In this eight-week course on mindfulness, Maitreyabandhu gently guides readers, teaching them how to pay closer attention to their experience. Each week, he introduces a different aspect of mindfulness - such as awareness of the body, feelings, thoughts and the environment - and recommends a number of easy practices; from trying out a simple meditation to reading a poem.Featuring personal stories, examples and tempting suggestions, Life with Full Attention provides both a starting point and a great refresher.
The key to becoming fully alive and joyful is to develop our natural capacity for attention and to be fully present here and now. In this informative guidebook to practical Buddhism you discover: How to live life with equanimity, loving-kindness, compassion, and joy How to cut through obsessions with the external world, relationships, harmful emotions, pleasure and power, and self Tried-and-true methods for cultivating active attention with your body and mind.
Julie Potiker turns some enormous lemons in her life into the sweetest lemonade in this wonderful book. She brings together practical brain science, powerful methods from psychotherapy, and her own friendly, funny, encouraging, and heartfelt voice to offer a wonderful roadmap and toolbox for when life throws some lemons at you.-Rick Hanson, PhD, author of Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom; and Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence. At one point in her life, Julie Potiker was so stressed that she began manifesting symptoms of a stroke. It was at this point she realized she needed to change her life and find better ways of managing the challenges she would inevitably face. Now she's sharing the methods she developed with you. In this compassionate and courageous new guide, Potiker shows you how to find happiness apart from your children's lives, practice important self-care rituals, rewire your own brain to receive happiness, feel safe and comforted in the midst of the chaos, and listen to your inner critic without letting it tear you down. Potiker also introduces Jewish tradition into her mindfulness lessons and explains the importance of following your own spiritual and emotional values as you embark on this new journey.
The behavioral scientist author of Just the Way You Are presents a provocative argument that the quality of one's life is directly related to the focus of one's attention, drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology to cover such topics as the human capacity for training concentration, the ways in which the creative mind thinks, and why people deliberate on the wrong factors when making big decisions.
A comprehensive guide to ending suffering through the practice of mindfulness In Uncontrived Mindfulness Vajradevi guides us in the practice of exploring our experience as it happens. The emphasis is on cultivating wisdom, using the tools of attention and curiosity to see through the delusion that is causing our suffering.
Named one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century (Spirituality & Practice) A 50th Anniversary edition of the bestselling Zen classic on meditation, maintaining a curious and open mind, and living with simplicity. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." So begins this most beloved of all American Zen books. Seldom has such a small handful of words provided a teaching as rich as has this famous opening line. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen as to completely miss what it's all about. It is an instant teaching on the first page--and that's just the beginning. In the fifty years since its original publication, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind has become one of the great modern spiritual classics, much beloved, much reread, and much recommended as the best first book to read on Zen. Suzuki Roshi presents the basics--from the details of posture and breathing in zazen to the perception of nonduality--in a way that is not only remarkably clear, but that also resonates with the joy of insight from the first to the last page.
“Excellent. Fully Present offers one of the clearest introductions to mindfulness in the field.” —Library Journal Mindfulness has attracted ever‑growing interest and tens of thousands of practitioners, who have come to the discipline from both within and outside the Buddhist tradition. In Fully Present, leading mindfulness researchers and educators Dr. Sue Smalley and Diana Winston provide an all‑in‑one guide for anyone interested in bringing mindfulness to daily life as a means of enhancing well‑being. This new edition, how with a new afterword, provides both a scientific explanation for how mindfulness positively and powerfully affects the brain and the body as well as practical guidance to develop both a practice and mindfulness in daily living, not only through meditation but also during daily experiences. Now, you can wait in line at the supermarket, exercise, or face difficult news with calm and mental fortitude. Ditch the absent-minded lifestyle and begin bringing your full self and your full mind everywhere. With research studies, personal accounts, and practical applications, Fully Present highlights how things like simply breathing, listening, and walking can change your perspective--and your life.
The life-changing international bestseller reveals a set of simple yet powerful mindfulness practices that you can incorporate into daily life to help break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and exhaustion. Mindfulness promotes the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones. It seeps into everything you do and helps you meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage. Based on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), the book revolves around a straightforward form of mindfulness meditation which takes just a few minutes a day for the full benefits to be revealed. MBCT has been clinically proven to be at least as effective as drugs for depression and is widely recommended by US physicians and the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence—in other words, it works. More importantly it also works for people who are not depressed but who are struggling to keep up with the constant demands of the modern world. MBCT was developed by the book's author, Oxford professor Mark Williams, and his colleagues at the Universities of Cambridge and Toronto. By investing just 10 to 20 minutes each day, you can learn the simple mindfulness meditations at the heart of MBCT and fully reap their benefits. The book includes links to audio meditations to help guide you through the process. You'll be surprised by how quickly these techniques will have you enjoying life again.
Poetry has long been thought of as a genre devoted to grand subjects, timeless themes, and sublime beauty. Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life from philosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettling transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even a mode of resistance, to a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention. In this timely and engaging study, Epstein examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism and why it has so often sparked genre-bending formal experimentation. With chapters devoted to illuminating readings of a diverse group of writers--including poets associated with influential movements like the New York School, language poetry, and conceptual writing--the book considers the variety of forms contemporary poetry of everyday life has taken, and analyzes how gender, race, and political forces all profoundly inflect the experience and the representation of the quotidian. By exploring the rise of experimental realism as a poetic mode and the turn to rule-governed "everyday-life projects," Attention Equals Life offers a new way of understanding a vital strain at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It not only charts the evolution of a significant concept in cultural theory and poetry, but also reminds readers that the quest to pay attention to the everyday within today's frenetic world of and social media is an urgent and unending task.
***NATIONAL BESTSELLER*** STOP FOR A MOMENT. Are you here right now? Is your focus on this page? Or is it roaming elsewhere, to the past or future, to a worry, to your to-do list, or to your phone? Whether you’re simply browsing, talking to friends, or trying to stay focused in an important meeting, you can’t seem to manage to hang on to your attention. No matter how hard you try, you’re somewhere else. The consequence is that you miss out on 50 percent of your life—including the most important moments. The good news: There’s nothing wrong with you—your brain isn’t broken. The human brain was built to be distractible. The even better news: You can train your brain to pay attention more effectively. Stay with me a little longer and soon you will be able to: Focus without all the struggle. Take back your attention from the pull of distraction. And function at your peak, for all that truly matters in your life.
