• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 276 0

introduced to a range of ways in which mindfulness can enhance our enjoyment and effectiveness in day-to-day pursuits as diverse as gardening, office work, computing, photography, and playing a musical instrument. Gardener Bob Howard takes us on a mindful walk in the woods that demonstrates how attention to the details of nature can offer surprises and insights that enrich life. Zen cook Edward Espe Brown shows how cooking goes better with mindfulness. Mindfulness helps in the workplace as much as it does at home. Consultant and business coach Michael Carroll, author of Awake at Work, tells how the quality of “not-knowing” (the opposite of being a know-it-all), which emerges from mindfulness, can be a great help in our work lives. One of the greatest stressors in life is having to perform. Many of us are less frightened of catastrophic injury than we are of getting up in front of a group of people. Piano teacher Madeline Bruser’s advice for musical performers can help us all work with the fear that can overtake us when we face an audience.

In part 3, “Mindfulness, Health, and Healing,” we learn how mindfulness is beneficial to many dimensions of physical and emotional health. It helps us think better, regulate our stress, eat better, heal ourselves, avoid overindulgence, and accept the inevitability of aging. Vidyamala Burch, author of Living Well with Pain and Illness: The Mindful Way to Free Yourself from Suffering, introduces us to the distinction between the sensation of pain and the mental anxiety associated with it. Mindfulness practice can help lessen the mental kind of pain. Toni Bernhard, a University of California law professor who contracted a debilitating illness that necessitated her retirement, shares a technique she has used to work with the ups and downs of being sick: mindfulness helps her to approach the uncertainty in her life the same way she approaches the uncertainty of the weather and to be more accepting. If it’s raining, it’s raining; if it’s sunny, it’s sunny. Saki Santorelli, executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, suggests that mindfulness can help the process of healing. If we can learn to stop and be present when we are ill or facing a crisis in our health, we can choose how to respond rather than be driven by fear or habitual neurosis.

In part 4, “Interpersonal Mindfulness,” we explore how mindfulness can help us in our relationships—with those we love and those we find difficult—and in raising and teaching children, helping our society, and benefiting humanity. Pema Chödrön, author of many best-selling books on how to cultivate kindness through meditation, explains how natural warmth can emerge from our hearts even when (in fact, especially when) we are experiencing emotional hurt ourselves. Psychologist Ronald Siegel talks about how mindfulness practice makes it more possible for us to actually be with the people we are closest to in our lives by helping us see that we are more interdependent than independent. While expecting children to practice mindfulness in the same way as adults is foolish, Susan Kaiser Greenland, author of The Mindful Child, presents several hands-on activities that help children cultivate their innate mindfulness. The Dalai Lama, who promotes a universal ethical code that is free of religious doctrine, celebrates our ability to develop “a deep concern for all, irrespective of creed, color, sex, or nationality.” If we include in our own pursuit of happiness an understanding of the need for others’ happiness, we will practice “wise self-interest” and ultimately act according to the mutual interest of all humanity.

In the final essay in part 4, “Creating a Mindful Society,” I introduce you to people I have been reporting on in my Mindful Society department in the Shambhala Sun magazine. Mindfulness practitioners are often called “contemplatives,” which can conjure up the notion of people who spend their time in solitude, or perhaps just introversion, and have little to do with the outside world. In this essay, I introduce