The Newspaper That Tells Tales of Homelessness, How to Help the Poor Build Credit and More

 

On the Streets with a Newspaper Vendor Trying to Sell His Story, CityLab

It can be uncomfortable shelling out change to a beggar living on the street, but would you be willing to pay $2 for a newspaper about homelessness and poverty? Robert Williams, a Marine Corps veteran who writes for Street Sense, a biweekly broadsheet in Washington, D.C., hopes so. For every copy he sells, he keeps 75 percent, his only source of income.

Banking on Justice, YES! Magazine

In the impoverished Mississippi Delta region, most locals can’t borrow from large banks such as Citibank, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase because small loans don’t make enough interest to be worthwhile. Instead, residents are increasingly turning to Community Development Financial Institutions, known as CDFIs, which receive federal assistance in exchange for making capital available in low-income areas.

When Teachers Take A Breath, Students Can Bloom, NPR

Educators have it rough. If keeping up with children’s energy levels for six hours isn’t enough, they also need to help students cope with difficulties outside the classroom and meet the rigors of state testing and federal standards. That can lead to a lot of stress, which is why CARE for Teachers trains educators in meditation techniques proven to reduce anxiety and burnout.

MORE: Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation

Why It’s Important for Children to Learn Mindfulness at a Young Age

Mindfulness, a secular form of meditation based on old Buddhist practices, is gaining popularity in more and more workplaces, but it still isn’t broadly available in most communities. In New Canaan, Conn., residents Nick and Michelle Seaver, Will Heins, and Erika Long banded together to offer group sessions in public institutions like libraries and wellness centers that help locals train their awareness on their physical existence in the present moment.

NationSwell spoke with Long, a former managing director at J.P. Morgan Chase and founder of the Carpere Group, about how she found meaning in mindfulness after quitting her career in finance.

How did you first become interested in mindfulness?
I was on a business trip to Tokyo and couldn’t fall asleep. In the nightstand next to the bed were the teachings of Buddha. I started reading it and thought the lessons were really interesting. Then I began investigating more about Buddhism and learning that meditation was really a core practice for that spiritual tradition. The more I read, the more it resonated with me. I was leading a very, very busy life in investment banking at the time, and soon after, I had two kids. I spent so much time in my head, trying to figure out investments, that mindfulness really helped me to integrate the mind and the body — to check in and make sure I wasn’t missing stuff that was going on outside my head. And I found that meditation allowed a lot of the clutter in my mind to settle, so that when decisions needed to be made, the path forward became more evident.

What advice do you have for someone who’s just starting to dabble in meditation?
We’re not a culture that supports sitting down without distraction. For some reason, you can justify doing a ton of other things, even if it’s just the crossword puzzle on the train on the way in or looking at Facebook. Some people have to overcome that as a hurdle.

Other people find that their mind won’t stop, and they get frustrated. We say that it’s very difficult to enter meditation or mindfulness thinking with the goal to keep thoughts out, to keep the mind quiet. It’s much easier to engage in the practice if you think when thoughts arise — because they will — choosing not to engage in them, not to get carried away with them, letting them arise and carry on their way.

What do you hope to accomplish through the Community Mindfulness Project (CMP)?
Originally four [founders] lived in the same town, and we all felt tremendous benefit from our own personal meditation practices over the years. But we had a hard time finding a community that we could sit with. There’s a real power to sitting in a group in addition to one’s own personal daily practice: you learn from each other, get support and feel a tremendous energy that arises when you sit in stillness with others. We started with one hour on a Monday night, and it grew and grew. We had the class coming in from lots of different places, asking “Could you do it here? Could you work with the kids in this school? With the teachers in this program?”

The more we looked around, we realized that there weren’t other secular, regular meditation or mindfulness sessions that were free and open to the public on an ongoing basis in community hubs. We offer regular weekly sessions in libraries and wellness centers in New Canaan and Stamford, Conn. We’re expanding out, particularly targeting communities with high numbers of stressors: food, housing and job insecurity, as well as people with other special needs like patients going through chemotherapy (as we’re currently doing at New York-Presbyterian Hospital).

Mindfulness is showing up in more places. What uses are you most excited about right now?
Maybe just because I’m a mom of a couple of teenagers, I feel that very little children are very much in the present moment, and as they get older, all of the adults in their lives and the media influences that they see begin to yank them out of the present moment. They’re sitting down every day with this notion that everything they’re doing in that moment is for the future somehow. It makes it really hard for them just to sit in the present. That’s right about the same time they need to be really connected with their bodies, and they need to be building habits and patterns for self-care. I love the extent to which people are thinking how we show kids these practices so that they can bring them into their lives, during those middle and high school years.

