How Mind Training Makes Better Lawyers
TAP INTO THE JOY OF DOING NOTHING
Congressman Tim Ryan Wants You to Meditate Find Out Why New Research on How We Learn from Our Mistakes
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Sex and Mindfulness…
Now We’ve Got Your Attention!
contents
Features 34 Up the Garden Path If the closest you get to nature is an image on your screen saver, science recommends getting a better dose of green. Here are three ways. By Carsten Knox Sidebar: Bob Howard digs in the dirt and finds connection p 39
42 Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Mindfulness Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio believes it’s time for Americans to find quiet—for their own well-being and for the good of the country By Christina Bellantoni Sidebar: An excerpt from Congressman Tim Ryan’s A Mindful Nation p 50
54 What’s Sex Got to Do With It? All that friction is nice, but what we and our partners really crave is connection, attention, a little wild abandon—and better use of our tongues By Jeremy Adam Smith Sidebar: Three ways to improve your sex life (hint: it starts with you) p 59
60 Goof Off Now…Really
42 “The strawberry is among the most versatile of berries—sweet or savory, rustic or refined, breakfast or dinner.”
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY (TOP) MARK MAHANEY, (BOTTOM) BÉATRICE PELTRE
Even leisure and relaxation can get tied up in seriousness, busyness, betterment. For Sallie Tisdale, the trick is to stop trying so hard
Departments 4 Your Thoughts
22 Mindful–Mindless
80 MindSpace
6 Contributors
Our take on who’s paying attention and who’s not
Maira Kalman continues her visual exploration of meditation practices
8 Our Thoughts
24 One Taste Better Berries Angela Mears savors the strawberry Recipes by Béatrice Peltre
11 Now How mind training makes better lawyers • Brainstorming gets a makeover • Young artists transform garbage into beautiful music • Make friends with money by tapping into your deeper values • How to build a regret-free life • Three apps that really give back • Research Roundup
28 Body/Mind Cycling Through Life Repeating a road trip you did 18 years ago is humbling, of course, but it proves the second time can be even better
30 Mind/Body
20 Bookmark This
To Love You Is to Know You Too much self-esteem is a drag, writes Sharon Begley, but the right dose of selfregard helps us learn from our mistakes
The writings, recordings, and apps that are capturing our attention now
11
reciation Being Generous
65 In Practice
PHOTOGRAPH BY TODD RAFALOVICH, ILLUSTRATION BY OLIMPIA ZAGNOLI
66 Techniques Walk This Way 67 At Work Stop, Listen, and Speak Up How to cope with a coworker who pilfers ideas and a promotion that feels more like punishment
Sticking To It
68 Ask Ms. Mindful A brother returns, a friend checks out, and a father-in-law learns to lay low
70 Insight
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Finding Your Way Meditation can take you far beyond stress reduction. Here are some of the qualities you’ll discover as you travel that road By Ed Halliwell
On our cover Read about how Congressman Tim Ryan is bringing mindfulness to Capitol Hill page 42 Photograph by Mark Mahaney
June 2013 mindful 3
contributors
Christina Bellantoni
Ed Halliwell
Jeremy Adam Smith
PBS NewsHour politics editor Christina Bellantoni gives us an insider’s look at Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan (D), author of A Mindful Nation. After spending time with Ryan and accompanying him on a visit to his home district—read the profile starting on p. 42—Bellantoni says the congressman’s authenticity and candor were refreshing. “It was clear right away that this guy believes what he’s saying. You don’t always get that in politics.”
Maps can be useful in meditation practice, says Ed Halliwell, who writes “Finding Your Way” (p. 70). “While mindfulness is a way of tuning into experience, that doesn’t mean there isn’t guidance,” he says. “These are what I find useful, but they’re not the only directions.” Halliwell is a mindfulness meditation teacher in the U.K., blogger for mindful.org, regular contributor to The Guardian’s website, and coauthor of The Mindful Manifesto.
Mindfulness is a better bedfellow than you might think. “Even people who are actively engaged in mindfulness practice, or are aware of the ideas, don’t often apply them when it comes to sexual intimacy,” says Jeremy Adam Smith about his feature, “What’s Sex Got to Do with It?” (p. 54). Smith is editor of the Greater Good Science Center website, author of The Daddy Shift, and coeditor of three anthologies, including The Compassionate Instinct.
