Latest Posts on Engaged Mindfulness & Teaching Mindfulness

There is a grief that lives beneath the surface of ordinary days. You feel it when you read the wildfire report and put your phone down a little too quickly. When you notice the absence of bees in a garden that used to hum. When a child asks you what the future will look like and something in you goes very still. This grief has many names. Climate anxiety. Eco-distress. Ecological overwhelm. But underneath all the names is something simpler, something the body already knows:

Can enlightenment really be packaged into a $69.99 annual subscription? A look at why meditation apps are great for opening the door, but why true transformation still requires the messy, beautiful reality of human connection.

For thousands of years, when human beings suffered — when they were lost, grief-stricken, anxious, or bewildered by their own minds — they sought out other human beings. A priest. A healer. An elder who had walked far enough ahead to know the terrain. The encounter was never merely transactional, and it was always human. Until now.

Not “feel better” — but feel fully, and respond wisely. A few years ago, I came across a photograph of a polar bear — not the iconic image of one stranded on a melting ice floe, but something quieter and somehow more devastating. It was a mother and her cub, asleep, curled together on a shrinking patch of ice. There was such tenderness in it. And I noticed something happen in me as I looked: a quick, sharp ache — and then, almost immediately, a kind of interior closing. A rea

Rachel came to the Engaged Mindfulness Institute's Mindfulness Teacher Training with a wealth of experience in meditation, mindfulness, and traditional Buddhist dharma. EMI's trauma-sensitive mindfulness training offered her a natural next step — a way to ground her practice in frameworks that could meet people where they are, including those carrying the weight of trauma, marginalization, and systemic harm.

Why experienced mindfulness practitioners are choosing to teach — and how EMI's Mindfulness Teacher Training prepares them to do it well.

Are we teaching mindfulness, or are we just life-hacking? As the practice goes mainstream, there is a growing fear that we are losing the depth of ancient traditions in favor of stress-management techniques. But according to Fleet Maull, the secret to deep practice isn't in the technique you choose—it's in the person teaching it.

I.V. came to the Engaged Mindfulness Institute teacher training not as a beginner, but as someone already doing the work — teaching mindfulness in Charlotte's school system and serving as both a teacher and operations manager at the Charlotte Center for Mindfulness. But even with that experience, she knew something was missing.

Doubt is the quietest hindrance, often masquerading as wisdom or responsibility. Learn how to identify hindering doubt and return to the direct practice of mindfulness.