“If you want a totally doable, realistic way to bring mindfulness alive in your daily life—waking up, working, relating, going to bed—The Mindful Day is a perfect guide."

- Tara Brach, psychologist, meditation teacher, and
author of Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion

This email was supposed to be purely celebratory. When I scheduled it a few weeks ago as part of a launch plan, the world looked very different. The email was intended to be a joyful announcement about the release of a new project that I’d been working on for months. But things have changed – fundamentally. We are all at home... and living in a world where so many celebrations – birthdays, weddings, baby showers, graduations, and more – have moved online, been postponed indefinitely, or are taking place in unprecedented ways.

So in another way, the timing is perfect. The project I'm talking about is a 50-day course, 50 Days to a Mindful Life, which is now available to stream or download on the Insight Timer app. If you follow me on social media, you’ve caught a glimpse of the intensity of the work during the final weeks of the project. I have loved being in the deep end of the pool with these sessions. The course is adapted from my book, The Mindful Day, and is designed to integrate mindfulness, positive psychology and practical meditations into our lives- with all of the joys and sorrows, praise and blame, togetherness and isolation, and love.

However, as different as things are, as housebound citizens washing our hands and keeping our distance, we are living our lives in a new normal, and navigating a new set of challenges and worries. Maybe you’ve suddenly found yourself homeschooling your children, feeling penned up, or struggling to find productivity in a new-to-you work from home situation. You might be dealing with feelings of anxiety, fear and overwhelm, which are only amplified by the constant stream of news alerts and closure updates.

Mindfulness helps us have more freedom with how we look at things.
With a shift in mindset, we can also hold this time as an opportunity – an opportunity to go on a retreat at home, to make space for ourselves, to take the time that we never usually take to learn and grow and develop new ways of being. Maybe even develop a meditation practice.

This daily course can help with all of this. In 15 minutes a day, you will have a short talk where we explore the challenges, situations and joys that we face as humans through the realms of home, work, love and play. With each day, you'll also have a guided meditation which will immerse you in that experience at the heart-body-mind level. As you return to the course, at your own pace, you will find it becoming easier to over the course to return to calm, to breath through anxiety, to uplift your mind and turn towards the good. What we practice grows stronger, after all.

Doing a short meditation a day with me for 50 days will make you a meditator by the time the shelter-at-home guidance lightens. More importantly, you'll have the capacity to feel grounded during uncertainty, to have a little more patience with yourself and others, to access peace when things feel unmoored, to find joy in the every day, and to be the calm center for others in the rocky boat.

In these times, we are all in search of ways to stay strong, centered, and connected. I hope that daily practice with me can be a reassuring source for all of those things.

Download 50 Days to a Mindful Life here on Insight Timer