Sallie Tisdale
Mark Mahaney
Julia Rothman
“I like doing things I don’t do well,” says Sallie Tisdale, naming miniature golf and softball as two favorites. “Being forced into incompetence is good for adults.” Tisdale wrote this issue’s essay about goofing off (p. 60), yet admits she doesn’t do it enough herself. “I let myself get pulled into too much, but I’m working at it.” Tisdale is the author of seven books, including Talk Dirty to Me. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Esquire.
Mark Mahaney photographed Tim Ryan for the cover and inside (p. 42). Mahaney, who has shot for Time, Dwell, and Fast Company, among others, prefers photographing people who have “left their print on the wall in some meaningful way.” His mindfulness practice informs his approach. “Quiet is the word that some people use to describe my work,” he says. “It’s the obvious goal with mindfulness, too—to be quiet and see what comes.”
“I try to have fun when I work and not take it too seriously,” says Julia Rothman, who illustrated the sex feature in this issue (p. 54). “I let things happen naturally and love when things come out a little ‘off.’ All those little irregular parts—when a foot looks too small or too big—make it more interesting.” Rothman has illustrated for The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others, and is the author of four books, including Farm Anatomy.
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Illustrations by Jessica McCarthy and Julia Rothman (self-portrait)
our thoughts
Barry Boyce Editor-in-Chief
Tracy Picha Editor
Jessica von Handorf Megumi Yoshida Art Director Associate Art Director
Take Five I’m Mindful’s editor. But I’m also exactly the kind of reader we’re trying to reach with this magazine. I eagerly joined the team here after a string of demanding positions in publishing and my second stint living overseas. Life was running at quite a pace. Along the way I always wondered if there was a better way of doing things. I wanted to believe that life didn’t have to be shot through with relentless speed and stress, with me at high risk of missing all the good parts—and really, isn’t missing any part of our lives something to be avoided? What I found through my own explorations was that anytime I could get myself into the moment—really focused on whatever was right in front of me: work, play, loved ones—the better life got. Then came an opening at Mindful, a bimonthly magazine (we’re still very new; you’re reading our second issue) that is dedicated to exploring just that approach to all aspects of our lives: how to be present with whatever is arising in the moment. And the good news is—for me, anyway, and I think the rest of our staff agrees—we don’t just write about this stuff at Mindful. We try to live it.
How? Well, for one, our team meditates together before our weekly production meetings. I’m not going to lie— I found this strange at first. Do we really have time for this? I wondered. We have a press deadline to meet. But then I started noticing how different the meetings went when we did meditate, compared to when we didn’t. After even a few minutes of silence everyone seems so much calmer, so much more there. I know I am. Now I find that after some silence, the grocery list of things I need to cover during those meetings slips into the background and the people come to the forefront. The great thing is, I still get around to covering everything that’s pressing, but in the process we really connect as a team. This is just one snapshot of how mindfulness—even five minutes of it—can alter things. It’s an example from my work environment, but I’m finding it applies well beyond Mindful’s office walls. That doesn’t mean I sit quietly with other groups of people in my life, but I’m carving that time out for myself a lot more often. And so far I’m really liking the results. —Tracy Picha tracy@mindful.org
Carsten Knox Associate Editor
Line Goguen-Hughes Assistant Editor
Stephany Tlalka Assistant Editor, Digital
Jane Doucet Copy Editor
James Gimian Alan Brush Publisher Associate Publisher, Circulation Beth Wallace Associate Publisher, Andrew Karr Marketing & Partnerships Finance Director Melvin McLeod Editorial Director
Board of Advisors Susan Bauer-Wu, Ph.D., R.N., University of Virginia Jeffrey Brantley, M.D., Duke Integrative Medicine Mirabai Bush, Center for Contemplative Mind in Society Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison Rich Fernandez, Ph.D., Google, Inc. Soren Gordhamer, Wisdom 2.0 Patricia Jennings, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society Tim Ryan, United States Congress, Ohio, 13th District Diana Winston, Mindful Awareness Research Center, UCLA Organizations included for identification purposes only.
Advertising inquiries Jamie Proctor Boyce Toll free: 1-855-420-9085, ext 43 jamie@mindful.org Customer Service Subscriptions: Toll free: 1-855-492-1675 subscriptions@mindful.org Retail inquiries: 732-946-0112 Moving? Notify us six weeks in advance. We cannot be responsible for issues the post office does not forward. On occasion, we make our subscriber names and addresses available to select organizations we feel will be of interest to our readers. If you would prefer that your name and mailing address not be used in this way, contact us at our addresses listed right.
