8 Keys To Practicing Mindfulness


Book Description

Learning how to pay attention to the present moment. Becoming mindful is about the small, everyday things such as pausing to take a breath before you drive off in a hurry or considering the food that will nourish your body before a meal. Or it can mean checking in with yourself before responding to a challenging email or text. Every moment of our lives can become an opportunity to practice mindfulness. This book will invite you to sharpen your awareness and ask yourself with more frequency, “What do I notice right now?” or “How do I need to respond or be with this situation?” These seemingly tiny moments of noticing yourself can have a major impact on your life as you learn to track habitual patterns and awaken to change. Practicing mindfulness is not about being better by figuring it all out. It is about tolerating the moments when you don’t know or learning to be more curious about the struggle. Here you will learn how to establish a basic practice with guidelines for posture and breathing as well as various options for meditations that involve sitting, walking, gently moving or lying down. You can try these exercises at your lunch break, before you rise or fall asleep. But best of all is for you to sprinkle mindfulness throughout your day. Whether you are new to mindfulness or a seasoned practitioner, you can make the conscious decision to change your approach to life. Moment by moment you have the opportunity to cultivate awareness that will make a difference in how you engage with the world on a daily basis.




8 Keys to Practicing Mindfulness: Practical Strategies for Emotional Health and Well-being (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Learning how to pay attention to the present moment. Becoming mindful is about the small, everyday things such as pausing to take a breath before you drive off in a hurry or considering the food that will nourish your body before a meal. Or it can mean checking in with yourself before responding to a challenging email or text. Every moment of our lives can become an opportunity to practice mindfulness. This book will invite you to sharpen your awareness and ask yourself with more frequency, “What do I notice right now?” or “How do I need to respond or be with this situation?” These seemingly tiny moments of noticing yourself can have a major impact on your life as you learn to track habitual patterns and awaken to change. Practicing mindfulness is not about being better by figuring it all out. It is about tolerating the moments when you don’t know or learning to be more curious about the struggle. Here you will learn how to establish a basic practice with guidelines for posture and breathing as well as various options for meditations that involve sitting, walking, gently moving or lying down. You can try these exercises at your lunch break, before you rise or fall asleep. But best of all is for you to sprinkle mindfulness throughout your day. Whether you are new to mindfulness or a seasoned practitioner, you can make the conscious decision to change your approach to life. Moment by moment you have the opportunity to cultivate awareness that will make a difference in how you engage with the world on a daily basis.




8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Take-charge strategies to heal your body and brain from stress and trauma. Understanding how our brains and bodies actually work is a powerful tool in mitigating the anxiety generated by unpleasant physical and emotional symptoms that we all may experience from time to time. Here, Robert Scaer unravels the complexities of the brain-body connection, equipping all those who are in distress with a plausible explanation for how they feel. Making the science accessible, he outlines the core neurobiological concepts underlying the brain-body interface and explains why physical and emotional symptoms of stress and trauma occur. He explains why “feelings” represent physical sensations that inform us about the nature of our brain-body conflicts. He also offers practical, easy-to-implement strategies for strengthening motor skills, learning to listen to our gut to gauge our feelings, attuning to the present, and restoring personal boundaries to relieve symptoms and navigate a path to recovery.




8 Keys to Stress Management (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Easy strategies for dealing with the near-universal experience of stress. Stress has become a near-universal experience as well as a rising public health concern. According to many measures, people today are dealing with stressors that are greater in number and severity than in the past several decades, and this stress is taking a toll on our collective wellness. Bringing considerable content from her popular stress management Web site on About.com, Elizabeth Scott distills information about stress management into central ideas and strategies for consumers. These include learning to reduce the stress response and stressors, practicing long-term resilience habits, and putting positive psychology research into action. These various perspectives provide a multilayered framework for understanding stress and approaching stress management that is inspirational, action-oriented, and backed by foundational and recent knowledge in the field. The quick-to-read “8 keys” format of the book can be utilized on many levels so that busy readers can quickly find relief from stress.




8 Keys To Eliminating Passive-aggressiveness


Book Description

Guidance for dealing with this common and frustrating form of behavior. Many people often say “yes” to something when they’d rather say “no.” They offer cooperation through words but follow up with how they really feel—in actions that contradict their words. That’s passive-aggression. At its heart, passive-aggression is about being untrue to oneself, which makes it impossible to have a clean relationship with others. Passive-aggression as a communication method doesn’t make someone “bad.” It is simply a strategy learned in childhood as a coping mechanism, a hard-to-break habit. Changing passive-aggressive behavior requires knowledge, tools, and practice, as outlined here. The book offers effective methods for transforming passive-aggression into healthy assertiveness to communicate in constructive ways through eight keys: Recognize Your Hidden Anger; Reconnect Your Emotions to Your Thoughts; Listen to Your Body; Set Healthy Boundaries; Communicate Assertively; Interact Using Mindfulness; Disable the Enabler; and Problem-Solve for Better Outcomes. Hands-on exercises are featured, enabling readers to better understand themselves.




