Photo: Courtesy of Harmony Books

Before a run or jog, does your typical warm-up involve queuing up a fast-tempo playlist and setting the volume level to "block-out-the-world"?

There's nothing wrong with that, but for variety's sake, you might want to try tuning in to a different kind of audio during your next workout--like your breathing, and the sound of your feet hitting the ground, and the swish of your arms. Sakyong Mipham, the Tibetan lama and leader of the Shambhala Buddhism community, is (naturally) a strong advocate of this kind of in-the-moment workout. The Sakyong (his title means "the king" in Tibetan) may spend a fair amount of time on a prayer mat, but he's also an athlete who has completed nine and a half marathons, and his recently-published book, Running With the Mind of Meditation, serves as a guide for integrating elements of meditation into the physical act of running.

Basically, the Sakyong advocates tuning into how the run makes us feel (even if the answer is, "pretty crappy"), and claims this will help strengthen powers of concentration, bring clarity and calm to our day, and might even bring us a little closer to enlightenment. Considering the Sakyong's fitness level and appearance (he's nearing 50, but looks much younger, as you can see in the photo to the left), he's definitely on to something, whether it be running, meditation, or doing both at once.

We figured that it might be kind of tricky to skim the Sakyong's book while pounding the pavement, so we asked him to create a mini-meditation that you can listen to on your computer while stretching, on your iPhone while you're on the road. As the Sakyong says, "Let's go for a meditative run."

Keep reading:
Meditate while you work out
More mini meditations you can incorporate into your day

Photo: Thinkstock

Berries bring us back to the carefree summer afternoons of our childhood--that is, unless you happened to spend a summer picking berries on a farm, like a friend of ours did (he's doesn't look back on those days with quite the same amount of fondness).

The rest of us will be delighted to hear about a new long-term study showing that berries don't only play a role in the creation of happy memories, but they can also help us hold on to them. Research published in the journal Annals of Neurology explains that women who ate strawberries and blueberries more frequently over a period of time showed slower decline in memory and attention as they got older than those who at them less often. This welcome research suggests that the tasty fruits may play a role in keeping aging brains healthy.

Based on this study, the sooner you start eating berries, the better it will be for your brain. Fortunately, this year's early spring means that strawberries already growing in the South. Pop them plain, or try one of these berry-centric recipes:

Start your day with a Blueberry Brain Boost Smoothie
Make Arugula with Berries and Feta for lunch
Mix Balsamic Strawberries into a dinner salad, or serve on top of chicken
Surprise someone with a dessert of Chocolate-Covered Strawberries

Keep reading:
More ways to keep your brain young

Photo: Thinkstock

While extreme pizzas with quadruple formaggis and cheeseburger crusts are practically a health hazard, there's reason to believe that a piece of traditional pie may actually be good for you, especially if you ask for extra tomato sauce and sprinkle on the herbs. We've known that tomatoes are packed with vitamin C, folate, potassium, and lycopene, which may reduce risks of cardiovascular disease and cancer. And now, the spotlight is on oregano, which researchers at Long Island University are calling the next "super-spice" because of its anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory properties, as well as new evidence that compounds in oregano may be able to destroy cancer cells. This news calls for a party! Who's in for a slice?

Photo: Thinkstock

Take a look at your lunch. You probably think it's pretty good for you, right? Well, yes, there's a burger on your plate, but you had a light breakfast, so you're starving. And hey, you skipped the cheese (which you really wanted) and got a side salad instead of fries. With the iron-packed beef and low-cal greens, your lunch is a respectable B+ -- to you, at least. Your coworker would probably give it a C at best, especially as they tuck into their salad (which, you've noticed, is covered with croutons--don't they realize how fattening those are?). This is because others tend to find our unhealthy eating to be more detrimental than we do. Overall, 72 percent of foods are rated healthier by the eater than by everyone else--for example, an observer would rate your burger 2.8 times less healthy than you would.

