Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-zinn

From the Publisher

From the bestselling author and renowned mindfulness teacher, scientist, and educator. . .a guide to living a meaningful life.

This follow-up to the widely praised national bestseller Wherever You Go, There You Are is yet another revolutionary offering from Jon Kabat-Zinn, showing readers how the power of mindfulness can bring radical change to their lives.

In the national bestseller Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn struck a chord in contemporary society that continues to reverberate to this day. It has been embraced by politicians, business leaders, and celebrities and endures as a classic with readers. In his groundbreaking new book, Dr. Kabat-Zinn teaches us how to harness the power of mindfulness to effect profound change in our personal lives and in the world.

As stress continues to exact a toll on everyday life, people are increasingly turning to ancient, meditative methods, which have been tested by science, to relieve the ill effects and become more focused, healthy, and proactive. Kabat-Zinn has been for decades at the forefront of this mind/body movement and the revolution in medicine and health care it has spawned, demystifying it and bringing it into the mainstream. In Coming to Our Senses, he shares how every human has the capacity to mobilize deep, innate resources for continual learning, growing, healing, and transformation through mindfulness.

Woven into eight parts, Coming to Our Senses uses anecdotes and stories from Kabat-Zinn's own life experiences and work in his clinic to illustrate healing possibilities. At its core, the book offers remarkable insight into how to use the five senses — touch, hearing, sight, taste, and smell, plus awareness itself — as a path to a healthier, saner, and more meaningful life.

This is the definitive book for our time on the connection between mindfulness, health, and our physical and spiritual well-being.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. is the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, as well as Professor of Medicine emeritus. He leads workshops on stress reduction and mindfulness for doctors and other health professionals and for lay audiences worldwide. He is the bestselling author of Wherever You Go, There You Are and Full Catastrophe Living, and, with his wife Myla Kabat-Zinn, Everyday Blessings, a book on mindful parenting. With Dr. Andrew Weil he created the CD program Meditation for Optimum Health. He was featured in the PBS series Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers, as well as on Oprah. He lives in Massachusetts.

Publishers Weekly

A passionate tour de force that blends personal experience with cutting-edge science, poetry, and insights culled from many traditions.

Publishers Weekly

"For any of us, perhaps our greatest potential regret may be that of not seizing the moment and honoring it for what it is when it is here," writes bestselling author Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living; Wherever You Go, There You Are; etc.). The scientist who pioneered the use of the Buddhist technique of mindfulness (or moment-by-moment awareness) to help patients cope with the stress and pain of illness arrived at this poignant lesson after seeing the way his father, an eminent immunologist who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, lost all sense of who he was and what was happening to him. In a passionate tour de force that blends personal experience with cutting-edge science (his own and others'), poetry and insights culled from many traditions, Kabat-Zinn sets out to awaken us to the true potential and value of a gift that most of us take for granted: sentience. Our lack of awareness of our impact on the rest of the world amounts to "a kind of auto-immune disease of the earth." Borrowing an analogy made by the neuroscientist Francisco Varela, Kabat-Zinn compares the way our immune system senses the whole of our bodily self to our potential for a mindful awareness. That is, the practice of cultivating this conscious, heightened sentience leads to the realization of our wholeness, as we begin to realize that we don't live just within the envelope of our own senses, sensations and thoughts but within the whole of all that is. Kabat-Zinn illuminates the many facets of this selfless way of being, not just with Buddhist understanding and verse but with quotes from Einstein ("A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe' "), Dickinson, Rilke and many other Western greats. Ardent, personal, frankly opinionated in places, this book seeks to wake up as individuals and as a culture. It is a treasure trove of contemporary wisdom. Author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Product Details