Daron Larson, Mindfulness Coach

08/24/2026

The past tugs at my attention, always ready to be rearranged. The future, too, beckons—posing as a puzzle with a single, elusive solution.

But sensory experience plays by different rules. It happens only in the present, unfolding moment by moment as a shifting blend of sensations and perceptions.

Experiment with noticing small endings during your day.

Follow the sound of a closing door until silence returns. Notice the final notes of a song or musical phrase. Feel one step end as the next begins. Notice the moment one task gives way to another.

Notice a bite of food leave your fork, then follow the sensations of chewing and swallowing until they come to an end.

You might discover that endings don’t create an empty space you need to fill. They help position your attention for renewed contact with your life.

Whenever you notice something ending, pause long enough to wonder: What’s beginning now?

Noticing when sensations end positions you to notice whatever arises next.

08/13/2026

The Anthropocene Reviewed book (featuring this essay and 49 others)...

08/12/2026

07/31/2026

Mindfulness practice can be like cleaning a window and a mirror—not by removing subjectivity, but by clarifying how subjective elements such as verbal thoughts, mental images, and emotions affect how we relate to life in real time.

The greater my perceptual clarity and the slower I am to dive into interpretation, the more of the real world makes its way through my senses. At the same time, my mental and emotional patterns and my personality can be observed with a little more psychological distance.

I’m still amazed by how observations from my first silent meditation retreat in the fall of 2002 revealed things about how I relate to the world, other people, and my life.

For example, during walking meditation, I discovered something I hadn’t realized before and which remains true in a way that feels both surprising and obvious. When we weren’t meditating sitting down, we were meditating while slowly walking back and forth along a path about ten yards long.

Each person selects where they want to practice. Indoors. Outside. On a sidewalk or the grass. Other people seemed to pick quickly and randomly and get to the excruciatingly boring task at hand. It took me a while to settle on a spot, and I liked to pick a different one each time.

One day, after selecting a place to practice, I stopped in my tracks and realized I was observing something deeply true about myself. I had picked a spot on a dirt road covered in dried tire tracks. I could have found a nice grassy area between trees, but I’d gone out of my way to select conditions that were riddled with small risks that required greater attention.

Something in me craves variety, challenge, and the potential for surprise. Instead of analyzing the insight in a psychotherapeutic or narrative way, I carried it in my mind and body as I walked the jutted path.

Throughout my life, when a simple path is available, I tend to wait until I find a more difficult option. Who knows why? It’s not a problem to solve. It feels more like a trait to hold lightly while noticing its impact.

Catherine Esposito Prescott’s poem “Wabi-Sabi” conjures this trait and reminds me to celebrate it rather than try to get rid of it. Thanks to Maggie Smith for sharing it recently on The Slowdown podcast.

"I want
the rock-worn, unpaved road,
the unmarked trail, gnarled trees
and tangled grass. I want the uncrested

wave, its blue unfrothed top,
and the broken shell under blankets
of sand, the crab circling the seafloor
on one leg waiting for the other

to grow back."

Today’s poem is Wabi-Sabi by Catherine Esposito Prescott.

07/26/2026

A coaching client recently told me he was frustrated because his meditation sessions no longer flowed like they used to.

Years of consistent practice had been disrupted by the inevitable stuff of life. He was eager to restore it, but sessions that had felt focused for so long now felt fragmented and forced.

The problem wasn't that he had forgotten how to meditate.

It was that he had started evaluating the quality of the sessions before they had a chance to get into a groove. He was forgetting to give himself as much warm-up time as he needed, even when a whole practice session felt like a warm-up.

Physical workouts have phases. Some days are mostly warm-up. Others settle into a smoother rhythm. Occasionally they fall into a satisfying, effortless flow.

Mindfulness practice follows a similar pattern.

The mistake many of us make is expecting every session to feel like the best ones we've ever had. That’s not sustainable for anyone.

