Inside Mindful: An Introduction

Welcome to the first post of Inside Mindful, the new blog about what we’re up to here at the Mindful Foundation.

Welcome to the first post of Inside Mindful, the new blog about what we’re up to here at the Mindful Foundation. You might know about us from Mindful magazine and Mindful.org, our flagship publications. Equally important, though far less well known, the Mindful Foundation works quietly behind the scenes supporting the champions in the field and the work they’re doing to bring mindfulness into society. In this blog I’ll be bringing more of that work to light, but first I’d like to tell you about why I wanted to start it and where we might go.

Inside Mindful is an opportunity to peek inside the mindfulness field, and inside the Mindful Foundation.

No, it won’t be a first-hand “reality blog” account of the food fights around the office and everyone’s missed mindfulness sessions. (Well, maybe we’ll have the occasional expose, and certainly a lot of mini-rants about the dumb stuff going on in the mindfulness world. I mean, let’s get real.) This blog will explore how this grand mindfulness adventure is going, sometimes by sharing a glimpse into some of the conversations I have with field leaders while I’m on the road.

Also, I want you all to know more about what the Mindful Foundation is doing, what concerns we think our projects are addressing, and how the work we do delivers benefit to you and the many others working to bring mindfulness into your lives, families, workplaces, and society. I want you to see us, and through that help us see how we can better serve you.

A few basics:

Before we get into that juicier stuff, though, let’s get a few basics in place. I won’t repeat all of our Mindful Foundation values or our theory of change here —you can take a look at the slide deck for those. But it will be helpful to outline a few things we do:

  • The Mindful Foundation isn’t just a media operation; we use our media expertise as the means to activate social innovation.
  • Our fundamental work is promoting authentic mindfulness to foster enduring social change—in people, their relationships and in society.
  • The time is now! Mindfulness is entering the mainstream, it’s scalable, and it brings its own benefits as well as activating a slate of good health practices.
  • Our goal is to help create a world that fosters resilience, better health, more caring relationships, and a more compassionate and caring society

The Mindful Foundation does this by being an activator of projects that help enhance mindfulness in society at critical leverage points. We are the trusted, credible voice of the movement—gatekeeper and curator presenting high-integrity content.

What the future holds:

In five years, Mindful has reached millions of people with Mindful magazine and Mindful.org, and worked closely with field champions and leading organizations as a key activator of the mindfulness revolution. But there’s so much more to do.

Here are some of the projects we think are important:

  • The Mindful Cities Project
  • A Mindful TV series
  • First Responders Training Project
  • The Annual Mindfulness in America survey
  • Mindfulness in Translation (Spanish, Syrian, etc.)
  • And many more emerging projects…

I look forward to getting into the details of some of these projects over the next few months.

But right now, I’m sorry, I can’t talk. I have to get back to the weekly office food fight.

Jim

Questions or suggestions? Send them to [email protected]