The Top 10 Mindful Articles of 2024

Our goal at Mindful is always to bring you the very best from the science, deep experience, and big questions of mindfulness. This past year has been filled with so much uncertainty, and we believe more than ever that mindfulness is designed to meet us exactly where we are to help us live better and experience stronger connections with ourselves and others.

The top articles of 2024 demonstrate the breadth and depth of all these shimmering, unexpected places that mindfulness can find us: anywhere from a children’s television show and our closets and to the books we read and the heavy spaces of disconnection, loss, and healing we’re navigating in our lifetimes.

The Most Popular Mindfulness Articles of 2024

1. The Whole Child Matters—What It Means to Have Mindfulness in Schools

In an age of increasing anxiety, introducing the mental resilience skills of mindfulness to young minds seems more important than ever. Writer Leslie Garrett went directly to teachers and mindfulness leaders to learn how it supports students, teachers, and their wider communities.

2. What to Do When You Feel Like You Don’t Have Enough Time

Free time can feel like a rare commodity these days. Dr. Diana Hill explores what free time really means to us and how our experience of it has more to do with how we’re spending our time than the amount of it we have.

3. Mindfulness for Racial Healing

The May 2020 killing of George Floyd is still having reverberating effects around the US. Educator and leader Tovi Scruggs-Hussein walks through six key ways that mindful practices can facilitate deeper connections by addressing the core emotional experiences at play in racial bias.

4. Nanalan’: The Viral Show That Models How Mindfulness Looks and Feels

Since 1999, Nanalan’ co-creators Jason Hopley and Jamie Shannon have been sharing mindful concepts like empathy, awareness, and acceptance with their young audience. Discover how this heartfelt show (that’s only technically for kids) found TikTok fame and is now reaching and healing people of all ages.

5. How Meditation Supports Health and Healing

Even in an era of unprecedented technical “connection,” the percentage of people who report that they’re struggling with depression, anxiety, and loneliness continues to rise. Studies show that mindfulness is ultimately an effective, low-cost way to manage (and maybe even improve) physical and mental health and well-being.

6. Cultivating Mindfulness Beyond Meditation: How 8 Skills Empower Us in Everyday Life

One of the most common questions people ask about mindfulness is, What does this have to do with my actual life? Shalini Bahl explores eight key ways that mindful practices can impact your daily thoughts, interactions, and choices.

7. Decluttering—Outside and Inside

Letting go is hardly ever easy. Here Barry Boyce examines how decluttering physical spaces can offer gentle insight into how we can also create more lightness and freedom inside our minds.

8. After the Funeral: When Grief is Part of Daily Life

Grief is a universal human experience that’s also not talked about with much openness. In her own uniquely compassionate and humorous way, Elaine Smookler shares her personal grief journey and offers comfort and wisdom for others on the long road of loss.

9. Mindful Reading Guide: Contemporary Authors to Deepen Your Practice

We don’t often think of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry as being an integral part of growing our own mindful practices. Using examples from her own library, poet Angela Stubbs walks readers through how we, too, can identify and connect with mindful themes in our favorite books.

10. Q&A: How Connecting With Our Senses Supports Mental Health and Resilience

Modern Western culture is notoriously disconnected from the body, and this fragmentation has far-reaching effects on our mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Authors Norman Farb and Zindel Segal talk about their new book Better in Every Sense and how reconnecting with our senses can help get us unstuck and find real healing.