Making Sense of Mindfulness


Book Description

Learn the principles of mindfulness and how to incorporate them into your daily life with this guide to combating modern distraction, stress, and anxiety. In a world filled with noise and distractions―including cell phones, millions of advertisements, and increasing pressure to do more, be more, get more, and make more―it’s no wonder we’re seeing an alarming increase in cases of anxiety and depression. What’s needed is mindfulness. But while mindfulness has become a major buzzword in culture today, very few people truly understand what the word means or how to integrate its many benefits into their daily lives. In Making Sense of Mindfulness, Keith Macpherson offers an accessible, five-step framework that demystifies mindfulness and offers a formula for combating the anxieties that plague daily life. Come back into balance as you discover the tools and techniques to successfully integrate and sustain a daily practice of mindfulness in your life.




Waking Up


Book Description

Spirituality.The search for happiness --Religion, East and West --Mindfulness --The truth of suffering --Enlightenment --The mystery of consciousness.The mind divided --Structure and function --Are our minds already split? --Conscious and unconscious processing in the brain --Consciousness is what matters --The riddle of the self.What are we calling "I"? --Consciousness without self --Lost in thought --The challenge of studying the self --Penetrating the illusion --Meditation.Gradual versus sudden realization --Dzogchen: taking the goal as the path --Having no head --The paradox of acceptance --Gurus, death, drugs, and other puzzles.Mind on the brink of death --The spiritual uses of pharmacology.




The Science of Meditation


Book Description

Drawing on cutting-edge research, friends and Harvard collaborators Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson expertly reveal what we can learn from a one-of-a-kind data pool that includes world-class meditators. They share for the first time remarkable findings that show how meditation - without drugs or high expense - can cultivate qualities such as selflessness, equanimity, love and compassion, and redesign our neural circuitry. Demonstrating two master thinkers at work, The Science of Meditation explains precisely how mind training benefits us. More than daily doses or sheer hours, we need smart practice, including crucial ingredients such as targeted feedback from a master teacher and a more spacious worldview. These two bestselling authors sweep away the misconceptions around these practices and show how smart practice can change our personal traits and even our genome for the better. Gripping in its storytelling and based on a lifetime of thought and action, this is one of those rare books that has the power to change us at the deepest level.




The Miracle of Mindfulness


Book Description

A new gift edition of the classic guide to meditation and mindfulness, featuring archival photography and beautiful calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh The Miracle of Mindfulness is a classic guide to meditation that has introduced generations of readers to the life-changing beauty of mindful awareness. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh offers gentle anecdotes and practical exercise as a means of learning the skills of mindfulness. From washing the dishes to answering the phone to peeling an orange, he reminds us that each moment holds within it an opportunity to work toward greater self-understanding and peacefulness. This gift edition features Thich Nhat Hanh’s inspiring calligraphy, photographs from his travels around the world, and a revised afterword.




Mindfulness


Book Description

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.




Making Space


Book Description

Find peace and calm amid the busyness of your life with this mindfulness meditation book by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Designed to be both inspiration and guidebook for those new to mindfulness practice, Making Space offers easy-to-follow instructions for setting up a breathing room, listening to a bell, sitting, breathing, and walking meditations, and cooking and eating a meal in mindfulness. Whether you live alone or with a family, this beautifully illustrated book can help you create a sense of retreat and sanctuary at home.




Mindfulness (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)


Book Description

Bring mindfulness into your work. The benefits of mindfulness include better performance, heightened creativity, deeper self-awareness, and increased charisma—not to mention greater peace of mind. This book gives you practical steps for building a sense of presence into your daily work routine. It also explains the science behind mindfulness and why it works and gives clear-eyed warnings about the pitfalls of the fad. This volume includes the work of: Daniel Goleman Ellen Langer Susan David Christina Congleton This collection of articles includes “Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity,” an interview with Ellen Langer by Alison Beard; “Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain,” by Christina Congleton, Britta K. Hölzel, and Sara W. Lazar; “How to Practice Mindfulness Throughout Your Work Day,” by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter; “Resilience for the Rest of Us,” by Daniel Goleman; “Emotional Agility: How Effective Leaders Manage Their Thoughts and Feelings,” by Susan David and Christina Congleton; “Don’t Let Power Corrupt You,” by Dacher Keltner; “Mindfulness for People Who Are Too Busy to Meditate,” by Maria Gonzalez; “Is Something Lost When We Use Mindfulness as a Productivity Tool?” by Charlotte Lieberman; and “There Are Risks to Mindfulness at Work,” by David Brendel. How to be human at work. The HBR Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master.




Mindfulness


Book Description

THE LIFE-CHANGING BESTSELLER. MINDFULNESS reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that can be incorporated into daily life to help break the cycle of unhappiness, stress, anxiety and mental exhaustion and promote genuine joie de vivre. It's the kind of happiness that gets into your bones. It seeps into everything you do and helps you meet the worst that life can throw at you with new courage. The book is based on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). MBCT 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 it is recommended by the UK's National Institute of 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. MINDFULNESS focuses on promoting joy and peace rather than banishing unhappiness. It's precisely focused to help ordinary people boost their happiness and confidence levels whilst also reducing anxiety, stress and irritability.




Conscious


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "If you’ve ever wondered how you have the capacity to wonder, some fascinating insights await you in these pages.” --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals As concise and enlightening as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience. What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for granted. But the very existence of consciousness raises profound questions: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious? How are we able to think about this? And why should we? In this wonderfully accessible book, Annaka Harris guides us through the evolving definitions, philosophies, and scientific findings that probe our limited understanding of consciousness. Where does it reside, and what gives rise to it? Could it be an illusion, or a universal property of all matter? As we try to understand consciousness, we must grapple with how to define it and, in the age of artificial intelligence, who or what might possess it. Conscious offers lively and challenging arguments that alter our ideas about consciousness—allowing us to think freely about it for ourselves, if indeed we can.




The Emotional Life of Your Brain


Book Description

What is your emotional fingerprint? Why are some people so quick to recover from setbacks? Why are some so attuned to others that they seem psychic? Why are some people always up and others always down? In his thirty-year quest to answer these questions, pioneering neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson discovered that each of us has an Emotional Style, composed of Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self-Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. Where we fall on these six continuums determines our own “emotional fingerprint.” Sharing Dr. Davidson’s fascinating case histories and experiments, The Emotional Life of Your Brain offers a new model for treating conditions like autism and depression as it empowers us all to better understand ourselves—and live more meaningful lives.