Summary
More than twenty 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 . He followed that up with 2005's Coming to Our Senses , the definitive book for our time on the connection between mindfulness and our well-being on every level, physical, cognitive, emotional, social, planetary, and spiritual. Now, Coming to Our Senses is being repackaged into 4 smaller books, each focusing on a different aspect of mindfulness, and each with a new foreword written by the author. In the third of these books, The Healing Power of Mindfulness (which was originally published as Part V and Part VI of Coming to Our Senses ), Kabat-Zinn focuses on the ways mindfulness can change the body and rewire the mind-explaining what we're learning about neuroplasticity and the brain, how meditation can affect the immune system, and what mindfulness can teach us about facing impermanence and, eventually, the end of our own lives. By "coming to our senses"-both literally and metaphorically-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 little and big.
Featured in Bill Moyer's PBS Special Healing and the Mind, Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD. is executive director at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He is the founder and former director of the UMMC Stress Reduction Clinic and an associate professor of medicine in the division of preventive and behavioral medicine.
Using mindfulness meditation, Kabat-Zinn works to help people reduce stress and deal with chronic pain, and a variety of illnesses, particularly breast cancer. He was a trainer for the 1984 U.S. Men's Olympic Rowing Team and is especially interested in reducing the stress-related problems in the inner city and in prison populations.
Kabat-Zinn's books include: Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness (1991); Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (1994), Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting (1997), which was co-authored with his wife, Myla, and Meditation Is Not What You Think: Mindfulness and why it is so important.
(Bowker Author Biography)