Optimism and social connections are essential to wellbeing
UMRA’s October 2025 Living Well Workshop featured Mariann Johnson from the University of Minnesota’s Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, who presented a master class on the basics of mindfulness. She started with an “arriving exercise” that set a wonderful, calm tone for the day.
Wellbeing has six dimensions that range from health and relationships to community and purpose, Johnson said. Stress and uncertainty get in the way of wellbeing, and are related to physical brain function that can be regulated through your own central nervous system. As she explained, wellbeing is not the absence of stress, but dealing with it through mindfulness.
Johnson emphasized that we need to protect our resilience as we age—through nutrition, exercise, and sleep as well as through purpose and meaning. Optimism and social connections are also necessary for wellbeing, she said, citing a Harvard study that found “good relationships were the strongest predictor of who was going to be happy and healthy as they grew old.”
She urged us to develop a “superpower” by combining mindfulness with movement and exercise. She invited all of us to visit the Bakken Center website to find more information and to take their Wellbeing Assessment.
Our thanks to Mariann Johnson for a skillful and well-presented introduction to mindfulness.
—Bill Donohue, UMRA Program Committee
In a follow-up to the workshop, the Mariann Johnson provided this folder of additional resources from the Bakken Center. It includes:
- About the Center
- All Courses
- Mindful Mondays
- Bakken Center Resources
- Taking Charge: The Center's Wellbeing Model
- Wellbeing 101: Tips and Strategies
Enhancing personal wellbeing, mindfully
Tue, October 21, 2025, at 11am
Mariann Johnson
Wellbeing and mindfulness instructor
Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing
Event to be held via Zoom.
Living well as we age means attending to our emotional wellbeing as well as our physical wellbeing. While our retirement years can be the happiest of our lives, they also can bring emotional challenges. Our health, our finances, and our families can all be sources of stress and worry. We need ways to deal with our stresses and be at peace with ourselves.
Mindfulness techniques like meditation are a proven way of helping people maintain emotional equilibrium. UMRA’s October 21 Living Well Workshop will focus on using mindfulness to strengthen personal wellbeing and emotional resilience. It will discuss everyday strategies for mitigating the effects of stress as we age, and mindfulness—as both an innate capacity and as an evidence-based resource—for reducing stress and enhancing cognitive capacity.
Practical tips
Participants will leave the workshop with practical tips for incorporating wellbeing into their everyday activities, allowing them to deal with life’s inevitable challenges with greater ease.
Our presenter will be Mariann Johnson, a wellbeing and mindfulness instructor for the University of Minnesota’s renowned Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing. Johnson has studied and practiced mindfulness meditation for more than 25 years, and is a certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction instructor through Brown University’s Mindfulness Center.
Before dedicating her professional life to teaching mindfulness, Johnson served as an organization development consultant and mediator, working with leaders of Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Her writings on mindful leadership have appeared in the Huffington Post and Mindful Magazine.
Registration for this event is through the UMRA Member Portal. Be sure to create your login (if you haven’t already) before you try to register. Don’t have the instructions? Look for an email from [email protected]. It may have gone to your spam folder.
Register online. Send questions on registration/cancellations to the reservationist. Registrations are accepted at any time up to and including the day of the event. The Zoom link will be sent to you in the confirmation email, and in the reminder email the day before the event.
If you need to cancel, cancellations can be done in your online Profile, at UMRA Member Portal > My Profile > My event registrations.
Please register and join us via Zoom at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, October 21.
—Ron Matross, Membership and Communication Committee chair
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