These nuggets are from a compelling series of infographics from the makers of a food-tracking iPhone app called The Eatery (see them all here, and learn more about the app at www.massivehealth.com). There are lots of interesting facts about what, when, where and how we eat, compiled using crowd-sourced data that included 7.68 million food ratings by Eatery users from over 50 countries, but what we found most interesting had to do with perception. Not only do we think we eat better than others think we do, but we tend to have some interesting ideas about good and bad foods: half of the Eatery users considered coffee to be "unhealthy" (they must not have had a chance to read the latest pro-joe research) and 1 in 5 think diet soda is "healthy" (it has fewer calories that regular soda, but since when is artificial sweetener "healthy"?!).

Photo: Thinkstock

A childhood summertime ritual, the humble lemonade stand, became something much more last week in East Texas: 6-year-old Drew Cox decided to sell lemonade to his neighbors in an effort to raise money for his father, who has a rare form of cancer and thousands of dollars in medical bills. According to local news station KLTV, Drew said he came up with the idea to make his dad feel better. "He is so important to me. We like to play with each other; Lots of times we like to play games," Drew told KLTV. Drew's lemonade stand brought in a huge crowd of friends and neighbors, and by the end of the day they had raised over $10,000 to go towards his dad's hospital bills.

The whole story just makes me want to weep and smile at the same time. I'm reminded me of something a friend told me her 3-year-old son said. When faced with the idea of death, when he asked if everyone had to die and was told that yes, everyone died, the boy thought about this for a long, quiet moment and then responded, "Chocolate is a vegetable!"

Personally, I can't think of a better response to the huge scariness of illness, of death. Chocolate is a vegetable. Lemonade will make someone's cancer feel better. Yes....Yes, yes, yes.

(via Upworthy.)

More Life-Lifters:
The Sound of One Hand Playing
A Rising Star's Inspirational Sister
Collecting Jokes for Kids With Cancer

Photo: Thinkstock

Boot camps and sculpting classes will whip you into shape and make you feel sore from head to toe. Despite their thoroughness, even these exercise programs tend to ignore a key muscle group--and that's a huge deal, because this area can cause embarrassing and frustrating problems. We're talking about the pelvic floor, and even if you're not familiar with it, if you suffer from incontinence, you know what weak pelvic muscles can do (or, um, not do).

Pelvic floor training, or doing regular exercises designed to strengthen the pelvic muscles, can be effective in curing urinary incontinence--and has far less side effects than the other popular treatment of estrogen therapy, concludes a new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Best of all, you don't need a gym membership or a set of weights to do these exercises, although you might benefit from a session with a women's health physical therapist who can help you develop a regimen. With approximately a quarter of young women and up to 57 percent of middle-aged and postmenopausal women having these kinds of problems, it's never too early add pelvic workouts into your fitness routine. To start, make sure you're practicing Kegels correctly, and then challenge yourself with these more advanced pelvic clocks.    

Keep reading:
Physical therapy for your lady parts
The two exercises every woman should be doing

Photo: Thinkstock

It's a proven fact that we spend 1/3 of our lives looking for our phones. Okay, fine, maybe that's not really a proven fact, but it sure feels true for me. I have absent-mindedly stowed my phone in a dresser drawer, the medicine cabinet, and once, in the beer cooler at my local bodega. After these episodes I walk around in a daze for a couple minutes or hours, going from one room to another, forgetting what I'm looking for, then standing in that room staring at a corner like a broken robot, then going back into the room I came from, at which point the cycle begins anew.

I know some people who walk through a doorway only to completely forget what they were doing and blame it on old age or being tired or sheer airheadedness. Turns out -- thanks, science! -- there is an actual explanation for this phenomenon. According to University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky, passing through doorways makes our brains hit reset.

As Radvansky told The University of Notre Dame School of Arts and Letters news blog, “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away...Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.” Read the whole article for descriptions of the experiments that led to this analysis. Aren't brains interesting? I wonder if this is why sometimes, when blocked at work, taking a walk even just to the other room can help rev your brain again. But also, I'm just relieved to discover that I'm not completely losing my mind. At least, not because of this.

Read More:
15 Ways to Remember Everything
The Surprising Reason You May Be Losing Your Memory