Recommended Mindfulness Books:
Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness
By Susan Smally and Diana Winston
Mindfulness—the art of paying attention with an open and curious mind to present-moment experiences—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. Fully Present 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, such as waiting in line at the supermarket, exercising, or facing difficult news.
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Make Peace with Your Mind
By Mark Coleman
The inner critic is the voice inside our heads reminding us that we are never “good enough.” It’s behind the insidious thoughts that can make us second-guess our every action and doubt our own value. The inner critic might feel overpowering, but it can be managed effectively. Meditation teacher and therapist Mark Coleman helps readers understand and free themselves from the inner critic using the tools of mindfulness and compassion. Each chapter offers constructive insights into what creates, drives, and disarms the critic; real people’s journeys to inspire and guide readers; and simple practices anyone can use to live a free, happy, and flourishing life.
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The Book of Mu
By Melissa Blacker
The word “mu” is one ancient Zen teacher’s response to the earnest question of whether even a dog has “buddha nature”. Discovering for ourselves the meaning of the master’s response is the urgent work of each of us who yearns to be free and at peace. “Practicing Mu” is synonymous with practicing Zen, “sitting with Mu” is an apt description for all Zen meditation, and it is said that all the thousands and thousands of koans in the Zen tradition are just further elaborations of Mu.
The Power of Now
By Ekhart Tole
In the first chapter, Tolle introduces readers to enlightenment and its natural enemy, the mind. He awakens readers to their role as a creator of pain and shows them how to have a pain-free identity by living fully in the present. The journey is thrilling, and along the way, the author shows how to connect to the indestructible essence of our Being, “the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.”
Bringing Home the Dharma
By Jack Kornfield
If you want to find inner peace and wisdom, you don’t need to move to an ashram or monastery. Your life, just as it is, is the perfect place to be. Here Jack Kornfield, one of America’s most respected Buddhist teachers, shares this and other key lessons gleaned from more than forty years of committed study and practice.
Bringing Home the Dharma includes simple meditation practices for awakening our buddha nature—our wise and understanding heart—amid the ups and downs of our ordinary daily lives.
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Meditation for Beginners
By Jack Kornfield
Have you ever thought about trying meditation, but didn’t know how to get started? With Meditation for Beginners, trusted teacher Jack Kornfield shows you how simple it is to start-and stick with-a daily meditation practice.
“Insight” or vipassana meditation is the time-honored skill of calming the spirit and clearing the mind for higher understanding. Now, in this course created especially for beginners, Kornfield offers a straightforward, step-by-step method for bringing meditation into your life.
Using the meditations included in this book, you will discover how easy it is to use your breath, physical sensations-and even difficult emotions-to create tranquility and lovingkindness in your everyday life. These simple, elegant practices are so easy to learn that you will begin enjoying the benefits immediately-while laying the foundation for a lifetime of inner discovery and awakening.
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Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-Discovery
By Mark Coleman and Jack Kornfield (Introduction)
“Nature deficit disorder” has become an increasingly challenging problem in our hyper modern world. In Awake in the Wild, Mark Coleman shows seekers how to remedy this widespread malady by reconnecting with nature through Buddhism. Each short (two to three pages) chapter includes a concrete nature meditation relating to such topics as Attuning to the Natural World, Reflecting the Rhythms of Nature, Walking with Compassion, Releasing the Inner Noise, Freeing the Animal Within, Coming into the Peace of Wild Things, Weathering the Storms of Life, and more. Incorporating anecdotes from the author’s many nature retreats, Buddhist wisdom and teachings, important nature writings by others, and nature itself, the book invites readers to participate in, not just observe, nature; develop a loving connection with the earth as a form of environmental activism; decrease urban alienation through experiencing nature; embody nature’s peaceful presence; and connect with ancient spiritual wisdom through nature meditations.
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Full Catastrophe Living
By Jon Kabat-Zinn
Stress. It is everywhere around us. Even worse, it gets inside us: sapping our energy, undermining our health, and making us more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and disease.
Now, based on Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this groundbreaking book shows you how to use natural, medically proven methods to soothe and heal your body, mind, and spirit.
