Today I have the honor of interviewing Susan Kaiser Greenland, who had the courage to leave a well-paying law career to embrace a calling to teach mindfulness meditation to children as young as four years old. She is author of the upcoming book The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate, developed the website Mindfulnesstogether.com and the Inner Kids program, designed to teach young kids vital skills toward a more peaceful and compassionate world. Susan will be speaking at the the Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth Conference in San Diego on February 4 – 5, 2012.

Elisha: Susan, what an amazing path you’ve chosen. When I teach mindfulness to adults, I often hear, how come we didn’t get this education when we were little, the world would be a much better place. What inspired you to leave the golden handcuffs and venture into this sorely needed area?

Today it’s my honor to bring to you Martine Batchelor, who along with her husband Stephen Batchelor, is author of a number of books including, Walking On Lotus Flowers, Let Go,and The Spirit of the Buddha.  Her husband Stephen Batchelor is author of Buddhism Without Beliefs and his most recent book Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. With her husband, Martine co-leads meditation retreats worldwide, including the upcoming retreat at InsightLA.org in Santa Monica on November 12-13 titled Toward a Secular Approach to Buddhism.  Martine and Stephen now live in France.

Today Martine talks to us about what is being gained and lost in a secular approach to Buddhism, where mindfulness is going and some tips on how to ground ourselves when we’re feeling overwhelmed.

Elisha: Mindfulness meditation can trace its origins to Buddhism, but is now being picked up in the fields of healthcare, psychology, business, and even politics as a way to live with greater ease, be more effective at what we do and even change our brains.

What are the implications of secularizing this Buddhist teaching and practice, what is gained, what is lost?

While there have been many things that may have gone through your mind the minute you heard of Japan’s recent 8.9 earthquake, all the subsequent aftershocks, the Tsunami and threat of radiation from their impacted nuclear plants, one thing we begin to realize is how connected we really are.

A short time after the Tsunami hit the coast of Japan, large waves rolled into the Harbor of Santa Cruz, Ca thrashing the marina around. It’s become clearer to me that we’re all responsible for one another and I think that’s a huge driving force in the growing interest in compassion.

Compassion is defined as being able to put yourself in the shoes of another and inclining your heart toward wanting to help in some way.

Compassion practices have been shown to reduce stress and increase well-being.

Last year I had the honor of interviewing Karen Kissel Wegela around The Courage to Be Present. Karen has been a core faculty member at Naropa University for more than 29 years focusing on “Contemplative Psychotherapy” – bringing together Buddhism and traditional psychotherapy. She has a private practice in Boulder, Colorado and gives workshops and lectures nationally and internationally. Karen has recently released What Really Helps and I think the message she conveys can be extraordinarily helpful to so many of us.

It is my honor to interview her here so we can all glean some of her wisdom.

Elisha: I’m struck by the title of your book, What Really Helps as it is such an important basic question that we all want the answer to. So let me pose it to you. What really helps?

Karen: Elisha, that’s such a good question. As I wrote in the book, what really helps most when we are aspiring to help others is our presence.  We won’t have any idea what will actually help until we connect with others and have a good sense of what their experiences are.  In order to be fully present and connected with another person, we have to be willing to feel whatever comes up in our own experience.

For those of you who don’t know Sharon Salzberg, she one of America’s leading mindfulness teachers and authors and has played a significant role in bringing mindfulness and the practice of lovingkindness to all of us in the Western world.

She is co-founder of one of America’s premier meditation centers, Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre Massachusetts and is the author of many books and CDs, including her classic Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness,The Kindness Handbook: A Practical Companion, and her newest release Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program.

If you’re in Los Angeles, don’t miss Sharon at InsightLA on Saturday, February 26th from 10am – 1pm. Hope to see you there.

Today Sharon talks to us about what Real Happiness is, how she integrates compassion practices into her life, and how an everyday totally stressed out person can start moving to real happiness.

Elisha: The first question that I have is what is real happiness and how do we all get it?

When it comes to trying to understand almost anything, I have found metaphors to be extremely useful. In mindfulness we use them all the time, we say, “Paying attention to your thoughts is like lying down on a field of grass looking at the clouds go on by or like lying down by a riverbed see the variety of debris come and go.”

I am very pleased to bring you Arnie Kozak, PhD, who is a master at using metaphors to help us understand mindfulness. Dr. Kozak is a licensed Psychologist and founder of Exquisite Mind, a place where people can come to learn more about mindfulness and psychotherapy. He is author of Wild Chickens and Petty Tyrants: 108 Metaphors for Mindfulness, The Everything Buddhism Book, and the blog Mindfulness Matters.

If you want to catch him live, Arnie is teaching Metaphors, Meaning, and Change: Finding Our Way to Mindfulness at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, 25-27 February 2011.

Today Arnie talks with us about mindfulness, metaphors and how we can find relief from our own minds.

Almost 2 years ago on January 16th, 2009 The Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Blog was birthed and I want to express my gratitude to John Grohol and all the readers who have been a part of this whether you just read a post and took something from it or whether you have been active in commenting or even retweeting.

Looking back on these last 2 years, my intention was for this blog to be an avenue for all of us to interact around mindfulness as it touches the many facets of life. I tried to create posts that were practical and accessible and that we could actually read and apply in our daily lives.

I feel grateful to have interviewed leaders in the field like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Daniel Siegel, Susan Kaiser Greenland, Jeffrey Schwartz, Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, Sylvia Boorstein, among many others.

Without further ado, here are the Top 10 Mindfulness and Psychotherapy blog posts for 2010, enjoy!

Today it’s my pleasure to bring to you Bodhipaksa, a longtime meditation teacher, author of Living As a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change. Bodhipaksa also started a wonderful site called Wildmind that has a number of self paced guided meditation courses and an ongoing blog to help us sew our seeds of mindfulness and compassion. As a short note, Bodhipaksa means “wings of enlightenment.”

Today Bodhipaksa shares with us what it means to live as a river, how we might gain freedom from seeing the ever changing nature of ourselves and what we can do when we’re suffering.

Elisha: What does it mean to live as a river?

Bodhipaksa: To me, living as a river means accepting the reality of impermanence and also recognizing the reality of anatta, or non-self. Our minds try to “fix” things and to see them as more permanent, static, and separate than they actually are. And one of the “things” that we treat in this way is ourselves.