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Try this meditation practice to relax your body from head to toe (click for audio).

Before I taught scores of body scan meditations like the one above, I too had to learn it for the first time. And my first reaction was: no, thank you! This is what happened: The woman at the front of the room is saying that over the next eight weeks we would be "learning to reconnect to our bodies by doing a number of body scans." Huh? Reconnect with my own body? Nuts to that, lady! Not that it's any of your business, but my disconnected body and I like it that way. As far as I can tell, I mean, we haven't spoken in years.

When was the last time you gave your body a break? And we're not talking about sleep. Take ten minutes and try the body scan practice.

When was the last time you noticed how your body was feeling? Not just when you have a headache or you're tired or you have heartburn after that spicy taco you ate for lunch. But just noticing how your body is feeling right now, while you're sitting or standing or lying down. How about noticing how your body feels while you're sitting in an important meeting or walking down the street or playing with your children?

Take a break and boost your mood with this 10-minute walking meditation.

Before you begin your meditation, find a quiet space to walk. It could be outdoors, or in a hallway, or even a large room, walking back and forth.

Walking meditation can be a formal practice, like watching the breath. Or it can be informal, bringing awareness to this everyday activity, whenever you need to travel from point A to point B. Walking meditation gives us an opportunity to gather our awareness which so often becomes distracted or even stuck when the mind is left to its own devices.

Becoming more aware of where you are and what you're doing, without becoming overly reactive or overwhelmed by what's going on around you.

Mindfulness is a natural quality that we all have. It's available to us in every moment if we take the time to appreciate it. When we practice mindfulness we're practicing the art of creating space for ourselves—space to think, space to breathe, space between ourselves and our reactions.

Meditation is not all in your mind. In fact, it begins and ends in the body.

TIME: 3 to 5 minutes

When we think about meditating (with a capital M), we can get hung up on thinking about our thoughts: we're going to do something about what's happening in our heads. It's as if these bodies we have are just inconvenient sacks for our brains to lug around.

On the daily grind, life can get bland—downright boring, when you think about it. So for a moment, stop thinking, and drop into your senses instead. Take three minutes with this mindfulness practice.

Boredom is a sign that we've become habituated. We're getting stuck on automatic pilot, and losing touch with actual experience, which can always be interesting if we bring our curiosity to it. By helping us shift modes of mind from thinking into sensing, this practice invites us to rediscover interest, beyond our expectations. Linger on each step for at least three minutes.

When was the last time something filled you with awe? While young children seem to be wonderstruck on a regular basis, this experience tends to be rare in adults; our attention is by necessity more focused on day-to-day responsibilities and mundane tasks. But awe is just as important for adults, according to a new and rapidly growing field of research.

Researchers define awe as the feeling we get in the presence of something larger than ourselves that challenges our usual way of seeing the world. A great work of art, a breathtaking vista, a moving speech, the first flowers of spring—these can all evoke awe.

Tap into a deeper sense of purpose and well-being with the first VR meditation of its kind—A 360 guided mindfulness practice through Muir Woods National Monument (click for video).

We are all naturally endowed with a set of passions that enable us to find our purpose, increase our well-being, and navigate our place in the social world. These passions include gratitude, compassion, mirth, and our focus here, awe.

Physical activity. Beautiful scenery. Who doesn't like the occasional hike in the great outdoors? And when you add a little extra awareness to the experience, your outing can benefit both your body and your mind.

Hiking with friends while enjoying great conversation and laughter is one of my favorite activities. But unless we make a conscious effort to stop every now and again and really pay attention to where we are and what we are doing, we can miss a tremendous amount. Stopping and consciously engaging our senses when out hiking not only calms and grounds us—relaxing both mind and body—but it also deepens our connection to the natural world.

Noticing self-perpetuating thought patterns is a core mindfulness skill. Take a moment to examine how it feels to disengage from a busy mind and shift into "being" mode.

The ability to recognize and disengage from self-perpetuating patterns of ruminative, negative thought is a core mindfulness skill. The basic tool to shift mental gears is the intentional use of attention and awareness. By choosing what we are going to attend to, and how we are going to attend to it, we place our hand on the lever that enables us to change mental gears.

This mindfulness practice can help transform your relationship to your phone—the very thing that can sometimes pull us toward mindlessness.

I just set my phone down to write this post, but thankfully and notably, it's well within arm's reach. As a psychologist, therapist, and parent, I consider the following to be of great concern:

• There is research suggesting that using cell phones for only a half hour a day for ten years doubles one's risk of brain cancer.

11 simple ways to bond with the people in your life.

We are social beings by nature. Connecting with others is what provides richness in life, makes us feel safe, and has us recognize that we're part of something greater than ourselves. Yet we sometimes choose to stay behind a wall of emotional (or physical) distance, even in our closest relationships. As a result, our world contracts and we're robbed of living a fully dimensional life. Mindfulness helps us to wake up to the "choice points" in our relationships when we can decide to connect a bit more by listening, communicating, and allowing our hearts to open.