What’s on your nightstand?
I’m reading “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War,” by Lynsey Addario. She was a photographer for The New York Times, and that feeds my love of trying to push myself outside my comfort zone by reading about other people’s lives. And I’ve just been given, by someone in our community, “Buddha’s Brain,” by Rick Hanson, which really is the boiled-down neuroscience behind mindfulness. Then there’s a beautiful book called “Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With,” by Gaylon Ferguson.

What’s your perfect day?
I have to say the perfect day would involve no technology whatsoever. It would involve time with my kids. I’m at that point where I’m very aware they’re going to be heading off on their own soon, so I’m cherishing every moment that I have with them right now. And it would involve being outside. There’s something about the outdoors that really grounds us in the present moment and gives us the sense of connection as part of something better. And there’s some kind of food involved. If we have those elements, it doesn’t really matter what we’re doing.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I worked with amazing people in investment banking. I could not believe how lucky I was to be able to do what I did. I felt like every day the world was my university. I learned so much. But I’m really proud of the fact that I got off that treadmill, even though there were financial ramifications. It wasn’t tapping into a deep need to do something that was more meaningful. I’m proud that I was able to sacrifice the identity that comes with having that job.

One of the CMP cofounders, Michelle Seaver, is from Canada, and she said one of the things she noticed most when she moved to the Northeast is that when people ask, “What do you do?” in Vancouver, the answer is “I waterski. I play tennis.” In the Northeast, it’s all about your job. After having a career for so long, when you go out into public and somebody asks, “What do you do?” you’re no longer able to say, “I manage money, I’m in finance.” There’s that open-ended “I am.” That can be really unsettling, and you have to dig deep inside and figure out where you pull your own identity from. Can you have the courage just to let that be? It’s a beautiful process to go through, and you don’t go through it when you’re on the treadmill of your career. I’m proud of that because my kids watched me do it. Hopefully, that will give them the freedom in their life to pursue what they’re passionate about.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: 37 Easy Strategies for Living in the Moment All Day Long

37 Easy Strategies for Living in the Moment All Day Long

Once found exclusively at New Age gatherings and hippie-dense ashrams, mindfulness is becoming an essential part of American corporate culture. So, just what is mindfulness, and why is it taking office towers by storm?
Forms of meditation have been practiced in Eastern religions for millennia, but their lessons didn’t find a secular home in America until Jon Kabat-Zinn, now an emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, created a formal, eight-week stress-reduction program in 1979. Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness practice — essentially, training oneself to deliberately and non-judgmentally pay attention to now — was soon found to sharpen concentration, improve recall and other cognitive skills, foster ethical decision-making and reduce anxiety.
Just as one bicep curl doesn’t suddenly make a person buff, mindfulness requires continual practice. To fit the techniques into already crammed schedules, NationSwell conferred with experts for tips on integrating mindfulness throughout the day. No Tibetan singing bowls, yoga mats or hour-long meditation sessions are required to follow along: only 15 minutes scattered here and there over a 24 hour time period. As your personal guru, we’re not promising enlightenment, but these tactics — if practiced daily — will reconnect you with the experience of living in the present, despite all the distractions around you.

7:00 a.m.

After the morning alarm goes off, take a moment before you rush headfirst into the day for a mindfulness exercise. Before you check the inbox and calendar on your phone, focus on your breath as it moves in and out of the body for three to five minutes. (You can set a timer on your phone to keep track of time.)

8:30 a.m.

Integrating mindfulness into the workday doesn’t mean you can’t tune out occasionally and let your mind wander into fantasies, possibilities or recollections, as long as those reveries don’t happen when you’re meditating. Mindfulness teaches “to try to notice the natural tendencies of the human mind,” so that we’re aware of how our mind instinctively reacts, says Brenda Fingold, manager of community and corporate program development at UMass Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness who adopted the practice as she received treatment for colon cancer at age 40. Fingold approaches her own thought process “with compassion and humor,” and she encourages others to daydream in the shower or while commuting via train.

8:55 a.m.

As you arrive at your office desk, do two things. First, set two calendar reminders spaced out during the day to remind you when to practice mindfulness, and second, take a breath before you boot up your computer. “As much as I immediately want to start working, I just sit for one minute and breathe,” Fingold suggests. Examine what it feels like to sit in your chair, or for those new to the exercises, notice what’s going on around your desk — the sights and noises in your environment. Doing so insures “the whole body comes to work, not just a busy head,” Fingold explains.

