Coming to Our Senses Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

by Kabat-Zinn, Jon

• ISBN13: 9780786886548
• ISBN10: 0786886544
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-18
• Publisher: Hachette Books

Summary

Ten years ago, Jon Kabat-Zinn changed the way we thought about awareness in everyday life with his now-classic introduction to mindfulness, Wherever You Go, There You Are. Now, with Coming to Our Senses, he provides the definitive book for our time on the connection between mindfulness and our physical and spiritual well-being. With scientific rigor, poetic deftness, and compelling personal stories, Jon Kabat-Zinn examines the mysteries and marvels of our minds and bodies, describing simple, intuitive ways in which we can come to a deeper understanding, through our senses, of our beauty, our genius, and our life path in a complicated, fear-driven, and rapidly changing world. In each of the books eight parts, Jon Kabat-Zinn explores another facet of the great adventure of healing ourselvesand our worldthrough mindful awareness, with a focus on the sensescapes of our lives and how a more intentional awareness of the senses, including the human mind itself, allows us to live more fully and more authentically. By coming to our sensesboth literally and metaphorically by opening to our innate connectedness with the world around us and within uswe can become more compassionate, more embodied, more aware human beings, and in the process, contribute to the healing of the body politic as well as our own lives in ways both little and big.

Author Biography

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

Introduction The Challenge of a Life's Time---and a Lifetime	1	(18)
PART 1 Meditation: It's Not What You Think	19	(96)
Meditation Is Not for the Faint-Hearted	21	(9)
Witnessing Hippocratic Integrity	30	(3)
Meditation Is Everywhere	33	(5)
Original Moments	38	(4)
Odysseus and the Blind Seer	42	(9)
No Attachments	51	(4)
The Origin of Shoes: A Tale	55	(3)
Meditation---It's Not What You Think	58	(6)
Two Ways to Think about Meditation	64	(5)
Why Even Bother? The Importance of Motivation	69	(6)
Aiming and Sustaining	75	(4)
Presence	79	(5)
A Radical Act of Love	84	(4)
Awareness and Freedom	88	(5)
On Lineage and the Uses and Limitations of Scaffolding	93	(9)
Ethics and Karma	102	(6)
Mindfulness	108	(7)
PART 2 The Power of Attention and the Dis-Ease of the World	115	(70)
Why Paying Attention Is So Supremely Important	117	(7)
Dis-Ease	124	(3)
Dukkha	127	(3)
Dukkha Magnets	130	(4)
Dharma	134	(5)
The Stress Reduction Clinic	139	(4)
A.D.D. Nation	143	(8)
24/7 Connectivity	151	(6)
Continual Partial Attention	157	(5)
The ``Sense'' of Time Passing	162	(5)
Awareness Has No Center and No Periphery	167	(5)
Emptiness	172	(13)
PART 3 The Sensory World: Your One Wild and Precious Life	185	(58)
The Mystery of the Senses and the Spell of the Sensuous	187	(5)
Seeing	192	(6)
Being Seen	198	(4)
Hearing	202	(3)
Soundscape	205	(6)
Airscape	211	(4)
Touchscape	215	(6)
In Touch with Your Skin	221	(3)
Smellscape	224	(4)
Tastescape	228	(6)
Mindscape	234	(3)
Nowscape	237	(6)
PART 4 Embracing Formal Practice: Tasting Mindfulness	243	(70)
Lying Down Meditations	245	(9)
Sitting Meditations	254	(10)
Standing Meditations	264	(4)
Walking Meditations	268	(5)
Yoga	273	(5)
Just Knowing	278	(3)
Just Hearing	281	(2)
Just Breathing	283	(2)
Lovingkindness Meditation	285	(11)
Am I Doing It Right?	296	(4)
Common Obstacles to Practice	300	(5)
Supports for Your Practice	305	(8)
PART 5 Healing Possibilities: The Realm of Mind and Body	313	(90)
Sentience	315	(6)
Nothing Personal, But, Excuse Me . . . Are We Who We Think We Are?	321	(10)
Even Our Molecules Touch	331	(5)
No Fragmentation	336	(2)
No Separation	338	(2)
Orienting in Time and Space: A Tribute to My Father	340	(7)
Orthogonal Reality---Rotating in Consciousness	347	(6)
Orthogonal Institutions	353	(6)
A Study in Healing and the Mind	359	(9)
A Study in Happiness---Meditation, the Brain, and the Immune System	368	(8)
Homunculus	376	(12)
Proprioception---The Felt Sense of the Body	388	(4)
Neuroplasticity and the Unknown Limits of the Possible	392	(11)
PART 6 Arriving at Your Own Door	403	(96)
``I Can't Hear Myself Think!''	405	(2)
I Didn't Have a Moment to Catch My Breath	407	(3)
The Infidelity of Busyness	410	(5)
Interrupting Ourselves	415	(5)
Filling Up All Our Moments	420	(5)
Attaining Place	425	(4)
You Can't Get There from Here	429	(16)
Overwhelmed	445	(3)
Dialogues and Discussions	448	(3)
Sitting on the Bench	451	(5)
You Crazy!	456	(2)
Phase Changes	458	(4)
You Make, You Have	462	(5)
Any Ideal of Practice Is Just Another Fabrication	467	(2)
You Want to Make Something of It?	469	(3)
Who Won the Super Bowl?	472	(5)
Arrogance and Entitlement	477	(5)
Death	482	(4)
Dying Before You Die	486	(5)
Dying Before You Die---Deux	491	(3)
Don't Know Mind	494	(2)
Arriving at Your Own Door	496	(3)
PART 7 Healing the Body Politic	499	(82)
Healing the Body Politic	501	(12)
``I Read the News Today, Oh Boy''	513	(9)
Reminding Myself That Self-Righteousness Is Not Helpful	522	(6)
Politics Not as Usual in the Twenty-First Century	528	(8)
Lessons from Medicine	536	(11)
The Taming Power of the Small	547	(4)
Mindfulness and Democracy	551	(4)
Talking Vietnam Meditation Blues---A Snapshot from the Past, or Is It the Future?	555	(7)
Wag the Dog	562	(4)
``I Don't Know What I Would Have Done Without My Practice!''	566	(3)
The Suspension of Distraction	569	(4)
Moments of Silence	573	(3)
The Ascendancy of the Mindful	576	(5)
PART 8 Let the Beauty We Love Be What We Do	581	(30)
Different Ways of Knowing Make Us Wiser	583	(8)
On the Doorstep: Karma Meets Dharma---A Quantum Leap for Homo Sapiens Sapiens	591	(7)
Reflections on the Nature of Nature and Where We Fit In	598	(6)
Hidden Dimensions Unfurled	604	(2)
Getting Things in Perspective	606	(5)
Related Readings	611	(6)
Index	617	(10)
Credits and Permissions	627	(5)
Mindfulness Meditation Practice CDs	632