Reading on the Mind
By Barry Boyce There
are plenty of good books these days on cultivating mindfulness,
awareness, and compassion. Here are a few that have especially caught my
eye since last year’s mindful living issue.
 While
it seems questionable that mindfulness can be learned and maintained
solely through a book—a method one wag calls “shelf help”—a how-to guide
can be a great aid to an existing practice. The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems
(Guilford Press; click here) by Harvard psychotherapist Ronald Siegel offers one of
the best available compendiums of tips and techniques for applying
mindfulness actively in your life, rather than leaving it in your
meditation room. Siegel travels through the full range of life
difficulties that arrive at the therapist’s door, including, fear,
sadness, depression, pain, stress, loss, compulsion, illness, aging, and
dying. In each case, what’s appealing about this book is the voice. It
encourages us to apply mindfulness using a gentle and often humorous
tone, which we can adopt as our own. I suspect that those of us dealing
with the difficulties covered in The Mindfulness Solution
(and who isn’t?) need a little help and guidance from live human
beings, but this book also lets us know that there is a lot we can do
ourselves. Many
of us safely assume that a program of the “X Days to Lasting Y”
variety—with Y being weight loss, financial freedom, or career
success—is a gimmick. And Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-day Program
(Workman Publishing Company; click here) by Sharon Salzberg would seem to fit that
bill. Yet beyond the gimmicky title, this book has real depth. Salzberg
has a feel for our minds and how they work—for good or ill—that comes
from years of clocking in twenty-eight day stretches of mind training.
Whether you follow the program step by step doesn’t really matter. You
can open this digestible little book to any page at any time and find a
valuable insight or useable practice. As a bonus, chapter 2 provides one
of the clearest overviews of the current science on mindfulness I’ve
seen. Sometimes an analogy fits so well you forget it’s an analogy. Reading How to Train a Wild Elephant and Other Adventures in Mindfulness
(Shambhala Publications; click here), by Jan Chozen Bays, I truly see how my mind
is an elephant in need of a worthy trainer. In India over the centuries,
elephants have proven to be very useful companions, but they’re not
born that way. A wild elephant runs away or goes on the attack. Such a
large jittery animal can do a lot of damage and is not much fun to ride.
Sound familiar? So, how do you train one? In short simple steps, Chozen
Bays says. For developing mindfulness, she offers fifty-three concise
training exercises—a year’s worth if you work with one per week as she
suggests. They range from the profound (study suffering) to the
deceptively simple (look up) to the habit-confounding (use your
non-dominant hand). If you finish them all and your elephant is still a
little restless, you can start all over again. A
lot of scientific research confirming the power of emotional
intelligence and offering models for how it works has been done since
Daniel Goleman released his landmark book Emotional Intelligence in 1995. In The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights (More
than Sound; click here), Goleman offers an updated introduction and guide to
emotional intelligence in a condensed e-book format. This new type of
book offers many owners of e-readers and tablet computers (iPad, for
example) a size of book that would be uneconomical in print. At
fifty-six pages and with large colourful diagrams, this book is more
like a pamphlet, and it does its job beautifully. To get a clear and yet
nuanced understanding of emotional intelligence and how scientists
currently talk about its operation in the brain, this electronic booklet
fits the bill. I expect to see lots more in this format. The category of mindfulness fiction has been wide open, and now with Mindful Monkey, Happy Panda (Wisdom Publications; click here), writer Lauren Alderfer and illustrator Kerry Lee MacLean (author of Peaceful Piggy Meditation)
have made a serious entry into the field. It’s not all that serious,
though, since it is intended for children. While I’m certain children
will love it, adults are going to enjoy it nearly as much. It’s a page
turner. I’ve read it five times myself, and intend to read it again.
Suffice it to say that Monkey has issues. When he’s walking, he’s
thinking about chores. When he’s doing chores, he’s thinking about
reading. When he’s reading, he’s thinking about eating. We all can
identify with Monkey. Fortunately, so can Panda, and he’s got some great
advice. It’s also fortunate that his advice is straightforward,
non-judgmental, and non-preachy. We all could use a little Panda. Jonathan
Kaplan is a psychotherapist with a practice in Manhattan who trained at
UCLA, so it’s hardly surprising that he started a blog called Urban
Mindfulness. In his new book, Urban Mindfulness: Cultivating Peace, Presence, & Purpose in the Middle of It All
(New Harbinger Publications; click here), Kaplan’s goal is stress reduction, and
his method is to turn the habitual thought of urban dwellers—that our
surroundings are the main cause of our stress—on its head. In a crowded
subway car, he sees the possibility of “a more mindful, compassionate
society.” He also asks whether there are ways for us to consistently
cultivate awareness and presence without feeling the need to get away to
a retreat or a meditation room. The fifty short exercises—designed not
only for tight public spaces but also for home, work, and playtime with
our children—may not create a radical transformation but they might just
remind us to find the space that always exists even in close quarters. We
tend to think of childhood as a happy time and raising children as one
of the most rewarding and joyful times in life, but the hard facts of
modern school and family life often contradict that rosy view. Childhood
obesity, neglect, domestic violence, bullying, substance abuse, and
suicide are major national problems for educators and childhood
development specialists. Christine Carter, author of Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents (Ballantine
Books; click here) and a sociologist with the Greater Good Science Center at the
University of California, Berkeley, believes that the science of
happiness has lots to teach us about how to raise children who feel good
about themselves. Carter’s core belief is that happiness is not an
accident. It is a skill that must be developed from early childhood
through adolescence. It begins, Carter tells us, with taking a little
time to learn how children’s emotions develop and what role parents’
emotions play in the process. Mindfulness
can sometimes sound like a chore or a cure for what’s wrong with us.
It’s refreshing then to see a book come along that celebrates our innate
mindfulness and awareness so robustly. On one hand, The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes
(Shambhala Publications; click here) by Andy Karr and Michael Wood is an
instructional book about how to take artful photographs using a digital
camera and related digital techniques. At the same time, though, it’s
about how at any time we can discover vivid perception that rivets us to
the moment. The photographic practice in the book is meant primarily as
a means of seeing our perceptions as a wide open door to a delightful
and uncontrived awareness. If artful pictures result, so much the
better.
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