9:30 a.m.

When you’re stuck in a meeting, the temptation to be mindless is high. Instead of giving your full attention to whomever is speaking, you’re mentally questioning if the speaker approves of your work, for example, or wondering when you can get back to your emails. Be present to listen and communicate your points. If you can, close your laptop and put your phone on airplane mode so the vibrations of texts and emails don’t distract you.

10:00 a.m.

Back at your desk, dive into one task at a time. Complete projects, rather than dividing your attention among email, phone, social media and other distractions.

11:00 a.m.

Your first reminder pops up on your phone. During this meditation of at least one minute, re-focus on that grounding anchor: your breath. Close your eyes, and feel your chest rise and fall. One of the biggest pitfalls early on is that people think their mind needs to be entirely clear during this short exercise. That’s not the case; it’s perfectly normal for thoughts to come and go. “Mindfulness is not to make your thoughts go away. This is not a sophisticated, non-medical form of lobotomy,” says Michael Baime, founder and director of the Penn Program for Mindfulness at the Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia. During this exercise, if any thoughts arise, follow them to their conclusion, then circle back to your breathing — a way of training the brain’s concentration. “You’re not judging them and not getting tangled up in them. They don’t distract you in the same way,” Baime explains. This helps you “to learn how to hold attention in a balanced and open way,” creating the neural changes in your brain.

12:30 p.m.

In some Buddhist monasteries, chopping vegetables is considered a form of meditation if it’s done with extreme care. During the lunch hour, practice mindfulness over your meal. Savor the textures and flavors of the food, and think about the process it underwent to arrive on your plate.

1:15 p.m.

During an afternoon meeting, you discover your coworker constructed a Powerpoint presentation in a completely different way from how one is normally made. You can feel your stomach clench with nervousness that you don’t have time to fix it before tomorrow’s meeting. You notice your heart beat increasing as you get angry, realizing that you might lose a deal that you’ve worked so hard to land. In this moment, drop attention to your feet, recommends Christy Cassisa, director of University of California, San Diego Center for Mindfulness’s WorkLife Integration program. “It takes focus away from this reaction that’s happening and grounds you. It calms the nervous system and allows you to reengage the executive control centers of the brain.”

1:30 p.m.

To inform your boss about the presentation’s problems, you write an email. Before you hit send, take a breath and distance yourself from your immediate emotional reaction. The experts recommend finding one touchpoint that’s common throughout your day — every time you’re about to click send in your inbox, every time you’re about to pick up the phone, every time you touch a door handle when you’re about to walk into a meeting — as a reminder to breathe. Collecting yourself with a breath will give you the wherewithal to communicate intentionally, rather than reacting instinctually.

2:45 p.m.

You’re feeling scattered and keep replaying something your colleague told you in your head. Talk a walk — and do so in a deliberate manner. On your way to the bathroom, to a meeting or to the coffee pot, for instance, slow down — but “not so much that you look like a zombie,” Fingold cautions — and focus your attention on the mechanics of walking and how your body moves through space.

4:00 p.m.

The second calendar alert dings, reminding you to take another mindfulness break for at least a minute. If you’re struggling to figure out what you’re gaining from focusing on your breath, you can try a short guided meditation on a smartphone. Headspace has several short, high-quality lessons; Stop Breathe Think assigns you a specific meditation that’s responsive to a short questionnaire on your emotions. And Insight Timer, Zenify or The Mindfulness App all automatically send text reminders throughout the day to turn on one of their recordings.

6:00 p.m.

Day’s over: time to power down your computer. During the time it takes for all its windows to close and the screen to go dark, reflect on the day.

11:00 p.m.

One last task: While you’re brushing your teeth before bed, do one final mindfulness exercise. For the two minutes you’re scrubbing your pearly whites, be attuned to the sensations involved in the task: the squeezing of the toothpaste out of the tube, the feel of the bristles on your gums, the minty taste, the way swishing, spitting and swallowing moves your lips and jaw. “See if you can stay present for the whole thing,” Fingold advises.

11:05 p.m.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath and know that you successfully lived in every moment of the day.
MORE: Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation

Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation

Mindfulness, the practice of being awake to the present moment, is now in vogue in American workplaces as varied as Google, Goldman Sachs, Aetna and General Mills. Backed by scientific research of the cognitive benefits of ancient Buddhist meditation, corporate types thinking of productivity and the bottom line quickly trained their workers how to focus using mindfulness. Outside of finance, tech and manufacturing industries, NationSwell found seven more workplaces where you find employees reaping the benefits of meditating on a regular basis.

