When painful emotions are circling all around, our instinct is often to reach for external reassurance.  In this practice, law professor and author Rhona Magee offers a gentle reminder that the key to calm starts with a simple pause—and we get to choose that.   Rhonda V. Magee is a professor of law at the University of San Francisco. Also trained in sociology and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), she is a highly practiced facilitator of trauma-sensitive, restorative MBSR interventions for lawyers and law students, and for minimizing the effects of social-identity-based bias. Magee has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society and a visiting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. The transcription of this guided meditation will be online at Mindful.org next week.  Stay curious, stay inspired. Join our community by signing up for our free newsletter:  Show Notes Find more from Rhonda Magee . Go Deeper Working with challenging, painful emotions is at the heart of mindfulness practices. It’s counter-intuitive, but the key to alleviating the suffering that often accompanies feelings like fear, rage, grief, or jealousy is not to fix or overcome them, but to move toward them with compassion and curiosity. To learn more about building this mindful skill, check out these articles:         For another meditation, here’s you can try.  And more from Mindful here: Let us know what you thought of this episode of 12 Minute Meditation by leaving a review or by emailing .