Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
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- ISBN13: 9780553351392
- Condition: New
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Product Description
In the rush of modern life, we tend to lose touch with the peace that is available in each moment. World-renowned Zen master, spiritual leader, and leader Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to make positive use of the very situations that usually pressure and alienate us. For him a ringing telephone can be a signal to call us back to our right selves. Dirty dishes, red lights, and traffic jams are spiritual friends on the path to “mindfulness” — the process of keeping our consciousness alive to our present experience and reality. The most profound satisfactions, the deepest feelings of joy and completeness lie as close at hand as our next aware breath and the smile we can form right now.
Lucidly and perfectly written, Peace Is Every Step contains commentaries and meditations, personal anecdotes and tales from Nhat Hanh’s experiences as a peace liberal, teacher, and community leader. It starts where the reader already is — in the kitchen, office, driving a car, walking a part — and shows how deep meditative presence is available now. Nhat Hanh provides exercises to increase our awareness of our own body and mind through conscious breathing, which can bring immediate joy and peace. Nhat Hanh also shows how to be aware of relationships with others and of the world around us, its beauty and also its pollution and injustices. the deceptively simple practices of Peace Is Every Step encourage the reader to work for peace in the world as he or she continues to work on sustaining inner peace by turning the “mindless” into the mindFUL.
“This book of illuminating reminders bid us to reorient the way we look at the world…toward a humanitarian perspective.” –Publisher WeeklyAmazon.com Review
Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing is illusory in its subtlety. He’ll go on and on with tales about tree-hugging or descriptions involving raw potatoes; he’ll tell you how to eat mindfully, even how to breathe and walk; he’ll suggest looking closely at a flower and to see the sun as your heart. As the Zen teacher Richard Baker commented, but, Nhat Hanh is “a cross between a cloud, a snail, and piece of heavy machinery.” Sooner or later, it starts to sink in that Nhat Hanh is conveying a depth of psychology and a world outlook that require nothing less than a perfect paradigm shift. Through his cute tales and compassionate admonitions, he gradually builds up to his philosophy of interbeing, the notion that none of us is separately, but rather that we inter-are. The ramifications are explosive. How can we mindlessly and selfishly pursue our individual ends, when we are inextricably bound up with everyone and everything else? We see an enemy not as focus of rage but as a human with a complex history, who could be us if we had the same history. Suffice it to say, that after reading Peace Is Every Step, you’ll never look at a plastic bag the same way again, and you may even renovate a penchant for hugging trees. –Brian Bruya
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Christians who aver superiority by quoting Jesus’ “I am the Truth, The LIfe and The Way” might be abashed to read the “Expedient Means” chapter of the Lotus Sutra, which would place an entirely different slant on that statement and give persons who take for granted the superiority (and exclusivity) of Christianity something to reconsider.
Sorry to say, Zen Buddhism places more emphasis on the BUddha’s earlier sutras, whereas Nichiren Buddhists base their faith primarily on the Lotus Sutra, the last and most vital of all the sutras. Readers should be aware that Zen Buddhism is neither the only nor the essential representation of this faith, and that there are additional sects of Buddhism that have a different slant on Shakamuni’s teachings altogether.
If you are really interested in Buddhist teachings, even just as a base of comparison, I recommend more study before you make a judgement, keeping in mind the importance that the Buddha himself placed on his later teachings over his earlier ones.
From an ex-Christian happily converted to Nichiren Buddhism.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This book is disappointing. Hanh purports to offer helpful information and advice to individuals. He does that, sometimes skillfully, in the first two parts of the book. But, the reader will find in the last part that he is really trying to place a guilt trip on Americans to raise money to help victims of the Vietnam war and to help the poor and exploited in underdeveloped countries. I’m all for helping the victims of war and for providing some aid to people in underdeveloped countries. But Hanh is dishonest in his approach because he says nothing to the people who are the causes of the problems.
Hanh blames Americans for hurts done during the Vietnam War. But, China was the primary cause of the war because it backed and supported it. The war was only the most recent time in history when China and its allies conquered neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. One motivation that the U.S. had for engaging in that war was to stop the spread of communism. That goal is understandable since “communist” governments and movements had already killed many millions of people.
Hanh says that mindfulness will cause Americans to conclude that they should provide aid to war victims and the exploited around the world. But, additional conclusions or questions could be also be reached as a result of mindfulness. I’ll give some examples. Why didn’t the Vietnamese people try to stop the spread of communism themselves? Why don’t people in underdeveloped countries take action to rid themselves of the corrupt governments that are oppressing them? The United States should not have entered a limited war in China’s backyard (Southeast Asia) if it wasn’t willing to confront China. Why don’t the people of Southeast Asia use mindfulness meditation to solve their own problems especially since mindfulness meditation originated in Asia? Hanh says nothing about these viewpoints. He was exiled from his own country after the war. He would have been imprisoned or killed if he had tried to return. Yet, nothing in his book is addressed to the Chinese, the government of Vietnam, the people of Vietnam, or to exploited people around the world.
I gave the book two stars for its first two parts. Some sections in the first two parts are, in my opinion, very excellent. Some are concise statements of what mindfulness meditation involves. Others give topics for meditation that are not arguable. But, some of Hanh’s views seem immature. For example, he said that to know an individual is to like them. If an individual is sadistic and treacherous, how am I to like that person? Maybe I could if being charitable is considered to be loving. Hanh leaves it to the reader to figure out how to like a name who is doing really terrible things.
I’m not an practiced on mindfulness meditation but I would recommend one additional book on that theme over this one by Hanh. That book is Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It is written from a non-religious perspective. If you are considering meditation for the first time, I suggest reading The Meditative Mind by Daniel Goleman. It gives a excellent overview of the theme.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
An simple to read well written all ears book that touched me and made me reflect more clearly about daily living.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This book came to me exactly as described (i.e., just like new), and just days after I placed the order. Quick, accurate, and cheap – perfect!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Every word that Thai has written brings more and more clarity. This is one I will read again and again.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5