02.14.2025 Befriending a Warm and Wise Teacher of Mindfulness   At Lion’s Roar, we are privileged to work with some of the sharpest minds and biggest names when it comes to mindfulness and meditation — people who’ve blazed trails and charted the course for the rest of us. And this is once again the case as we roll out our new online learning class, Befriending Your Mind & Emotions: The Essential Guide to Mindfulness Practice, featuring Diana Winston. There are a number of things that make Diana special: she’s the director of UCLA Mindful, the mindfulness education center of UCLA Health; a sought-after speaker and author who has taught mindfulness in hospitals, universities, corporations, nonprofits, and schools in the US and Asia since 1993; a mom; even a former Buddhist nun. Most of all, though, it’s the way she boils down all that experience and expertise and presents it to us in a maximally encouraging, you-really-can-do-it kind of way. When Diana speaks about meditation practice and tells you you really can do it, she knows! So in this Weekend Reader, I want to share this clip from Befriending Your Mind & Emotions — I hope you’ll consider joining this course, which can really help solidify and deepen your mindfulness practice — as well as some articles from Diana that, I’m sure, will further that good sense of who she is, and why she’ll make a great guide for you as you explore the many ways that mindfulness can be practiced to benefit your mental and emotional life. —Rod Meade Sperry, editor, Buddhadharma; Lion’s Roar Online Learning Video: The Importance of Kindness in Your Mindfulness Practice In this 4-minute sample from Befriending Your Mind and & Emotions, Diana Winston explores the essential role of kindness in mindfulness practice — not just as a concept, but as an embodied feeling that can be developed on the spot to help sustain your meditation routine. ADVERTISEMENT The Power of Mindfulness Diana Winston on how to use the tools of mindfulness to work with negative patterns like shame, guilt, and self-criticism that stand in the way of caring for and liking yourself. I, like everyone else, suffer from a challenging complex of thoughts and emotions that show up from time to time: self-judgment, self-criticism, guilt, shame. These emotions seem to be at epidemic levels in society today. Because I’ve been meditating now for thirty years, I have tools at my disposal that I can deploy to work with these emotions and thoughts. When they pop up, as they did in my roller-skating misadventure, mindfulness tools are there for me. To help you work with your own painful thoughts and emotions when they arise, here is the approach I use when working with students, one that has kept me sane (most of the time) and self-compassionate for decades. Mindfulness with Baby: Yes, it’s possible!   Diana Winston on maintaining meditation and mindfulness practice while being the mother of a young child. The most common question I get as a mindfulness teacher and new mom is: “Are you still able to meditate?” The implication is that amid the chaos of a wailing, demanding, pooping baby, my formal meditation practice would likely find itself out the window. And that’s sort of true… Well, depending on how you define meditation practice. Suffering Is Optional   Physical pain is unavoidable, but meditation practice can ease the mental suffering that often accompanies it. Diana Winston teaches us how. The biggest difficulty in working with pain is not the pain itself; it is how we react to it. With mindfulness, you can learn to see how your mental reactions to suffering function and how you can avoid being so caught in them. Here is a practice you can do if you are experiencing any physical pain.