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June 2013 mindful 8
now
now
“The goal is to help lawyers develop the capacity to put themselves in the shoes of another, to listen more thoroughly, with as little judgment as they can manage.”
Contents News 12 Research Roundup 19 Bookmark This 20 Mindful–Mindless 22
5 mindful 11 mindful June June2013 2013
Photograph by Christine Alicino
PHOTOGRAPH BY TK, ILLUSTRATION BY TK
Rhonda Magee, University of San Francisco
ANGRY ABOUT SOMETHING? Ride it like an undulating wave. Don’t push it down. Don’t act it out. See what happens. Find more on Twitter @mindinterrupter
now
The Mindful Lawyer
Rhonda Magee, law professor at the University of San Francisco and codirector of USF law school’s Center for Teaching Excellence.
Mindfulness Goes Global Some of the world’s most powerful people attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. And for the first time, this year’s gathering of political leaders, change agents, billionaires, and thinkers included a workshop on mindful leadership. It was taught by Janice Marturano of the Institute for Mindful Leadership in New Jersey and Mark Williams of the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford University. Organizers had to turn people away when the room reached its capacity of about 70. Early morning meditation sessions at the conference attracted close to 40 people.
You need a lawyer. You’re in a painful confrontation, maybe over a wrong you feel was done to you, and you’re preparing to battle for justice. But according to Rhonda Magee, law professor at the University of San Francisco, you ought to find a lawyer who knows more than just how to win. A contemplative lawyer, perhaps. “That’s a lawyer with the capacity to support clients in developing their own selfawareness—recognizing that whatever is coming up in the moment is not necessarily the whole story,” says Magee. “There is more truth around any given issue than is manifest in our own experiences in the moment.” Magee, 45, is codirector of USF law school’s Center for Teaching Excellence. With support from The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, and with Judi Cohen, of Golden Gate University, and Charlie Halpern of the University of California‑Berkeley, she has been working for more than a decade to bring mindfulness into law practice and legal education. It was with Cohen and USF colleague Tim Iglesias that Magee developed a course for third-year law students called Contemplative Lawyering. “The goal is to help lawyers and clients develop the capacity to put themselves in the shoes of another,” says Magee, “to listen more thoroughly to other people with as little judgment as they can manage.” Magee’s own path to the legal profession, and to mindfulness, has its roots in her childhood, growing up African American in North Carolina and Virginia in the 1970s and 1980s. “So much of my early years were shaped by the larger dynamics that are told in the
story of Brown v. Board of Education, and in the stories of the battles over integration and desegregation in the South and elsewhere.” Magee’s grandmother played a large part, too. “I grew up spending time with her while my mother worked in a shirt factory,” she remembers. “I would wake up in the morning and my grandmother was already up, before dawn, spending an hour or so in prayer and reflection. She grounded herself in a sense of her own dignity, her own inner life. “It showed me that you could overcome even the most oppressive circumstances by working with and through those oppressions, not ignoring them but making the most of what opportunities were there. And doing so with love for one another.” Magee was fascinated by how we construct social relationships and studied sociology before transferring to law. “I love law because it is the language and process by which we try to make real these inspiring and awesome democratic ideals—of equality, of one person, one voice,” she says. “And at the heart of all that are our commitments to human dignity, which is what animates the notion of human rights. “I have a desire to do work in the world that supports all of us in being our highest and our best. No matter where we’re from, what color we are, what background, whether we’re born in circumstances of wealth and privilege or the opposite, we are all in this together.” ●
OVERHEARD
“People are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they’re not. How often do people’s minds wander? Turns out, a lot: 47% of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they are currently doing.” Matt Killingsworth, from his TED talk, “Want to be happier? Stay in the moment”
Read the rest of this article in Mindful’s June 2013 issue. For more on Davos, Subscribe at mindful.org go to mindful.org/davos Photograph by Todd Rafalovich
June 2013 mindful 12
24 mindful June 2013
Recipes and photographs by BĂŠatrice Peltre. Find more of her work at latartinegourmande.com
one taste
Better Berries By Angela Mears We’re taking a drive in early November in Sonoma Valley and decide to make a stop. I haven’t been feeling well all day, and my body is in need of something clean and real. We pull up to a roadside produce stand and, from a table laden with persimmons, peppers, and tomatoes, I select a basket brimming with small autumn-harvest strawberries. They are plump, red, bruised, and utterly beautiful—the salve I’m seeking. Tart but sugary, firm but yielding, fleshy but pure, they renew me. Though I’d eaten thousands of strawberries in my life, this was the first time I’d truly tasted one. What I wouldn’t give for a basket of those strawberries now. These days I am far more likely to confront strawberries in a plastic shell—a big unbruised variant that’s every bit as beautiful as those Sonoma berries but merely a shadow of the real thing when it comes to essence, vitality, and flavor.