When it's difficult to meditate, you can build moments of mindfulness into the day through simple activities like brewing and enjoying a cup of tea.

Bringing mindfulness to simple activities like drinking tea trains us to direct attention consciously. We might think we choose what we're paying attention to in life, but in reality most of us are driven by habit and impulse. By deliberately choosing to attend to an activity, we slow things down and let ourselves become aware of the process of attending and perhaps how little control we usually have over it.

The next time you need to wake up your body for a mid-day meditation, try this 6-minute mini-mindfulness retreat to go from foggy to focused.

Before heading for the vending machine for a mid-day pick me up, try an all-natural, zero-calorie option: mindfulness. This energizing mini-retreat is the perfect remedy for workday sluggishness, waking up your body, refreshing your brain, and shifting you from foggy to focused.

Jason Ong, a sleep psychologist at Rush University Medical Center, offers these quick reminders to help you get to sleep.

Beginner's mind
Remember: Each night is a new night. Be open and try something different! What you have been doing to this point is probably not working well.

Non-striving
Sleep is a process that cannot be forced but instead, should be allowed to unfold. Putting more effort into sleeping longer or better is counterproductive.

Learn to love (or at least accept) your alarm clock with this wake-up practice from sleep psychologist Shelby Freedman Harris.

We've all been there. It's morning, the dreaded alarm clock goes off, and you just can't muster the will to sit up and start the day.

Sadly, most of us are sleep deprived and any extra minutes of shut-eye seem far too precious to readily give up.

Every minute of our lives serves up something new and gives us an opportunity to learn. But when it comes to the usual ways of learning—reading, writing, and listening to others—we often lose the freshness of direct experience and instead just shovel information into our brains. Mirabai Bush suggests how to learn more deeply and with more enjoyment.

We're all learning all the time. Parents learn to care for children, students learn physics, soldiers learn survival skills, and all of us learn the latest app or how kale will make us healthy. But much of what we call learning isn't particularly useful: I just "learned" on Facebook that someone I hardly know baked cupcakes today. Riveting!

Mindfulness apps are trending in a big way. Here are five we're happy we downloaded.

There's no shortage of mindfulness and meditation apps these days, promising to help you combat anxiety, sleep better, hone your focus, and more. We scoured the app stores to find the most popular, educational, and easy-to-use mindfulness apps that are available for free.

A deep lover of all things natural, Coleman shows how the great outdoors makes the perfect meditation studio.

This anthology draws on the work of over 40 authors on mindfulness topics and shows the myriad ways it can help us in our lives—from stage fright to gardening to dealing with illness to changing the world.

Salzberg's folksy and friendly way of introducing meditation makes it seem as straightforward as washing dishes, and you don't need to do the 28-day program to benefit from the book.

This classic by the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is simple and immediately applicable to your life.

What if you could profoundly change your life just by becoming more mindful of your breathing? According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, you can. What if paying attention on purpose (and nonjudgmentally) could improve your health? Again, according to Dr. Kabat-Zinn—it can.

A profound transformation can occur just by training your attention in awareness—a practice sweeping schools, workplaces, and institutions across the country with its capacity to decrease stress, cultivate inner calm, and expand wisdom and creativity.

Mindfulness is a simple yet profound practice that transforms lives. The Practice of Mindfulness invites you to join six Sounds True authors who are each considered leaders in bringing the many benefits of mindful living into our personal and professional lives. Enjoy six beginner-friendly guided meditations aimed at increasing harmony in mind and body in order to open us to the fullness of our experience from one moment to the next.

In this YouTube video, the developer of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program and author of Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go There You Are talks about cultivating mindfulness and integrating it moment-by-moment in our lives.

Why are our brains like Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good? In this podcast, the acclaimed neuroscientist and author talks about how we can deepen our experiences and rewire our ever-changing brains.

What is mindful leadership? Marturano, founder of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, shows what it is, why it's critically important, and how it can be cultivated.

Winston shows how to work with hindrances that arise when we practice. She talks about the power of loving-kindness: a simple tool that can help us cultivate self-compassion and recognize our shared humanity.

"This is all you really need to know: It's sitting or standing or any posture and simply being aware of what arises and then seeing what we learn from being aware," Goldstein says. Sounds simple, right? Yes—except when it's not. Sit back and enjoy one of the leading figures in the mindfulness community.

"If we're at war with ourselves, we can't feel love and connection with our world," Brach says. The DC-based instructor looks at how mindfulness and heartfulness can dissolve what she calls "the trance of unworthiness" and reveal the loving  awareness that is our essence.

Why is the state of flow—moments where everything comes together in some almost magical way—so hard to achieve? In this TED Talk, a neuroscientist and mindfulness expert shows how we ourselves are the only barrier keeping us from flow.