New World Mindfulness : From the Founding Fathers, Emerson, and Thoreau to Your Personal Practice

Techniques to fit mindfulness into the demands and pace of real life - Reveals the medical benefits of mindfulness for stress, anxiety, and depression as well as for coping with serious illness and major life changes - Offers a wide range of techniques, including a "high-speed" form of contemplation, from the authors' extensive experience working with this practice as a healing modality We are all busy--and we all long for quiet and connection. Yet despite the growing body of evidence supporting the benefits of mindfulness, the hectic pace of modern life leaves little time to devote to meditation, relaxation, and contemplation. In New World Mindfulness, mindfulness teacher and therapist Donald McCown and physician Marc Micozzi provide techniques to successfully integrate mindfulness into real life so we can rise above the stress of work, family, and community that can easily pull us out of the moment and into states of tension, anxiety, or depression. Dispelling the two big myths of mindfulness--that it is an "exotic" activity and that it requires you to "slow down and find more time"--the authors present a history of mindfulness in the West, from the American Founding Fathers, Thoreau, and Emerson up to present-day leaders in the field such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, and reveal a high-speed form of contemplation ideal for even the busiest of lives. Exploring the physiological impact of mindfulness practices for stress, anxiety, depression, and coping with serious illness and major life changes, the authors show that mindfulness is not about being silent and alone--it can even be practiced as a family or community. Not prescribing change but rather working from within, this book connects Western no-nonsense, get-it-done pragmatism with the yearning for beauty and balance that makes a full life truly fulfilled.