So it goes with all our keenest pleasures. Were they always available, we wouldn’t cherish them as we do. At least that’s what I tell myself when I think about strawberries on, say, a chill January morning near the shores of a frozen Midwestern lake. But with spring the strawberries ripen, the farmers’ markets gear up after their winter lull, and it’s time for the real thing. To maximize your pleasure during this glorious ephemeral spring, there are a couple things I recommend. Hundreds of varieties of strawberries are cultivated across the continent, with vast differences in size, appearance, taste, and texture. But generally you will find that the smaller the berry, the bigger the flavor. Giant gorgeous strawberries tend to be bloated with water and little else. Once picked, you may expect to keep sun-ripened strawberries in good condition for only a day or two. So don’t delay in either preserving or savoring them. I find that peak-season berries are best
eaten plain—perhaps with a touch of lightly sugared, freshly whipped vanilla cream. Then again, if you’re lucky enough to live in a region where the growing season is long, or have found yourself with a glut of berries, there is exquisite work to be done with them. Aside from being among the most widely cultivated berries, the strawberry is also among the most versatile—sweet or savory, rustic or refined, breakfast or dinner. So this spring, make ice cream. Make jam. Make cake. Make clafoutis. Hull them and halve them and serve them in a salad with bracing vinegar, salty cheese, and velvety spinach. Even though you’ve encountered them countless times before, taste strawberries for perhaps the first time. I’ve found that, if you’re lucky, you may do this more than once—for there is almost too much to take in at first bite. ● Angela Mears writes about food at thespinningplate.com
Strawberry and Cherry Tomato Salad with Spinach and Feta Cheese Serves 4 people Sea salt and pepper 2 tsp balsamic vinegar (dark or white) 4 tbsp olive oil 4 cups spinach leaves, washed 2 cups small strawberries, hulled and halved 2 cups small cherry tomatoes, halved 4½ ounces feta cheese, crumbled 10 basil leaves, finely sliced 1 tsp marjoram, finely chopped (optional)
In a small bowl, add the sea salt and pepper to the balsamic vinegar. Whisk in the oil and emulsify. Set aside. In a large bowl, combine the spinach with the strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and feta cheese. Toss gently with the dressing. Finish with the basil leaves and marjoram, if using. Divide the salad between four plates and serve immediately.
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slug
body/mind
Read the rest of this article in Mindful’s June 2013 issue. Subscribe at mindful.org
Name: Bruce Weber Age: 58 Activity: long-distance bicycling Location: New York, New York
mind/body
To Love You Is to Know You Too much self-esteem is a drag, writes Sharon Begley, but the right dose of self-regard makes us better at learning from our mistakes.
Sharon Begley is the senior health and science correspondent at Reuters, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, and coauthor with Richard Davidson of The Emotional Life of Your Brain.