1. Concert Hall

Where: Tempe, Ariz.
After studying mindfulness for four decades, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is renowned as the field’s mother. Her concept of mindfulness differs from the common practice, in that she believes no meditation is necessary to change the brain’s chemistry; instead, she achieves mindfulness by existing in a state of “actively noticing new things,” she tells NationSwell.
As part of her research, she once split the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra into two groups and instructed each to play a piece of music by Johannes Brahms, which she recorded. Langer asked the first group to remember their best performance of the familiar piece and try their best to replicate it. She told the other group of musicians to vary the classical piece with subtle riffs that only they would recognize. Langer taped both performances and played them side-by-side for an audience. Overwhelmingly, listeners preferred the second one. To Langer, it seemed that the more choices we make deliberately — in a word, mindfully — as opposed to the mindless repetition, the better our end-product will be. The most important implication for Langer came later, when she was writing up the study: In America, she says, we so often prize a “strong leader to tell people what to do,” but as the orchestra’s performance proves, when an individual takes the lead instead of doing what someone instructs her to do, a superior result is the likely outcome.

2. Primary School

Where: East Village, New York City
“The research is pretty conclusive: when kids feel better, they learn better. One precedes the other,” declares Alan Brown, a consultant with Mindful Schools where he offers mindfulness training to the private school’s freshman and sophomores. Brown incorporated a serious practice into his life at a week-long silent retreat, after “jumping out of my skin, reading the toilet paper, doing anything but to be with your own thoughts and with yourself.” He now teaches kids how to be attuned to themselves and recognize feelings that may be subconsciously guiding their lives, like when they’re hyped up with sugar or are stressed out about a test. (Solutions: spending a moment in a designated corner calming down, breathing through a freakout to restore higher cognitive functions.)
As someone in the caregiving profession, Brown reminds himself and his fellow teachers they need to adopt mindfulness practices as well. With them, “the way I interact with others comes from a place of much greater compassion for the kids: clearly this young person, who is not a fully-formed, self-regulating adult, is probably trying their best and probably has some really significant hurdles outside the classroom. I’m not going to let that get to me.” If teachers expect similarly enlightened behavior from their kids, Brown adds, they have to know, “You can’t teach what you don’t have in your own body” and better embrace a meditative practice to see the results at every desk.

The UMass Mindfulness in Medicine program teaches the benefits of meditation to their staff members.

3. Hospital

Where: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Modern mindfulness was formalized in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn created an eight-week meditation routine to reduce stress for the hospital’s chronically ill patients that’s now replicated worldwide. Back on the medical campus where it all started, a new mindfulness program is being offered this summer for the people on the other side of treatment: the physicians, nurse practitioners and care managers.
The Mindfulness in Medicine program works to combat the frequent feeling of dissatisfaction about a lack of patient interaction among doctors. Instructor Carl Fulwiler gives lectures about the clinical research on meditation’s benefits, teaches 90-minute workshops for busy staffers and leads full-blown courses for a dedicated few. His teachings focus on how to avoid burnout with strategic pauses; by taking a breath immediately prior to seeing a patient, doctors can focus solely on the interaction. “Often they’re thinking about what’s the next thing they have to do or the documentation. They’re not even hearing a lot of what the patient is saying,” Fulwiler observes. With mindfulness, they can see what “might be contributing to a bad encounter, what’s preventing us from being empathetic, compassionate and more efficient in our style of communication?” The whole interaction may be over in three minutes, but having that time be meaningful is vital for helping the healers themselves feel the rewards of a demanding job.

4. Government

Where: Washington, D.C.
Change rarely comes to our nation’s capital, but that’s okay in Rep. Tim Ryan’s mind. A meditative practice equipped him to deal with legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. The seven-term Democrat representing northeastern Ohio practices mindfulness in a half lotus position for roughly 40 minutes daily — a regimen he began after attending one of Kabat-Zinn’s retreats in 2008, after which he gained “a whole new way of relating with what was going on in the world,” Ryan tells The Atlantic. “And like any good thing that a congressman finds — a new technology, a new policy idea — immediately I said, ‘How do we get this out?’” Ryan first wrote the book “A Mindful Nation,” exploring the ways mindfulness is being implemented across America, and today, in sessions of the House Appropriations Committee on which he sits, the representative advocates for more funds to be deployed to teach meditation tactics. The money may not be forthcoming just yet, but that hasn’t stopped mindfulness from gaining more new converts like Ryan every day.

