Failing at being a perfect parent is my favorite moment of parenting, one of which was unintentionally captured on video when my son videotaped himself during remote learning one day.

Mindful Self-Compassion for Teens (MSC-T, formally called "Making friend with yourself") is an empirically supported, 8-session program designed to foster the skills of self-awareness and resilience, helping teens to navigate more effectively with the ups and downs of life with greater ease. Research finds that MSC-T participants experience many benefits including decreased stress, greater resilience, and increased well-being.

You are probably familiar with the aspect of an observer in mindfulness practice. That observer sometimes takes a form of a factual and distant interpretation what we are observing in ourselves and beyond. It often happens in the practice that this narrative get us into another form of judgment - less argumentative but nevertheless, it is still judgment. Compassion and practice of loving-kindness can help us to shift from this distant judgment into warm experience of how we are riding the waves of life.

It’s been a month since Pearl left home. As I think of her, my heart shrivels, and I feel a clenching fist suffocating my chest. I fight with tears as worry eats my thoughts. It is hard to have a closure. Friends try to remind me how much we have done already - sleepless nights, roaming through the hutongs with her food, with a recording of the food filling up in her bowl, shyly calling her name and whistling so she can hear how much we love her.

As coaches, we learn how to ask open questions, give space for contemplation and perspective shift. Asking closed questions that require a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer resembles driving into a dead end road. It's a conversation killer. For example, take this question: "Are you happy?" There is no simple way to answer it.

Join us on Thursday 2nd June 7.30pm Beijing Time to learn more upcoming mindfulness-based coach training program.

Do you remember how it was to be a teenager? What it was to be you, what were the challenges you had to go through, on the journey of becoming an adult?

It’s a great pleasure for me to be launching together with BMC an eight-week Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (8-Week MBCT) that will provide you with a structured way to develop your mindfulness practice whether you are a beginner to mindfulness or an existing practitioner.

Due to the current uncertainty and difficulty to plan short or long term, Beijing Mindfulness Centre will pause with activities through May holidays and announce next steps after the holidays. One thing that I know for sure, it is not easy to be in a leadership position at this time. So kudos to all who can maintain their calm and cool, who can feel motivated to move forward even when all signals show that we cannot move anywhere.

I spend more time on the phone, getting lost in absentminded scrolling through the news. General sense of fatigue is draining, and it feels like deja vu. I have been here before. It is hard to find excitement about the future. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is rapidly demoted from self-actualisation to the basic needs: safety, food and shelter. How does this happen and where are these deeply concerning realities taking us?

These days I've been calling on to the energy of Goddess Kali, Kali-Maa, the Divine Mother. She is fierce in protecting what is sacred, and many see her as bizarre and terrifying. In the past, I have resisted meditations on Kali energy as brutal and unnecessary. Learning more about her archetype helps me understand what is going on inside and how to work with it.