Illustration by Malin Rosenqvist
It was the 1980s that made self-esteem more like a punch line than a desirable quality. That decade brought us the much-ridiculed California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem (only California would create an official program for making people feel better about themselves), the National Association for Self-Esteem, and enthusiastic efforts to raise people’s self-esteem, not by making them smarter, more talented, kinder, or otherwise better but just by telling them how wonderful they are. It was the era of sports trophies for every kid who simply showed up. Alas, as research subsequently showed, such artificially inflated selfesteem does not boost academic performance, occupational success, or leader-
ship ability, let alone improve personal relationships. The best account of these findings is a May 2003 paper in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. I was prompted to take this trip down memory lane when I began noticing a recent profusion of studies on “selfaffirmation.” This is a little different from self-esteem. Self-affirmation is the process of reminding yourself of the values and interests “that constitute your true or core self,” Lisa Legault, assistant professor of psychology at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., told me. “It’s taking stock of who you are and what you care about. You can think of it as mindfulness of the self”—without the “I’m wonderful” component of self-esteem. What piqued my interest were
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34 mindful June 2013
nature
Up the Garden Path If the closest you get to nature is an image on your screen saver, science recommends getting a better dose of green. Here are three ways. By Carsten Knox Photographs by Alexi Hobbs
Can you see a tree from where you’re sitting right now? How about a plant? Anything living, besides other people? Can you open the window and take a big breath of fresh air? If your answer to these questions is no, if you’re one of those people who spends all day breathing the lifeless output of a building-ventilation system, then you may be encountering nature deficit. And it’s making your life less enjoyable, less healthy, and more stressed. We are in the midst of the largest wave of urbanization in human history. The United Nations reports that more than half of all people on Earth now live
in cities. For Americans, the figure is even starker: 80% are urban dwellers. And get this: the Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average American spends 90% of his or her time indoors. “It’s the first time in human history that we are virtually divorcing ourselves from the natural world,” warns Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of NatureDeficit Disorder. “We can’t expect to make such a sudden, drastic turn in our everyday lives without repercussions.” It was Edward O. Wilson, known as the father of sociobiology, who pioneered →
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leadership
LIFE, LIBERTY & THE PURSUIT of
Mindfulness Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio believes it’s time for Americans to find quiet—for their own well-being and for the good of the country. By Christina Bellantoni Photographs by Mark Mahaney 42 mindful June 2013
leadership
It’s 95 degrees, I have sweat in my eyes, and I’m squinting at four women in brightly colored Spandex tops and cropped pants. That’s when I spot the guy who suggested I try this yoga class. The congressman has flipped his dog. He’s turned his downward dog almost inside out—back bent, belly up. The moment offers one answer to the central question of this story: How does Representative Tim Ryan truly live his mindfulness practice? As I stick with downward dog, he looks like he could hang out upside down all day, and the more I get to know him, it’s clear his steadiness is not limited to the yoga mat. Ryan, 39, is not one of those bomb-throwing members of Congress, the type who generates sensational headlines on Hardball. No, he’s not that Ryan, the one who was on the Republican presidential ticket. He’s the Democrat. The one who has quietly continued winning races in his Ohio district. The one with “that mindfulness thing,” as one of his fellow members put it. Ryan’s book, A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit, reads a bit like what presidential candidates publish two years before they start to show up at the Iowa State Fair, full of broad statements like this one from the close: “It’s helping us all recapture the spirit of what it means to be an American. Join us.” But it’s also pretty simple—taking a mindfulness approach to your life can make it better. And it can make America better. Children can be smarter and better prepared for the world. Soldiers and firefighters can become more resilient. The book hasn’t generated the same buzz as the typical Washington political tell-all, but it’s done what Ryan wanted: it’s garnered him dozens of appearances across the country to talk about mindfulness; it’s inspired
Ryan says mindfulness practice gives him a feeling of calm that allows him to manage his day, especially necessary in an increasingly bitter Washington. 44 mindful June 2013
teachers, doctors, nurses, and veterans to contact him about how they’re applying mindfulness practice in their lives; and the policy ideas in the book may well be catching on in the halls of the Capitol. And that’s what Ryan is counting on this year, as he steps up his efforts to translate mindfulness into legislation. During the time I spent with Ryan, in his home state of Ohio and in Washington, I witnessed a politician who—unlike many others I’ve interviewed— hasn’t adopted a cause because it does well with focus groups. He’s adopted it because he believes it will help our country. And from what I’ve seen, this guy isn’t faking it. Our journey began on a drizzly Friday, as I drove with Ryan 319 miles from his Capitol Hill office to Niles, Ohio. He sat in the front seat in shorts and flip-flops with his shirt sleeves rolled up; looking like he could have been on his way to a football game, not coming from a congressional office. His aide, Merv Jones, son of the late Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio, was behind the wheel of the SUV. Ryan describes his almost-daily meditation practice as “classical”: he sits on a cushion and follows his breath, usually giving himself 40 to 45 minutes before a church-bell timer sounds on his phone. He meditates at home in front of the fireplace or in the House gym. He says mindfulness practice gives him a feeling of calm that allows him to manage his day, especially necessary in an increasingly bitter Washington. “If something arouses some anger, I try to see it, and then let it go. As the days get hectic, I make myself stop, take a breath, and pay attention to that breath,” Ryan says. Among the practices Ryan highlights in his book are waiting in the morning until you’re fully out of bed and stirring before looking at your email, instead of reading it the moment you wake. And no television before bed: “I sleep better.” Back to that question if he’s for real. I decide to tally how often he looks at his device. 1:10 p.m. is the first glance, and he pops off a quick text message. He turns his eyes to the screen about once an hour, and at more frequent intervals as we get closer to home, perhaps because we’re arranging to meet his family at a festival. In all, Ryan looked at his iPhone only 13 times during our more than 7 hours together. Meanwhile, I was going through BlackBerry withdrawal, and Merv didn’t look like he was doing much better. As we pulled into Youngstown, Ohio, Ryan sat in the front seat of the SUV, animated. He pointed out new developments along the main drag, boasting about the city’s 80% commercial-occupancy rate. There’s his great uncle’s house, the golf club where he used to caddy, parts of his district added through redistricting, and the Youngstown State University
A Mindful Nation hasn’t generated the same buzz as the typical Washington political tell-all, but it’s done what Ryan wanted: it’s inspired teachers, doctors, nurses, and veterans to contact him about how they’re applying mindfulness practice in their lives.