8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery: Take-Charge Strategies to Empower Your Healing (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Safe and effective principles and strategies for recovery from trauma. Trauma recovery is tricky; however, there are several key principles that can help make the process safe and effective. This book gives self help readers, therapy clients, and therapists alike the skills to understand and implement eight keys to successful trauma healing: mindful identification of what is helpful, recognizing survival, having the option to not remember, creating a supportive inner dialogue, forgiving not being able to stop the trauma, understanding and sharing shame, finding your own recovery pace; mobilizing your body, and helping others. This is not another book promoting a new method or type of treatment; rather, it is a necessary adjunct to self-help and professional recovery programs. After reading this book, readers will be able to recognize their own individual needs and evaluate whether those needs are being met. They will have the tools necessary to put themselves in the drivers seat, navigating their own safe road to recovery.




Becoming Mindful


Book Description

Featuring embedded exercises and guided meditations—as well as an appendix with audio guided meditations and a resource list—Becoming Mindful: Integrating Mindfulness Into Your Psychiatric Practice provides clinicians with readily accessible tools to use in sessions with patients. With chapters that focus on the benefits of mindfulness for both the clinician and the patient, this guide discusses practical aspects and offers solutions for overcoming common obstacles, including restlessness and boredom, sleepiness, and sensory craving. Key takeaways summarize each chapter’s content, making it easy for busy clinicians to quickly reference the information they need to most effectively treat patients, including children and adolescents; patients battling substance addiction; and patients suffering from such disorders as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. With additional sections on mindful eating, mindfulness and technology, and the growing field of positive psychiatry, Becoming Mindful introduces readers to the full scope of benefits that mindfulness has to offer.




The Five Keys to Mindful Communication


Book Description

Good communiation is essential to any healthy relationship, whether it's between spouses, family members, friends, or co-workers. In this book Susan Chapman, a marriage and family therapist and a longtime meditation teacher, explains how mindfulness can be brought to bear in the way we speak and listen to each other so that we can strengthen our connections and better accomplish our goals. Drawing on Buddhist principles and on her training as a psychotherapist, Chapman explains how the practice of mindfulness—learning to become fully present in the moment—makes it possible for us to listen more deeply to others and to develop greater clarity and confidence about how to respond. Chapman highlights five key elements of mindful communication: silence, mirroring, encouraging, discerning, and responding, and she dedicates a chapter of the book to each. Other topics include identifying your communication patterns and habits; uncovering the hidden fears that often sabotage communication; staying open in the midst of difficult conversations so that we can respond wisely and skillfully; and learning how mindful communication can help us to become more truthful, compassionate, and flexible in our relationships.




8 Keys to Mental Health Through Exercise (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Inspiring strategies from a wellness expert for keeping fit, relieving stress, and strengthening emotional well-being. We all know that exercise is good for physical health, but recently, a wealth of data has proven that exercise also contributes to overall mental well-being. Routine exercise alleviates stress and anxiety, moderates depression, relieves chronic pain, and improves self-esteem. In this inspiring book, Christina Hibbert, a clinical psychologist and expert on women's mental health, grief, and self-esteem, explains the connections between exercise and mental well-being and offers readers step-by-step strategies for sticking to fitness goals, overcoming motivation challenges and roadblocks to working out, and maintaining a physically and emotionally healthy exercise regimen. This book will help readers to get moving, stay moving, and maintain the inspiration they need to reap the mental health benefits of regular exercise. The 8 keys include improving self-esteem with exercise, exercising as a family, getting motivated, changing how you think about exercise, and the FITT principle for establishing an effective exercise routine.




8 Keys to Parenting Children with ADHD (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Compassionate and effective strategies for raising a child with ADHD. Parenting children with ADHD, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, can be challenging and complex. But just as a child who struggles with reading can learn to decode words, children with ADHD can learn patience, communication, and solution-seeking skills to become more confident, independent, and capable. This book, rich with optimism, tips, tools, and action plans, offers science-based insights and systems for parents to help cultivate these skills. Combining expert information with practical, sensitive advice, the eight “key” concepts here will help parents reduce chaos, improve cooperation, and nurture the advantages—like creativity and drive—that often accompany all of that energy. Based on author Cindy Goldrich’s seven-session workshop entitled Calm and Connected: Parenting Kids with ADHD©, this book focuses on developing and strengthening effective interpersonal skills in both parents and children as a way to improve conflict resolution. Following the parenting principle to “Parent the child you have,” Goldrich offers advice to help readers tailor their parenting to meet the needs of their unique child. The book also leads parents to recognize the value of being a leader and a guide to children, building parents’ confidence in their decision-making, and giving children a sense of safety, security, and confidence. The principles outlined in 8 Keys to Parenting Children with ADHD are appropriate for parenting kids of all ages—until they have “launched” and are on their own.