The Pursuit of Happiness" by Phillip Moffitt:

Herein lies the paradox common to mystical teachings in most spiritual traditions: In order to be fully alive, you also have to die. When you cling to the past or future, believing you are holding onto something precious, you are denying what is sacred about life. Your life, with its unique pains and joys, can only be reconciled in your surrender to the truth of your experiences as they arise one moment after another, never fixed, always moving. A beautiful sunrise, a baby's smile, a broken heart, cancer, the loss of love; open fully to the experiences of your life in all their mysterious manifestations. Meet each of these moments with compassion, loving-kindness, and your very best response. Then let loose of each in turn, for however beguiling in their beauty or their horror, they are truly only life dancing."

Read the entire essay...

You Keep Falling

Photo: Jake Rajs, "Cherry Blossom," Washington DC

Love Recognized
by Robert Penn Warren

There are many things in the world and you
Are one of them. Many things keep happening and
You are one of them, and the happening that
Is you keeps falling like snow
On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until
The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.

How many things have become silent? Traffic
Is throttled. The mayor
Has been, clearly, remiss and the city
Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor
Was I yes, why should this happen to me?
I have always been a law abiding citizen.

But you, like snow, like love, keep falling,
And it is not certain that the world will not be
Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.

Silence.

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Robert Penn Warren reads his poem "Love Recognized"