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A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook
By Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein
Stress and pain are nearly unavoidable in our daily lives; they are part of the human condition. This stress can often leave us feeling irritable, tense, overwhelmed, and burned-out. The key to maintaining balance is responding to stress not with frustration and self-criticism, but with mindful, nonjudgmental awareness of our bodies and minds.
Impossible? Actually, it’s easier than it seems.
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Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
By Jon Kabat-Zinn
When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that’s what you’ve wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that’s what’s on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened.
The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, “Now what?
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Coming to our Senses, Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness
By Jon Kabat-Zinn
Ten years ago, Jon Kabat-Zinn changed the way we thought about awareness in everyday life with his now-classic introduction to mindfulness, Wherever You Go, There You Are. Now, with Coming to Our Senses, he provides the definitive book for our time on the connection between mindfulness and our physical and spiritual wellbeing. With scientific rigor, poetic deftness, and compelling personal stories, Jon Kabat-Zinn examines the mysteries and marvels of our minds and bodies, describing simple, intuitive ways in which we can come to a deeper understanding, through our senses, of our beauty, our genius, and our life path in a complicated, fear-driven, and rapidly changing world.
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Calming Your Anxious Mind – How mindfulness and compassion can free you from anxiety, fear and panic
By Jeffrey Brantley
Drawing on techniques and perspectives from two seemingly different traditions, this second edition of the self-help classic Calming Your Anxious Mind offers you a powerful and profound approach to overcoming anxiety, fear, and panic. From the evidence-based tradition of Western medicine, learn the role your thoughts and emotions play in anxiety. And, from the tradition of meditation and the inquiry into meaning and purpose, discover your own potential for presence and stillness, kindness and compassion-and the tremendous power these states give you to heal and transform your life.
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The Zen of Eating
By Ronna Kabatznick
When it comes to weight loss, the emphasis today is shifting away from fad diets and compulsive workouts toward sane, sensible techniques that incorporate both the mind and the body. This is the first book to apply the 2,500-year-old principles of Zen Buddhism to the modern struggle with the vicious cycle of dieting, losing, and regaining weight. From a Buddhist perspective, overeating is a disorder of desire.
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Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food
By Jan Chozen Bays, MD
The art of mindfulness can transform our struggles with food—and renew our sense of pleasure, appreciation, and satisfaction with eating.
Drawing on recent research and integrating her experiences as a physician and meditation teacher, Dr. Jan Bays offers a wonderfully clear presentation of what mindfulness is and how it can help with food issues.
The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness
By Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn
If you’ve ever struggled with depression, take heart. Mindfulness, a simple yet powerful way of paying attention to your most difficult emotions and life experiences, can help you break the cycle of chronic unhappiness once and for all.
In The Mindful Way through Depression, four uniquely qualified experts explain why our usual attempts to “think” our way out of a bad mood or just “snap out of it” lead us deeper into the downward spiral.
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Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha
By Tara Brach
For many of us, feelings of deficiency are right around the corner. It doesn’t take much–just hearing of someone else’s accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument, making a mistake at work–to make us feel that we are not okay.
Beginning to understand how our lives have become ensnared in this trance of unworthiness is our first step toward reconnecting with who we really are and what it means to live fully.
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The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology
By Jack Kornfield
Experience the Transformational Power of Buddhism’s Psychology of the Heart with Bestselling Author Jack Kornfield
You have within you unlimited capacities for extraordinary love, for joy, for communion with life, and for unshakable freedom—and here is how to awaken them. In The Wise Heart, celebrated author and psychologist Jack Kornfield offers the most accessible, comprehensive, and illuminating guide to Buddhist psychology ever published in the West. For meditators and mental health professionals, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, here is a vision of radiant human dignity, a journey to the highest expression of human possibility—and a practical path for realizing it in our own lives.
The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life
By Elisha Goldstein
You can calm your anxious mind, have greater focus at work and home, feel more empathy toward yourself and others, approach difficulties with more grace and less stress, and be aware of what is most important to you. The secret is in the spaces.
A leader in mindfulness psychology, Dr. Elisha Goldstein demonstrates how to use the space between stimulus and response to break free from habitual beliefs and thoughts that don’t serve you. These techniques will allow you to connect to the present moment to make deep, permanent life changes. In essence, this book teaches the foundation for how the now—this very moment—can change the rest of your life.
To enhance and ease your experience, the text also contains links to simple instructional videos.
