mindfulness | Susan Lebel Young: Author & Mindfulness Teacher

Welcome to Nourishing Bytes

It’s a blog about Mindfulness and Heartfulness and how you can use these ancient practices in your life to nourish your very modern hungers.

Mindfulness has become a modern buzz word in the West. Yet this practice of paying kind attention on purpose to the present moment comes from the ancient East. “Mindful this, mindful that,” everyone seems to be saying.

This very old awareness and consciousness practice is now like apple pie and baseball, used in stress reduction clinics, in hospitals for healing, in businesses for equanimity, in schools to help kids with attention, in prisons to help with anger management, in yoga classes for meditation and more.

“Mindfulness is great stuff,” a friend said to me the other day.

But what does it mean really? How do we do it?

First of all, it’s not stuff and it’s not exactly a doing. It’s our lives, if we pay attention. It’s what’s right in front of us, if we dare to see it. It’s simple and it might be the hardest thing we ever ask ourselves to learn.

Nourishing Bytes hopes to offer you a taste, a flavor of what mindfulness has come to mean to me: what I call heartfulness because the word heartfulness helps me with the “kind” part of mindfulness, with non-judging, acceptance, patience, and trust, all part of mindfulness…the heart part.

In Nourishing Bytes, you’ll read about everyday “stuff” feeling stupid, feeling left out, losing your way, finding it again, being too fat, being too thin, binging on junk food and then choosing healthy eating, dealing with the criticism of others, finding a place in the heart again and again as we keep falling out. I hope my personal stories on these themes strike a universal chord in you.

May this blog provide nourishment for you.

Kindness and Connection on Christmas

My daughter Alisa was born on August 5, 1980. She was what anyone would call, “a good baby.” Rarely cried. I’d nurse her in her sunshine-gold nursery, sway with her in the bentwood rocker, place her lovingly in her brass crib, and she’d fall asleep. I knew, even as a new mom, that the warmth of body-to-body, the cuddling, maybe even my off-key singing of the lullaby passed down from my grandm[Read more]

The Wonder of Surprise Connections

December 23, 2023. On this day, I found a musket in the back corner of the unfinished basement. Shocked, I asked my husband, “A gun!? What are we doing with this gun?” The rusty rifle, covered with dust and cobwebs, reeked of must. He said, “It’s not real. It’s a prop, a decoration at Ethan Allen Furniture Store.” This morning of the fifth rainy day in a row, I had decided t[Read more]

WELCOME TO THE CONNECTION COLLECTION

Recently seeing a road sign, Stonewall Way: Dead End, evoked a memory of the New York City Stonewall Riots. At the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, gay men and women gathered in safety, to dance, to connect. The Stonewall Inn provided a sense of I-am-not-alone, a place of refuge. Then, on June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn. They dragged employees and hauled patrons out of the b[Read more]