Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

This book had some remarkable passages, but was simply too sprawling to sustain interest over its 600+ pages -- not exactly what you want to conclude about a book about mindfulness, alas. The book pretty much preaches the same message preached in "Wherever You Go, There You Are," which is a more focused tome, and in my opinion, a better place to start for those interested in the mindfulness-based approach to living advocated by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I would give this book 3.5 stars, rounded up to four, but would rate "Wherever You Go..." at a full five stars.

We Americans have a difficult time integrating Eastern ideas into our Western lives. For over twenty years Jon Kabat-Zinn has been doing so in the most practical way, through his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

Drawn from his insight along with his professional and personal experiences, Dr. Kabat-Zinn creates a deep, rich work here which should be read, followed, and taken to heart by everyone with a desire to heal. This healing can be felt and take place on multiple levels simultaneously. Coming to Our Senses is a book which will help you along your way. I highly recommend it to seekers wherever they find themselves at the current moment.

This work is subtle in its message and easy to read. But don't be fooled by its simplicity. This is a powerful work for personal and societal transformation.

I loved Full Catastrophe Living, so looked forward to Coming To Our Senses, but was terribly disappointed. Looks like JKZ believed his press or was smoking weed. Luckily, I have a 10 page rule that mandates if a book doesn't captivate me by then, I get to pitch it. Buh-bye!

For mindfulness, go with Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh or even Eckhart Tolle. About 300 pages fewer with a lot more bang for your buck.

As a teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, I admit that I am biased in regard to Dr. Kabat-Zinn's work, but that having been said, this book is truly a treasure that I will take great pride in recommending to the most important people in my life (family, friends, patients, colleagues).

Dr. Kabat-Zinn has the unique ability to act as the ultimate matchmaker: introducing (or re-introducing) each of us to our very own lives. He does this well in the first part of the book where he refines and deepens the ideas and practices he has talked about in his previous works. Then he goes on to take mindfulness into the broader context of the "body politic" and does a masterful job of putting aside any agenda and simply observing how mindfulness and resting in awareness could benefit our "dis-eased" political and social environment in profound ways. His description of making an "orthogonal rotation" in consciousness of the problems faced in our modern world (as he has taught about doing in our personal world as well) is truly radical and potentially highly impactful if our leaders take heed of his suggestion.

All in all, a deep, moving and potentially important book on many levels. I highly recommend it!

In this book, Kabat-Zinn takes the time and space to discuss not just a leaf or a branch, but the roots, trunk, and branches of mindfulness meditation. While many recent works on meditation or Buddhism are really extended essays exploring a single concept or practice, this work stands out as a comprehensive engagement with and discussion, evaluation and integration of mindfulness meditation practice. The author speaks from the perspective of one well acquainted with the whole tree, and integrates the practices and insights of mindfulness meditation into the entire scope of life, not merely the meditation cushion or the yoga mat.

I restrained myself and read only a chapter or two per day, allowing my mind the time and space to make connections between the ideas Kabat-Zinn presents and the varied elements of my experience. Doing so enriched my own meditation practice significantly and strengthened my resolve and ability to articulate meditation concepts to others.

I bought "Full Catastrophe Living" by Kabat-Zinn for $1 at a garage sale in 1997. Since then, I've yellow highlighted, paperclipped, dog-eared pages and written in the margins of that old book. Integrating mindfulness has enriched everything....relationships, work, spirituality. It is a deliberate and effort based skill. I've read many others on this topic, but Kabat-Zinn is the master. He proves that with "Coming To Our Senses". He always pushes this to places I not yet thought. Either people get this ( you can almost see it in their eyes) or they don't (you can read it in their book review). Fortunately for me, the lady running that garage sale didnot.

I checked this book out from my Public Library and while reading it I quickly decided that I wanted to own a copy for reading and re-reading. It is wonderfully organized so you can always refer back to a particular section easily. The bibliograpy is a gold mine for those interested in further pursuit of COMING TO OUR SENSES.

Before buying this book I read the title, subtitle, blurb on the back cover and all the wonderful endorsements written by all the well known people. And they talk about scientific rigor and science, healing, the planet, the mysteries of the body and such. No where, in any of it, was the word "meditation."

I know that the authors "thing" is the joy of meditation. I agree, meditation is wonderful. But as I already know this, I didn't need to buy a 600 page book to tell me about those joys, I'm already aware of them. The title/subtitle/blurbs/etc. lead me (or more accurately, mis-lead me) to believe that the author had written about something else. Intrigued by what this could be, I bought the book. And found that it's nothing more than 600 pages on the joys of meditation...which, as I said, I'm already aware of.

