The heart of The Mindfulness Bell is the creative expression of mindfulness practice offered by practitioners throughout the world. The beauty of each issue comes from the creative fruits offered by our readers. Many of our articles are commissioned, or transcribed and edited from Dharma teachers’ talks. We welcome your submissions and publish a limited number of unsolicited articles.
Submissions for upcoming issues of The Mindfulness Bell should include specific examples of how mindfulness practice in your daily life is helping you to transform suffering, create peace, and improve relationships and well-being. We receive articles with the spirit of interbeing, nonself, personal transformation, and awareness of actions/thoughts/speech as our true continuation.
Please share submissions from your personal practice in the Plum Village tradition, writing from your heart on:
- Upcoming theme: Building Community in Divisive Times—How does your Plum Village practice help you to create in-person connections and find commonality with others? For example, through connecting to neighbors, caring for each other, sangha building/practices/outreach, community activism/organizing, sharing recipes/food as a way to bring people together, supporting personal stability/capacity, cultivating a foundation of friendliness/kindness/understanding…
- Current theme: Thích Nhất Hạnh brought the Plum Village tradition to the West to transform the collective consciousness. How does the monastic path inspire you to respond to suffering in the world?
- Climate justice and engaging with the climate crisis
- Social justice (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, gender, healthcare, income inequality, etc.)
- Buddhist psychology and its relationship with science, public health, neuroscience, and trauma
- Sangha building and outreach
We especially request stories, poems, and artwork from children and teens.
We prefer articles between 600–1,200 words and poetry up to 25 lines.
Please send written submissions in Word format or a google doc with:
- a 3–4 sentence biography with your Dharma name (if any) and pronouns (if we can share them),
- a photo of yourself,
- an image to illustrate your submission (optional, please include image credit).
We appreciate photos, artwork, illustrations, and cartoons. Please send high-resolution images as TIF, PNG, or JPG files, 1 MB or larger.
Send your submissions to mb@parallax.org
Terms and Conditions
Submitters agree to the copyright policy, confirm that submissions have not been published in a print or digital publication, and will not use AI to create their submission.
Deadlines
We accept submissions on a continuous, rolling basis for consideration to be published on our website.
For consideration for our print issues, deadlines are October 1 for the March equinox issue and April 15 for the September equinox issue.
We are a small team and it may take several months for us to respond to submissions. We appreciate your patience.