July 2005

I have quoted directly from the jacket cover and the book. Enjoy!

Coming to Our Senses:
Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness
By Jon Kabat-Zinn

I recently attended a presentation by Jon Kabat-Zinn during which he spoke at length about mindfulness and the positive impact it can have on our daily lives.

In my book, Body-Centered Coaching, I use mindfulness as the basic foundation for working with clients to move them from head to heart and to assist them to access more of their body’s wisdom and intuition. Here is some of what Jon Kabat-Zinn says about mindfulness. In the following, I have quoted directly from “Coming to Our Senses”.

This is a 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, Dr. 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.

The application of mindfulness gives rise to awareness. The greater and the more stable the mindfulness, the greater the awareness and penetrative insight that may stem from it.

Mindfulness can be thought of as moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, and as non-reactively, as non-judgmentally, and as openheartedly as possible. When it is cultivated intentionally, it is sometimes referred to as deliberate mindfulness. When it spontaneously arises, as it tends to do more and more the more it is cultivated intentionally, it is sometimes referred to as effortless mindfulness. Ultimately, however arrived at, mindfulness is mindfulness.

Jon sometimes uses the example of a dial-up connection to the Internet compared to a cable modem to describe the felt difference between deliberate mindfulness and effortless mindfulness. In deliberate mindfulness, you could think of it as dial-up networking, where you have to make an effort to get connected, where often the connection keeps getting disconnected and you have to reestablish it. In effortless mindfulness, the connection is always present. No dial-up is necessary. It just is. We are already connected. Things are already exactly as they are and we are already who we are. The realizing of it is always less than a breath or a heartbeat away. In fact, not even that far. No distance at all.

In each of the book’s eight parts, Kabat-Zinn explores another facet of the great adventure of healing ourselves – and our world – through mindful awareness, with a focus on the “sensecapes” of our lives and how a more intentional awareness of the senses, including the human mind itself, allows us to live more fully and authentically.

By “coming to our senses” – both literally 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 little and big.