Here's what I found very odd---there is a title, a subtitle, a back of the book blurb, and two pages of endorsements praising a 600 page book on meditation and not once did anyone use the word "meditation." I'm usually not a cynical person, but I get the distinct impression that this was deliberately done to increase sales. I suspect they felt that if they came out and said this was a book on meditation that people like me who are meditators, and all those not interested in meditation, wouldn't buy it. But by carefully "hiding" what this book was truly about, they'd get more buyers.

While it is a great book on meditation, I didn't need or want another book on meditation, so I was bored and upset that I got suckered into buying it.

And the other reviewers are right, the author is long winded and rambling. Parts of it are not an easy read. I've read whole pages that were irrelevant and pointless and wondered why an editor allowed them to stay.

Very good book. I have the paperback and the kindle editition, but the kindle edition HAS NO FOOTNOTES wherever you read it: kindle device, iPad, android phone... That is very poor quality and really disappointing!

As another reviewer has noted, this book is about four books in one. As a person who is very aware of the wonderful books on meditation available today, of which Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go There You Are is one, I recommend that you not waste your time and energy on this one.

I tried to read this book. I read the introduction and thought to my self; Wow, this sounds great. The introduction was all I need to read. And in my view it was all he need to write. This man must love to over explain everything. As I was working my way through this book my thought was "he must be getting paid by the word". And he loves the word..."I". He makes the simple complex!
I literally threw the book away. His mindfulness might want to consider the reader.
Less is more. This book could have been a pamphlet.

This book seems like a good idea-- 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 Old Man tirade, quite 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 think it's more likely that he honestly doesn't know. In that case, it's just lazy 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 technology 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 "good old 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 without noticing the inconsistency. (And it bears repeating: Ritalin was introduced in 1956.)

The essays might be interesting 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 easy to blame outer conditions for our inner state of mind for our dysfunctional behavior" (pg. 460-- a lot of other examples, though)? Other authors manage to write about mindfulness without finding it necessary to add these elements (Marsha Linehan comes to mind), and I guess that Kabat-Zinn has done a better job with other books, but after this, I'm not interested enough to find out.

I bought this book after watching the author on PBS(John McLaughlin's One on One) talking about it. I was looking for something that had lots of studies in it and hard data. The way the interview went, the author led me to believe this book was chock-full of that sort of thing. The book sounded like a good buy. I was wrong.
Here's what it boils down to on how to meditate- sit, lay down, stand, listen, feel. Really? Just sit and breath? Guess what I'm doing right now? As for the actual nuts-and-bolts about what goes on physiologically, I learned more about the brain and hormonal release and their effects on the body from an intro to Anatomy and Physiology class, or a 15 minute internet search.
The book is basically saying how Buddhism is not a religion, but more of a way, and if you just love yourself then you can love and forgive everyone. Then, we can all hold hands, sing kum-by-yah, and make smores around the campfire. It's just a collection of his new age-lite opinions and inspirational poems/quotes he's gathered from various sources.
This is not a good instructional book for meditation or for understanding the nuts-and-bolts about the mind-body connection. What a waste this was. If you are looking for some mushy, touchy-feely nonsense because you're a lost little lamb then here you go. If you want facts, this ain't it.
WJI

Kabat-Zinn, to his misfortune, is like many people who gain a bit of fame for doing one thing well: they come to believe that that they can do many things well and, worse yet, that they have the solutions to the world's problems. Almost always, 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 famous 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 those pleasant folks who are beheading people because they don't share their ideas. 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 amazing 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 awful. 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 author's father into Alzheimer's. It is, in its own way, moving, but has nothing to do with meditation.

Kabat-Zinn seems to think 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 awful "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

Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of the leading authorities on alternative medicine in America. I've rummaged a bit and read a few review articles and white papers on the field and his work demonstrating the effectiveness of mindfulness-based meditation is widely-regarded as the gold standard by the medical establishment (aka, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality or ARQH, a government funding agency). Thus, I approach his work for the public with utmost respect. I've studied mindfulness-based meditation as part of my treatment for my own medical problems and it has been as effective or more effective than medication or other therapies. Dr. Kabat-Zinn's descriptions of meditation practice, benefits and accompanying philosophical approach are important and of great benefit to people like me. However, I do wish he had a better editor. Without being circumlocutory, rambling, or verbose, nevertheless, his writing is horribly un-concise. Like a great apple tree, his writing needs some careful pruning. I find myself fighting the words to absorb the meaning. Nevertheless, once I get past the verbiage, there is wisdom in this book.