5. Police Department

Where: Hillsboro, Ore.
Last month, Americans watched videos of officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La.; St. Paul, Minn; and North Miami, and they read about the five cops who died in a sniper attack in Dallas. While those crises were deeply felt by civilians nationwide, they were only a glimpse of what cops encounter regularly. “Law enforcement is a profession that is deeply impacted by trauma. On a daily basis, we bump up against human suffering,” says Lt. Richard Goerling, head of Hillsboro Police Department’s investigative division and a faculty member at Pacific University. “It doesn’t take very long for police officers’ well-being to erode dramatically,” he adds, ticking off studies that track early mortality and cardiovascular issues among public safety professionals.
Through the organization Mindful Badge, Goerling teaches several police departments in the Portland area and in Northern California how mindfulness can better cops’ performance: sharpening their attention to life-or-death details, cultivating empathy and compassion that’s crucial for stops and searches and building resilience before encountering trauma. The theory goes that once an officer receives mental training, he can sense when a stressor in his environment is activating his flight-or-flight reactions and then check those instincts. “If a police officer is in their own crisis,” Goerling suggests, “they’re not going to meet that person in a way that’s totally effective.” The lieutenant is aware mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for “a landscape of suffering,” but he believes it’s a first step to changing a “broken” police culture that takes its officers’ health for granted.

6. Athletic Competition

Where: San Diego, Calif.
BMX bikers may not seem like a group that’s primed for meditation, but when an elite biker stuttered with anxiety at the starting line, his coach James Herrera looked into any way to solve the problem of managing stress before a high-stakes event. Herrera soon got in touch with the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, and he signed up his seven-man team for a small study into the effects of meditation on “very healthy guys who are at the top of their sport,” lead author Lori Haase tells NationSwell. Over seven weeks, the bikers practiced a normal mindfulness routine, but with extra impediments like having their hands submerged in a bucket of icy water to teach them to feel the sensation of pain, rather than reacting to it cognitively. As the weeks went on, their bodies seemed to prepare for a physical shock, without an accompanying psychological panic. In other words, participants’ bodies were so amped up and hyperaware that they didn’t need to react as strongly to the stressor itself compared to an average person. The study didn’t test whether it made them faster on the course, but it seemed to suggest that reaction times could be sped up by using mindfulness to slow down.

7. Military

Where: Honolulu, Hawaii
Like cops, members of the military have much to gain from situational awareness. A couple seconds’ of lead-time for a soldier to notice someone in a bulky jacket running into a public square could prevent a suicide bomb from taking out dozens of civilians and comrades abroad. But that’s not all mindfulness is good for in a service member’s line of duty.
Before soldiers even leave home, they must deal with leaving family and putting other aspects of their lives on hold. To prepare soldiers for deployment, University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha offered mindfulness trainings at an Army outpost on Oahu to soldiers heading to Afghanistan. To fit the program into an already crowded training regimen, Jha drastically cut down the standard 40-hour model to an eight-hour practice scattered throughout eight weeks. Despite the stress of leaving that could sap the mind’s attention and working memory — “everything they need to do the job well when they’re there,” Jha notes — the mindfulness trainings prevented their minds from wandering. Tentative research Jha’s still conducting suggests those benefits persist post-deployment. Her session was just like boot camp, Jha found, only for the brain.

MORE: How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools

Mindfulness Isn’t Just a Hot Trend. It’s Improving Low-Income Schools

When kids can’t concentrate on their studies, it’s probably because their attention is focused on everything else going on in their lives. Consider the students at Coronado Elementary School, a low-income, public school in Richmond, Calif. Jean-Gabrielle Larochette, a teacher at the school, had his formerly rowdy class of kids practice the calming method of “Mindfulness,” a trendy meditation-like exercise that preaches “living in the moment,” for 15 minutes every day. The method showed such amazing results that he went on to found the Mindful Life Project, a non-profit that seeks to empower children through mindful living. Larochette told Mindshift that all the schools his organization works with have seen drops in disciplinary action. Other studies have shown that practicing mindfulness may also reduce ADHD behaviors and increase attention in young students.
MORE: How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools
“Before we can teach a kid how to academically excel in school, we need to teach him how to have stillness, pay attention, stay on task, regulate, make good choices,” Larochette told the publication. Mindfulness may be a trendy relaxation method for adults, but it looks like it’s helping kids stay on track, too.