stadium where he played one football game “before I cashed it in.” As a teenager Ryan dreamed of being a pro quarterback, but a blown knee forced him to, as he puts it, “reconstruct my life.” He’d already been exposed to politics, working in then Representative James Traficant’s district office and in his office on the Hill. He got a law degree but never practiced, and he was, as he describes it now, “just floating around thinking about what I ought to be doing.” Ryan considered coaching but kept coming back to politics and a desire to offer leadership. He ran for the state senate at age 26, and when Traficant landed in jail, he ran for his old boss’s seat in Congress. His surprise victory in the primary made him the youngest Democrat in Congress the following year. Pat Lowry, Ryan’s district press secretary and longtime friend, isn’t surprised at how his political career has played out. Lowry tells me that in 1991 Ryan was named player of the year, and the next day “the coaches in the paper didn’t talk about his abilities, they talked about his leadership.” Now, he’s a hometown hero. We drove up bucolic Fifth Avenue, then off to his neighborhood in Niles. His house is just down the way from his mom’s. A little farther is the home where his grandparents took care of him. Family is everything.
His father left his mother when Ryan was eight, and the family became even more close-knit. As a boy, Ryan found their Catholic church to be a calming place. He smiles when he talks about his grandparents’ peaceful home where he could always find them saying the rosary. They were early role models for mindfulness. “I always think about my grandparents. They worked hard, but it wasn’t everything,” he says. “They spent time in the garden, they celebrated birthdays, they went out dancing to big bands, they hosted parties and dinners.” We stopped at the church’s souped-up Italian festival, which seemed more like a county fair. We walked only a few feet before someone called out for “Timmy.” Everywhere we go he has roots. He ushered me into the beer tent his grandfather used to run. I didn’t get to meet his mom; her shift at the dried-baloney stand wasn’t until the following day. We all ordered the Italian sausage Ryan says is the festival tradition. Eating like this matters politically—northeastern Ohio’s Italian and Portuguese roots are a distinctive part of the local culture. Ryan taps into that easily; his family embodies his district’s working-class demographic. As I ate one of those giant sausages, Ryan’s sisterin-law was gabbing about how he’d gotten them all into yoga. A discussion among his friends and →
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in practice
insight
Finding Your Way Inquisitiveness
Acceptance
Body Awareness
Tenderness 70 mindful June 2013
Appreciation
Being Generous
Sticking To It If you take up the practice of meditation, the journey will go far beyond stress reduction, writes Ed Halliwell. Here are some of the qualities you’ll discover and explore as youJune travel. Read the rest of this article in Mindful’s 2013 issue.
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Illustrations by Olimpia Zagnoli
June 2013 mindful 71
It’s who you are You want the best for your family and friends. You enjoy work that is meaningful and satisfying. You’re dedicated to a more caring and sustainable society. You know the simple practice of being in the moment brings out the best in who you are.
P r Is e m s u ie e r
You are mindful. And this is your magazine.
IS MINDFULNESS GOOD FOR BUSINESS?
How a Mother Stopped Teens From Hurting Themselves
Doctor Not Listening? 5 ways to change that
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