About Legally Mindful
Why Mindful Meditation?
We all know the steady stress and pressures that lawyers experience. Mindful meditation can help relieve emotional overload.
The American Bar Association’s National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being released a report in August 2017 that supported meditation as a positive practice, saying: “Research has found that mindfulness can reduce rumination, stress, depression, and anxiety. It also can enhance a host of competencies related to lawyer effectiveness, including increased focus and concentration, working memory, critical cognitive skills, reduced burnout, and ethical and rational decision-making.”
What makes Legally Mindful different?
The use of a proprietary sound-assisted meditation technology, which I refer to as SAM, differentiates Legally Mindful® from traditional mindfulness meditation.
The SAM signals in the Legally Mindful exercises will help get you in a desired meditative state and keep you there. Once you are in a good meditative state, it should be easier to allow random thoughts to pass through and you can start using your meditation practice in more practical ways.
Simply put, the Legally Mindful approach should yield quicker, more noticeable results than the traditional mindfulness practice.
Legally Mindful aims to help professionals remove barriers and focus on maintaining a regular meditation practice. These exercises allow you to advance your skills as you learn and gain experience with meditation-related tools and encourage you to continue using these tools when you have a big issue to address. Continually using the sound-assisted meditation technology (SAM) will help you achieve a deeper and more productive state.
Each exercise is tailored to help get you into a specific meditative state. Overall, the Primary Level exercises will help you to achieve a more relaxed state while facing stress, reflect upon the sources of gratitude and the need for compassion in your life, and help you hone your concentration skills. The SAM signals are designed specifically for each exercise to help you stay in, or get back to, that relaxed state without the need to start over if focus is lost. With SAM support, you will gain confidence that anytime your mind wanders, or you get distracted by a noise or an itch, you can effortlessly bring your attention back to your breath, without losing that relaxed, focused state.
The Secondary Level Exercises then build on your primary experiences and take you to a whole different level where you will be able to work on work-related or personal tasks while in a deep, creative state. Learn more about these exercises and the benefit of guided meditation on our blog.
The goal is to teach your mind to get back to that relaxed but focused state through the wonders of neuroplasticity – lasting changes to your brain – without being tied to an exercise.
Meditation should be effortless. By using the Legally Mindful guided meditation exercises supported by the proprietary SAM technology, you will more easily understand and experience getting into a meditative state without effort and benefit from your time investment quickly.
The exercises
There are two levels of exercises, each with different objectives to help you experience a specific meditative state.
Primary Level:
- Introduction to the Legally Mindful Exercises and SAM Technology
- Relax and Release Exercise
- Heart-Based Gratitude and Compassion Exercise
- Short Relaxation Exercise
- Concentration Exercise
Secondary Level:
- Introduction to Secondary Level Exercises
- Creative Space Exercise
- Meeting Room Exercise
- Health and Well-Being/Body Scan Exercise
These exercises provide you with practices that are easily adaptable to an attorney’s (or other professional’s) day-to-day personal and professional lives. Once you train your mind to go into that “creative space” you will be able to go back there when you’re not tied to the exercise, and even when you are in a meeting or other stressful situation.
About Gary Powell
An Ohio-based lawyer, Gary Powell is currently General Counsel for a global natural-based chemical company in Cincinnati. Before joining the corporate world, Gary was in a private litigation practice for more than 25 years, focusing primarily on land use, zoning and development. He participated in cases involving eminent domain, freedom of speech and association, due process and equal protection claims.
Gary has served as President of the Cincinnati Bar Foundation and as a Trustee for the Cincinnati Bar Association, and he currently serves on its Health and Well Being Committee. A Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Ohio State Bar Foundation, he has been a Member of the Hamilton County (Ohio) Mental Health & Recovery Services Board since 2005. He was an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati from 1986 through 2011. Gary has maintained an AV rating from Martindale-Hubbell since 1996. While in private practice, Gary was recognized as an Ohio Super Lawyer from 2004 through 2011, included in Best Lawyers in America from 2006 through 2013, and named Best Lawyers’ 2013 Cincinnati – Land Use & Zoning Litigation “Lawyer of the Year.” For Gary’s complete professional bio, click here.
Gary started his meditation practice in 2005 and annually attends week-long meditation workshops that utilize sound-assisted meditation technology, and he has been facilitating similar meditation workshops in Cincinnati since 2011.