The Mindful Twenty Something

“A 21st century book, grounded in ancient ways of practice.” —Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness In The Mindful Twenty-Something, the cofounder of the extremely popular Koru Mindfulness program developed at Duke University presents a unique, evidence-based approach to help you make important life decisions with clarity and confidence. As a twenty-something, you may feel like you are being pulled in dozen different directions. With the daily tumult, busyness, and major life changes you experience as a young adult, you may also be particularly vulnerable to stress and its negative effects. Emerging adulthood, which occurs between the ages of 18 and 29, is a developmental stage of life when you’re faced with important decisions about school, relationships, sex, your career, and more. With so much going on, you need a guide to help you navigate with less stress and more ease. The Koru Mindfulness program, developed at Duke University and already in use on numerous college campuses—including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth, and several others—and in treatment centers across the country, is the only evidence-based mindfulness training program for young adults that has been empirically proven to have significant benefits for sleep, perceived stress, and self-compassion. Now, with The Mindful Twenty-Something, this popular program is accessible to all young adults struggling with stress. With Koru Mindfulness and the practical tools you’ll learn from this acceptance-based, proven-effective approach, you’ll be able to cultivate the compassion and mindfulness skills you need to manage life’s challenges from a calm, balanced center, regardless of what comes your way.

Originally published: Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House, 2012.

Buddhist teachings and meditation offer a roadmap to help college students and others in early adulthood incorporate mindfulness into their lives as a means of facing the myriad struggles unique to this stage of life. Early adulthood is filled with intense emotions and insecurity. What if you never fall in love? What if you can't find work you’re passionate about? You miss home. You miss close friends. You’re lost in the noise of how you think you should be living and worried about wasting what everyone says should be the best years of your life. What Now? shares mindfulness practices to help twentysomethings learn to identify and accept these feelings and respond—not react—to painful and powerful stimuli without pushing them away or getting lost in them. This is not about fixing oneself or being "better." Readers are encouraged to embrace themselves exactly as they are. You are already completely whole, completely loveable, completely worthy. What Now? shares practices that help us to wake up to this fact. This uniquely tumultuous developmental period is a time when many first live away from home and engage in all kinds of experimentation—with ideas, substances, relationships, and who we think we are and want to be in the world. Yael Shy shares her own story and offers basic meditation guides to beginning a practice. She explores the Buddhist framework for what causes suffering and explores ideas about interconnection and social justice as natural outgrowths of meditation practice.

Discover how to shed old thinking patterns—and live more joyfully with food. Are you ready to get to the roots of your challenges around food—whether it's gratuitous snacking, compulsive or emotional eating, indulging cravings, overeating, or other disheartening habits? Be ready to get mindful. Mindfulness can be the deciding factor between your successful adoption of a healthy vegan diet and repeated frustrating attempts. This simple technique goes under the surface of what is hampering your happiness, providing a sought-after solution to many of life's ups and downs by rewiring your reactivity to challenges. Certified mindfulness meditation facilitator, award winning health educator, and longtime vegan advocate Lani Muelrath has been practicing mindfulness meditation for 25 years. In The Mindful Vegan, she teaches you how to practice mindfulness and shows how it can bring freedom and a new joy to your eating—and living—experience. Backed by extensive research, with step-by-step instructions, personal stories, positivity, humor, and a handful of delicious recipes, The Mindful Vegan will help you emancipate yourself from the stranglehold that mindless and compulsive eating have on your weight, health, food choices, and, most of all, peace of mind. With Lani's guidance, you'll learn the techniques of mindfulness meditation, opening the door to creating a more resilient vegan lifestyle. You'll discover why eating in a way that lines up with your convictions about health, the environment, and ethics reduces stress and increases happiness. The Mindful Vegan sets you on a path to cultivating your capacity for genuine happiness and a more peaceful life--in a way that is personally satisfying and aligned with your deepest values. This book is for anyone who wants to be free of frustrating and baffling eating behaviors, experience a new ease around eating, and discover their naturally healthy body and weight. Stop stressing. Start living—and eating—mindfully. Your body and mind will thank you.

College students and other young adults today experience high levels of stress as they pursue personal, educational, and career goals. These struggles can have serious consequences, and may increase the risk of psychological distress and mental illness among the age group now commonly referred to as "emerging adults." Scientific research has shown that practicing mindfulness can help manage stress and enhance quality of life, but traditional methods of teaching mindfulness and meditation may not be effective for college-age adults. This fully updated second edition of Mindfulness for the Next Generation describes an evidence-based approach for teaching the useful and important skill of mindfulness to emerging adults. The manualized, four-session program outlined here, Koru Mindfulness, is designed to help young adults navigate challenging tasks, and achieve meaningful personal growth. Rogers and Maytan, psychiatrists and developers of Koru Mindfulness, also discuss the unique stressors emerging adults face, identify effective teaching techniques for working with them, and review the now-robust research supporting mindfulness for stress reduction in a scientifically rigorous yet reader-friendly way. Among the features new to this edition are new data on the effectiveness of the curriculum, an introduction to the Koru mindfulness teacher certification program, and adaptations for culturally informed practice, reflecting the international appeal of Koru Mindfulness as well as its growing use outside of college settings, and extensively revised in-session scripts. Mindfulness for the Next Generation is written for therapists, teachers, health professionals, and student service providers.

Stress is a modern-day epidemic, and with the tumult of busy schedules and major life changes that young adults experience, they're particularly vulnerable to its negative effects. In The Mindful Twenty-Something, the founder of the extremely popular Koru Mindfulness program developed at Duke University presents a unique, evidence-based approach to help twenty-somethings reduce stress and make important life decisions with respect to school, relationships, sex, career, and more-with clarity and confidence.

Full of simple mindfulness and meditation exercises for kids, this guide is “a wonderful reminder that every young person is capable of great understanding, compassion, and joy” (Thich Nhat Hanh) The interest in teaching children meditation is growing rapidly, as a number of recent stories in the mainstream media have documented, including NPR, The New York Times, and London Telegraph. Child's Mind aims to teach parents and child professionals how to integrate mindfulness into their work with children, and teach children and adolescents basics of mindfulness and meditation. Willard’s intention is to help parents pass on to their children the practices of mindfulness that they have found valuable for themselves. The book can also be a resource for those who work with children, whether it is family and children coordinators at retreat centers, religious instructors from a range of traditions, or teachers, therapists, and even medical professionals. Child's Mind aims to teach children the power that comes with the comfort of just being, and the capacity to be, be aware, and be comfortable with yourself.