Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness
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- ISBN13: 9780786886548
- Condition: USED – VERY GOOD
- Notes:
Product Description
Now in paperback, the guide to living a meaningful life from the world stress practiced
“[The] journey toward health and sanity is nothing less than an invitation to wake up to the extensiveness of our lives as if they really mattered . . .” –Jon Kabat-Zinn, from the Introduction
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 tie between mindfulness and our physical and spiritual wellbeing. With scientific rigor, poetic deftness, and compelling personal tales, 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 intricate, dread-driven, and rapidly changing world.
In each of the book’s eight parts, Jon Kabat-Zinn explores another facet of the fantastic adventure of healing ourselves — and our world — through 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 senses” — both factually and metaphorically by opening to our innate connectedness with the world around us and within us — we 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 small and huge.
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After seeing Jon Kabat-Zinn on McLaughlin’s One-on-One I was intrigued and chose to buy this book. I was sorely disappointed. He makes some excellent observations (e.g. about ADD and the 24/7 lifestyle), but offers solutions based only on far-eastern philosophies (yoga, meditation, etc). Not what I expected. I would not recommend this book to devout Christians or Muslims. Better stick with the Bible or the Koran, or the writings of accomplished Biblical or Koranic scholars.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
really, i couldn’t read this book. i couldn’t get through it. all i can say is this guy needs to stop over analizing meditation and do more of it. i know, i know – he has creditials but that didn’t change the fact that i regularly establish myself exhausted by the run – ons in this book. most sentences are a paragragh long. maybe jon just likes to hear himself talk and is facinated by his own mind’s constant wit. if you want to read from an leader who clearly has incorporated meditaion and mindfulness in their very being try thich nhat hanh.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Kabat-Zinn, to his misfortune, is like many people who gain a bit of fame for doing one thing well: they come to judge that that they can do many things well and, worse yet, that they have the solutions to the world’s problems. Nearly permanently, that solution is dependent upon people behaving or doing what they do.
This book is not about the meditative strategies that made Kabat-Zinn justifiably legendary in some circles. Rather, “Coming To Our Senses” is a confused, disjointed, rambling, disconnected and amazingly naive and ignorant treatise on how the world will be saved if only everyone could be induced to meditate.
Tell that to persons pleasant folks who are beheading people because they don’t share their thoughts. Or to the punks on the street who take what they want with whatever violence they deem appropriate. Tell that to the smarmy politicians and others who feast on the taxpayer’s money.
Kabat-Zinn should have stuck to helping people use mindfulness (his term of art for meditation) to help them overcome stress.
Kabat-Zinn displays incredible levels of naivete, ignorance and gullibility in these pages when he leaves his area of expertise. He leaves no doubt that he is a child of the 1960s. This is apparent in his endless litany of common left-wing political nostrums.
Kabat-Zinn’s writing style in this work is absolutely dreadful. I counted 97 words in one sentence and it was not an exception. In many ways it seems that Kabat-Zinn is imitating — poorly — Joyce and Proust. One chapter is devoted to a description of the descent of the leader’s father into Alzheimer’s. It is, in its own way, moving, but has nothing to do with meditation.
Kabat-Zinn seems to reflect that like Barbara Streisand and Sean Penn, that he has something to say not merely on the state of the world but about how humankind can save itself. This is the kind of senseless monologue that you would expect to see as a self-published work from a vanity press.
I simply cannot overstress how dreadful “Coming To Our Senses” is. If you want to learn about meditation, Kabat-Zinn’s earlier works are far, far better. If you want New Age nonsense, then you might find this wretched work satisfying.
Jerry
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I was excited to see a new book from Kabat-Zinn, but so far I have establish many of the “chapters” seem to have a tiny scrap of an thought that has somehow been blown into several pages–much ado about nothing, I’m worried. Really, an incredible amount of much ado, agreed the part of the book. I plot to separate wheat from chaffe to get what I can from my buy.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This book seems like a excellent thought– basically, it’s a series of essays about meditation, its positive effects, our various inabilities to use our inner and outer senses the way we should to interact the world, and how we could handle it all better. But it ends up sounding like an ill-informed, overly New-Agey, endless Grumpy Ancient Man tirade, reasonably honestly.
I had a feeling that things weren’t going to go well once Kabat-Zinn hit us with Chapter 3: “Thirty years ago, no one had ever heard of attention deficit.” WRONG! Unless you really want to be weasely, but I reflect it’s more likely that he honestly doesn’t know. In that case, it’s just bone idle research, which is worse. In 1960, this disorder was called “minimal brain dysfunction”. Amphetamines have been prescribed for ADHD (under whatever name) since the 1930’s. Ritalin was introduced in 1956. So it wasn’t caused by some sinister plague of cell phones and “the internets”. We’re treated to a whole lot more of the same as Kabat-Zinn continues to rant and rave about how modern equipment is turning us into a bunch of mindless, emotionless robots with three-second attention spans, an endlessly repeated argument which would have been a whole lot more convincing if it were ever backed up by any actual evidence (it isn’t– only anecdotes.) We also get continuous nostalgia for the “excellent ancient days” in the 1950’s when we all supposedly had tons of leisure time and wonderful lives in every way, although Kabat-Zinn bizarrely also notes that racial segregation, racist violence, and Jim Crow laws in the South might have been a tad bit of an inconvenience, seemingly lacking noticing the inconsistency. (And it bears repeating: Ritalin was introduced in 1956.)
The essays might be appealing to some, I guess, but why was it necessary to have all the weird cranky ranting and raving along with them? And why so judgmental (“it is so simple to blame outer conditions for our inner state of mind for our dysfunctional behavior” (pg. 460– a lot of additional examples, though)? Additional authors manage to write about mindfulness lacking finding it necessary to add these fundamentals (Marsha Linehan comes to mind), and I guess that Kabat-Zinn has done a better job with additional books, but after this, I’m not interested enough to find out.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5