This week’s attention exercise explores a different approach—not trying harder to relax, but noticing where relaxation is already present, even if it’s subtle or quietly resting in a small part of your body.

Sometimes that's exactly what allows calm to take root and bloom.

Wanting to feel calmer can undermine the very process that creates calm.

07/26/2026

Gary Gulman is one of the funniest people you'll ever meet.

He's also smart about what it takes to stay well.

He talks with Stephen Dubner about depression, recovery, and why his mental health requires constant vigilance.

07/24/2026

My recent adventures in Croatia inspired me to revise a poem I wrote a few years ago after a SwimTrek vacation where I swam with the group.

"Land Breather"

We didn’t have oceans in Kansas,
but we had plenty of horizons, wind,
and a surplus of sky.

I’ve been drenched in downpours,
but nobody ever stopped breathing
from an overabundance of air.

I once dove into the Red Sea
to chase a pod of passing dolphins,
their gray bodies at play in the blue where they belong,
but these Midwestern feet feel more at home on the ground,
where, given enough time, I can send down roots,
regardless of where I'm standing.

I love it when a strong gust blows off all my leaves.

So far, I’ve always been able to grow new ones,
but never by myself.

07/24/2026

While Matt spent last week swimming 8k a day around the Adriatic with his SwimTrek friends, I wandered.

I spent my days wandering the tiny island of Prvić, home to two small villages and just one car. I felt invisible in the best possible way—free to quietly observe people enjoying the summer without seeming self-conscious, while understanding almost none of what they were saying to each other.

It made me notice everything else.

A woman drew my attention to two bright red starfish beneath the water. To help translate the Croatian name, she pointed toward the sky.
I kept noticing people singing. Not performing. Just singing. Children, alone and together. Grown men doing chores. Two small groups gathered at the church doors during Sunday mass. Small fragments of song woven into ordinary summer moments.

And when people weren’t talking or singing, they were playing just for the sake of playing: card games, chess, bocce ball. On our walk to dinner along Bačvice Beach on our last evening in Split, I watched hundreds of people standing in the shallow water, batting a small white ball around, trying to keep it from touching the water. I later learned it was a 100-year-old game called picigin, often described as a “water hacky sack.”

Beneath it all was the steady chorus of cicadas, whose persistent singing became the soundtrack of the island.

I learned that Croatia’s first head of state, the poet Vladimir Nazor, devoted one of his poems to the sound I’d been hearing all week. The first stanza includes the phrase “cvrči, cvrči cvrčak,” pronounced “tvrchi, tvrchi tvrchak,” an onomatopoeic line that sounds like cicadas chirping.

I had to look up the words trochee (a two-syllable metrical foot in poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable) and dithyramb (a Greek choral hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus).

And the cicada chirps, chirps on the knot of the black spruce
His deafening trochee, his sonorous, heavy iambic.
It is noon. — Like water, the
Sunny dithyramb is spilling through the silence.

From “Cvrčak” by Vladimir Nazor
https://www.poezija.hr/cvrcak-vladimir-nazor/

07/24/2026

Several attentional fitness exercises, including progressive muscle relaxation, breathing exercises, and guided imagery, are among the thirteen evidence-based approaches for falling asleep more quickly.

Meditation is #7

"You've heard it hundreds of times, but there’s a good reason. Meditation has been shown to reduce cortisol levels, helping you feel less anxious and more relaxed—and thus, more likely to fall asleep. An older study in JAMA that’s still relevant found that mindfulness meditation helped improve sleep quality in older adults by reducing "worry, rumination, and mood disturbances."

I'm impressed that they also included ditching your sleep-tracker and accepting rest when sleep remains elusive. I've found these and other paradoxical intentions to be surprisingly helpful when it comes to sleep challenges.

Don't expect any of them to address your specific issue quickly, though. Stay open to experimenting with one or more of them for a couple of weeks. As with any empowering skill, experimentation, customization, and consistent practice are required. 😴

Stop all that tossing and turning with these science-tested strategies.