Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment_and Your Life
Language: English
Pages: 184
ISBN: 1604076585
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Here, the teacher, scientist, and clinician who first demonstrated the benefits of mindfulness within mainstream Western medicine offers a book that you can use in three unique ways: as a collection of reflections and practices to be opened and explored at random; as an illuminating and engaging start-to-finish read; or as an unfolding “lesson- a-day” primer on mindfulness practice.
Beginning and advanced meditators alike will discover in these pages a valuable distillation of the key attitudes and essential practices that Jon Kabat-Zinn has found most useful with his students, including:
- Why heartfulness is synonymous with true mindfulness
- The value of coming back to our bodies and to our senses over and over again
- How our thoughts “self-liberate” when touched by awareness
- Moving beyond our “story” into direct experience
- Stabilizing our attention and presence amidst daily activities
- The three poisons that cause suffering—and their antidotes
- How mindfulness heals, even after the fact
- Reclaiming our wholeness, and more
The prescription for living a more mindful life seems simple enough: return your awareness again and again to whatever is going on. But if you’ve tried it, you know that here is where all the questions and challenges really begin. Mindfulness for Beginners provides welcome answers, insights, and instruction to help us make that shift, moment by moment, into a more spacious, clear, reliable, and loving connection with ourselves and the world.
Includes a complete CD with five guided mindfulness meditations by Jon Kabat-Zinn, selected from the audio program that inspired this book.
Contents
Part I Entering
Beginner’s Mind
The Breath
Who Is Breathing?
The Hardest Work in the World
Taking Care of This Moment
Mindfulness Is Awareness
Doing Mode and Being Mode
A Grounding in Science
Mindfulness is Universal
Wakefulness
Stabilizing and Calibrating Your Instrument
Inhabiting Awareness Is the Essence of Practice
The Beauty of Discipline
Adjusting Your Default Setting
Awareness: Our Only Capacity Robust Enough to Balance Thinking
Attention and Awareness Are Trainable Skills
Nothing Wrong with Thinking
Befriending Our Thinking
Images of Your Mind That Might Be Useful
Not Taking Our Thoughts Personally
Selfing
Our Love Affair with Personal Pronouns—Especially I, Me, and Mine
Awareness Is a Big Container
The Objects of Attention Are Not as Important as the Attending Itself
Part II: Sustaining
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
A World-Wide Phenomenon
An Affectionate Attention
Mindfulness Brought to All the Senses
Proprioception and Interoception
The Unity of Awareness
The Knowing Is Awareness
Life Itself Becomes the Meditation Practice
You Already Belong
Right Beneath Our Noses
Mindfulness is Not Merely a Good Idea
To Come Back in Touch
Who Am I? Questioning Our Own Narrative
You Are More Than Any Narrative
You Are Never Not Whole
Paying Attention in a Different Way
Not Knowing
The Prepared Mind
What Is Yours to See?
Part III: Deepening
No Place to Go, Nothing to Do
The Doing That Comes Out of Being
To Act Appropriately
If You Are Aware of What Is Happening, You Are Doing It Right
Non-Judging Is an Act of Intelligence and Kindness
You Can Only Be Yourself—Thank Goodness!
Embodied Knowing
Feeling Joy for Others
The Full Catastrophe
Is My Awareness of Suffering Suffering?
What Does Liberation from Suffering Mean?
Hell Realms
Liberation Is in the Practice Itself
The Beauty of the Mind That Knows Itself
Taking Care of Your Meditation Practice
Energy Conservation in Meditation Practice
An Attitude of Non-Harming
Greed: The Cascade of Dissatisfactions
Aversion: The Flip Side of Greed
Delusion and the Trap of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Now Is Always the Right Time
The “Curriculum” is “Just This”
Giving Your Life Back to Yourself
Bringing Mindfulness Further Into the World
Part IV: Ripening
The Attitudinal Foundations of Mindfulness Practice
Non-Judging
Patience
Beginner’s Mind
Trust
Non-Striving
Acceptance
Letting Go
Part V: Practicing
Getting Started with Formal Practice
Mindfulness of Eating
Mindfulness of Breathing
Mindfulness of the Body as a Whole
Mindfulness of Sounds, Thoughts, and Emotions
Mindfulness as Pure Awareness
Frequency: The Power of Personal Vibration
Relationships: To Oneself, To Others, To the World (Books on Living for Teens, Volume 2)
Married to Distraction: Restoring Intimacy and Strengthening Your Marriage in an Age of Interruption
Freedom Flight: The Origins of Mental Power
particular Full Catastrophe Living; Wherever You Go, There You Are; and Coming to Our Senses. Mindfulness for Beginners is meant to provide a straightforward, convenient portal into the essentials of mindfulness practice, including its formal cultivation and the essence of applying it in everyday life. Both will wind up being part of your ongoing work if you decide to say “yes” to the invitation. The chapters here are by design brief rather than comprehensive. They are meant to stimulate
lacking, whatever it is, then we will feel complete again. And that is true, as far as it goes. It does feel good … until we feel incomplete again, and then we grasp a little bit more … until we get the next thing. And that sets off a never-ending cascade of dissatisfactions. It is clinging writ large, the tendency that the Buddha declared to be the root cause of suffering. When greed is operating, there always seems to be something missing — something that if only we had it, we would be
Reduction Clinic, many of our patients say to us, with great regularity, that they feel that mindfulness training in the form of MBSR gave them back their lives and they are grateful to us for it. We often point out that while that may be true to a degree, it is also true — perhaps even more true — that we didn’t give them anything. Whatever benefits they received came from their own hard work with the meditation practice, from the inspiration and support of the other people in their class,
savings on all our titles. To listen to a podcast interview with Sounds True publisher Tami Simon and author Jon Kabat-Zinn, visit SoundsTrue.com/bonus/JKZmindful. Sounds True, Inc. Boulder, CO 80306 Copyright © 2012 Jon Kabat-Zinn Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this program may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher. Published 2012 Cover and book design by Karen Polaski Cover photo
position to learn. So when we bring a certain discipline to the cultivation of mindfulness and are aware of how challenging it is to bring a sustained attending to any aspect of our lives, we are actually creating the conditions for learning something fundamental from life itself. Then life becomes the meditation practice and the meditation teacher, and whatever happens in any moment is simply the curriculum of that moment. The real challenge is how will we be in relationship to whatever is
