Conscious Choice: Mindfulness

September 2008 | From the Publisher

Mindfulness

I received a letter today from an advertiser who has been with Conscious Choice for about six months. The advertiser is a non-profit seeking mission specific contributions for the betterment of children. The ad they run is honest and well designed; their mission is provoking. In the letter that I have in my hand, the Director of Development states a major donor came forward recently: “When I asked her how she learned of our organization, she said it was through the advertisement in Conscious Choice.”

I cannot begin to express how positively wonderful that makes the CC team feel. And, that is really what it is all about, isn’t it? Despite the crazy world of magazine publishing, the constant deadlines, the rising costs of materials and distribution, the trim staff, the need to always meet the bottom line, our purpose remains constant: We educate. We promote Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) with every issue through the conduits of editorial and advertising. We are the medium for new ways of thinking and for living a better life.

I think I can vouch for everyone who works in Conscious Choice’s complex network of print and interactive media when I say: We did not go into this to get rich. We do what we do because we love it and we believe in it. In the 20+ years of publishing the marquee of Chicago’s Conscious Community, we have yet to expose all of the facets, ever-changing, of living a conscious life.

In a book I stumbled across recently (in reality, it fell off a shelf when I was cleaning up my office and it hit me on the head), The Only 127 Things You Need by Donna Wilkinson (Tarcher/Penguin New York, 2008), one of those 127 things is Mindfulness. In the section, “The capacity to notice new things,” where Dr. Ellen J. Langer (Professor of Psychology at Harvard University) is quoted as well: “When we are mindless, we see things in a limited way, through habit or routine. ‘Things are constantly changing, yet we hold them still in our minds,’ Dr. Langer says. When we are mindful and tuned in, we begin to realize that we really don’t know what we think we know… ‘You have to realize that evaluations are in our heads, not in the things we are evaluating. The more mindful one is, the more aware one becomes of the various evaluations anything can take.’ When we are mindful, we begin to see there are many ways of looking at things — there are alternatives to old ways of thinking.”

I hope with every cell of my being, every quantum vibration that makes me who I am, that Conscious Choice has a mindful impact on at least one person every month. I hope we provoke a new thought, a new action, and a new way of knowing something differently. And, may these new thoughts, actions and knowledge have a positive impact on our community, and the generations yet to come.

Thank you for picking up Conscious Choice. Please come back.

— Richard McGinnis, Publisher

Special note: Abby Mandel Meyer, founder of Chicago’s Green City Market in 1999, passed away on August 14th, 2008. She was very well respected in Chicago’s conscious community. Though she did not pick up the “green lifestyle” until she was in her 60s, she made her new-found passion very impactful. It was her desire to connect local farmers with chefs and the general community looking for sustainably produced food. It was her goal to turn the market into a year long event, which will happen for the first time this year, as it moves indoors to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum from November though April.

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