Hey All,

My Favorite Bit of Information From The Week:

As promised, this week I want to talk Mindfulness/ Meditation.

What is Mindfulness/ mediation? I love the following quote from Sam Harris as a description: (Same Harris is an American neuroscientist, author, critic of religion, blogger, public intellectual, and podcast host.) 
“Mindfulness is simply a state of open, nonjudgmental, and non discursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to modulate pain, mitigate anxiety and depression, improve cognitive function, and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self awareness.”
You can check out the full article here: https://samharris.org/how-to-meditate/

How it has helped me: Meditation/ mindfulness has helped me get a better handle on my anxiety, it helps me prioritize my time, control my emotions, minimize stress, and increase my self esteem. It also helps me sleep better, and enjoy my life more. 

If you are a skeptic of meditation/ mindfulness… or think you need to be of a certain religion in order to partake, I encourage you to check out, both the above article from Sam Harris, and also this article from business insider interviewing Time Ferriss: https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-ferriss-meditation-mindfulness-2017-11

Tim Ferriss operates an excellent podcast where he interviews top successful people in their respective fields and asks them about their habits. What do the top most successful people in the world have in common more than anything else? Daily mindfulness or meditation. Over 90%.  
Please check out the resources at the bottom of the E-mail for my top meditation application recommendations. 

Update on my Show: 

More edits of the script this week, very exciting!Working with the puppet designer to narrow things down as we begin to construct our beautiful new puppet friends. In communication with the educators from Hope For The Day about the details of our partnership. 

Thank you VERY much to all who have donated thus far, making this project possible. If you would like to donate to my show, share this project with a friend, or find out more about it please check out my gofundme here: https://www.gofundme.com/one-woman-hamlet

Resources:

New Resources From Last Week:

Meditation Apps: 
If you are more of a learning in person sort of human, please E-mail me back and I can send you a list of meditation meet ups in your area. I wanted to include this here- but as the E-mail list now expands to different states I thought this method best. 

1.Sam Harris, (The same fellow from the article above) is a huge advocate for Mindfulness. He has spent an incredible amount of time and research on his own mindfulness application. It is called  Waking Up and you can check it out here: https://wakingup.com/I love Sam’s discussions on Mindfulness from his podcast- in fact he just had a fantastic conversation about it with the amazing Stephen Fry that I especially enjoyed ( https://samharris.org/podcasts/147-stephen-fry/) but I have not yet tried his app- just downloaded it today to try. I am told it is excellent. Especially if you are turned off by the sometimes spiritual side of meditation/mindfulness. 
It costs to do the whole mindfulness program, although you can start for free to make sure you like it first, but he generously offers a free year long subscription to anyone who truly cannot afford the app, all you have to do is E-mail  info@samharris.org. 

2. Insight: I love this free app. It is what I use everyday personally. I do Vipassana Meditation while using the timer on this app. It has been mentioned to me that the guided meditations on this are excellent as well. I just haven’t gotten to try them yet 
You can find out more about Vipassana here: https://www.dhamma.org/en/about/vipassana. If it sounds interesting to you, I LOVE to speak about their ten day silent meditation courses, and would be delighted to chat if you have questions. 

3. Headspace:  this is where I first started out when I began my interest in meditation two years ago. I really enjoyed these guided meditations and videos and they made sense to my brain- totally hooked me and is the reason I fell so hard for meditation in the first place. Many thanks to my friend Courtney for introducing me- life changing. https://www.headspace.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=917256436&utm_content=51529947492&utm_term=217943261430&headspace&gclid=Cj0KCQiA-onjBRDSARIsAEZXcKbO-oEucAkh8urxcGc3TL0s4d2v8fjmTouA6kcv5Nd0syS0lW-LFGwaAldoEALw_wcB

Thanks so much for your time and support, May you all have a beautiful week,

Kate