Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

This is a mindfulness master class.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is considered one of the top mindfulness teachers you will ever see. He has been instructing the mainstream about the real advantages of meditation for decades. Today, thousands of people throughout the world have formally incorporated mindfulness meditation into their daily lives. But what exactly is meditation? Why may it be worth attempting? Or additional development if you already have experience?

The book Meditation Is Not What You Think It Is addresses these issues. Initially published in 2005 as part of a much larger book “Coming to Our Senses,” it has been revised with a new introduction by the author and is now much more pertinent. 

Take this book as an offer to discover more — from one of the founders of the global mindfulness movement — about why meditation is not for the “faint-hearted,” how dropping into awareness daily may be a revolutionary act of love, and why paying close attention is of the utmost importance.

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

The groundbreaking work on meditation, mindfulness, and healing has been edited and updated after 25 years.

Stress. It can suck our energies, impair our health, and even abbreviate our lives if we let it over. It increases our susceptibility to depression and anxiety, isolation, and sickness. Premised on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s famous mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this iconic, ground-breaking effort spawned an entirely new practice of psychology and medicine—shows you how and when to use scientifically validated mind-body strategies derived from yoga and meditation to combat stress, set up a greater balance between mind and body, and promote well-being and healing. 

By participating in these mindfulness activities and incorporating them into your moment-to-moment and daily life, you can learn how to relieve stress and feelings of panic, promote optimal healing, manage chronic pain, and enhance life quality, interactions, and social networks. 

This second version includes findings from contemporary studies on the neuroscience of mindfulness, a fresh introduction, revised statistics, and a comprehensive reading list that has been thoroughly revised. Full Catastrophe Living is a book for the young, the old, the healthy, and those attempting to live a healthier and calmer life in our fast-paced society.

Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life

Jon Kabat-Zinn says that, despite our desire for totality, it is already present and ours. The mindfulness practice enables not only an ephemeral sense of contentment but also a genuine embrace of a more profound harmony that encompasses and penetrates our life. Mindfulness for Beginners invites you to learn how to shift your relationships to the way you feel, think, love, play, and work to awaken and embody yourself more fully.

The scientist, teacher, and clinician who first illustrated the benefits of mindfulness in mainstream Western medicine provided a book that can be used in three distinct ways: as a catalog of practices and reflections to be opened and investigated at random; as an enlightening and appealing start-to-finish read; or as an evolving and dynamic “lesson-a-day” introduction to mindfulness practice.

Jon Kabat-Zinn has discovered certain attitudes and behaviors to be the most helpful with his students:

• Why heartfulness and true mindfulness are equivalent
• The need to always return to our body and our senses
• How our “self-liberating” thoughts are affected by consciousness
• Beyond our “narrative” and into direct personal experience.
• Stabilizing our focus and presence during daily tasks.
• The three venoms that cause agony and the remedies for them
• How mindfulness facilitates healing
• Regaining our entirety, and much more

The recommendation for leading a more mindful life sounds straightforward: redirect your attention repeatedly to whatever is occurring. If you have done it, however, you know that this is where the real problems and difficulties begin. Mindfulness for Beginners offers welcome answers, perspectives, and guidance to help us make this transformation, moment-to-moment, into a more expansive, clear, dependable, and loving relationship with ourselves and the world.

Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

Coming To Our Senses is an essential guide to finding meaning in life, written by a renowned expert premised on the relationship between mindfulness and spiritual and physical health.

With his now-classic primer to mindfulness, Wherever You Go, There You Are, Kabat-Zinn transformed our understanding of the awareness in everyday life. Now, with Coming to Our Senses, he presents the authoritative book on the relationship between mindfulness and our spiritual and physical well-being. 

Jon Kabat-Zinn explores the marvels and mysteries of our bodies and minds with methodological knowledge, poetic dexterity, and convincing personal stories, describing simple, insightful ways we can arrive at a greater knowledge, through our sensory experiences, of our elegance, our brilliance, and our life path in a complex, fear-driven, and rapidly evolving world.

In each of the eight sections of this book, Jon Kabat-Zinn uncovers a different aspect of the grand journey of healing ourselves — and the world — through mindful awareness, with an emphasis on the “sensescapes” of our lifestyles and how a more deliberate understanding of the senses, including the mind itself, enables us to live more fully and genuinely. By “coming to our senses” — both literally and figuratively, by opening to our inherent interconnectivity with the world all around us — we can be more embodied, more compassionate, and more aware individuals, thereby contributing to the rehabilitation of the body politic along with our own lives in both big and little ways.