Meditation Is Not What You Think: Mindfulness and Why It Is So Important

by Jon Kabat-Zinn PhD

Overview

Welcome to a master class in mindfulness.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is regarded as "one of the finest teachers of mindfulness you'll ever encounter" (Jack Kornfield). He has been teaching the tangible benefits of meditation in the mainstream for decades. Today, millions of people around the world have taken up a formal mindfulness meditation practice as part of their everyday lives. But what is meditation anyway? And why might it be worth trying? Or nurturing further if you already have practice?

Meditation Is Not What You Think answers those questions. Originally published in 2005 as part of a larger book entitled Coming to Our Senses, it has been updated with a new foreword by the author and is even more relevant today. If you're curious as to why meditation is not for the "faint-hearted," how taking some time each day to drop into awareness can actually be a radical act of love, and why paying attention is so supremely important, consider this book an invitation to learn more — from one of the pioneers of the worldwide mindfulness movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316411745
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	310,631
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.62(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, is founding Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is also the founding director of its renowned Stress Reduction Clinic and Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches mindfulness and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in various venues around the world. He received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT in 1971 in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate, Salvador Luria.

His work in the Stress Reduction Clinic was featured in Bill Moyers' PBS Special, Healing and the Mind and in the book of the same title, as well as on Good Morning America, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and Oprah's Super Soul Sunday, as well as NPR. he has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions such as medicine, and psychology, health care and hospitals, schools, corporations, the legal profession, prisons, and professional sports.

He is the author of numerous bestselling books about mindfulness and meditation: Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness; Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life; Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness; and Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness. He is also co-author, with his wife Myla, of Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting; and with Williams, Teasdale, and Segal, of The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness Overall, his books have been translated into over thirty languages.

Table of Contents

New Foreword Jon Kabat-Zinn ix

Introduction

The Challenge of a Life's Time-and a Lifetime xxiii

Part 1 Meditation: It's Not What You Think 1

Meditation Is Not for the Faint-Hearted 3

Witnessing Hippocratic Integrity 13

Meditation Is Everywhere 16

Original Moments 22

Odysseus and the Blind Seer 26

No Attachments 35

The Origin of Shoes: A Tale 39

Meditation-It's Not What You Think 43

Two Ways to Think about Meditation 49

Why Even Bother? The Importance of Motivation 54

Aiming and Sustaining 61

Presence 65

A Radical Act of Love 70

Awareness and Freedom 73

On Lineage and the Uses and Limitations of Scaffolding 78

Ethics and Karma 87

Mindfulness 93

Part 2 The Power of Attention and the Dis-Ease of the World 99

Why Paying Attention Is So Supremely Important 101

Dis-Ease 109

Dukkha 112

Dukkha Magnets 115

Dharma 119

The Stress Reduction Clinic and MBSR 125

A.D.D. Nation 129

24/7 Connectivity 138

Continual Partial Attention 144

The "Sense" of Time Passing 149

Awareness Has No Center and No Periphery 155

Emptiness 160

Acknowledgments 173

Related Readings 177

Credits and Permissions 182

Index 187

About the Author 194

Guided Mindfulness Meditations with Jon Kabat-Zinn 196