BOOKS
2024 | Wherever You Go, There You Are — 30th Anniversary Edition
This edition has a new Foreword and a revised and updated Afterword. The text has been revised throughout where I felt it was appropriate for greater clarity. This book was always meant to be an accessible and commonsensical door into the cultivation of mindfulness, both as a formal meditation practice and as a way of being in wise relationship to life as it unfolds. Over the decades, I have met many people, young and older, who told me that they had taken it on trips to various remote places around the world at key moments in their lives, or had used it to remind them not to miss the present moment, wherever they found themselves. Many have told me that the book became the foundation for a lifetime of meditation practice and greater moment to moment awareness and embodied wellbeing, even in the face of major challenges. I am gratified and hopeful that this edition will find its way to new generations of readers who are facing the enormous challenges the world is now encountering. May they and all of us benefit from the practices and perspectives offered here, and bring them into the world for the benefit of all life, everywhere, and for the planet itself.
“Want to meet the most interesting, exciting person you will ever know? Let Jon Kabat-Zinn introduce you to YOU. Nowhere else in the literature of meditation can you find so simple and commonsensical a path to yourself.”
Norman Lear
Television producer, Los Angeles
2023 | Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief
A highly color-illustrated book that functions on numerous levels to soothe body and mind and help the reader drop into the present moment, underneath intense sensations in the body and turbulent thoughts in the mind associated with pain. Jon’s earliest studies of the outcome of MBSR described its effectiveness for people suffering with a wide range of chronic pain conditions, most of whom were falling through the cracks of the healthcare system and not receiving full satisfaction, if any, from the treatments they were receiving to alleviate the pain. Often they were told that they would simply “have to learn to live with it.” Too often, that was the end of the conversation.The how of living with it was left unexplored. Once referral to the MBSR clinic became an option, those patients who enrolled were challenged to do something for themselves as a vital complement to whatever medical treatments they were receiving. This book describes in detail the practices they used and the approaches they followed in working with chronic pain conditions of all kinds through the cultivation of mindfulness and heartfulness, directed inwardly as well as outwardly. It includes a series of guided meditations designed specifically for people with chronic pain conditions, available via download. The book also contains the texts of those guided meditations. This program will eventually become part of the JKZ Meditations App.
The Coming to Our Senses Series
In this series of four books, Jon updates the material in his 2005 book, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. Each book opens with a brand new foreword. There is no question that if mindfulness was important when Coming to Our Senses first came out in 2005, it is infinitely more important now—personally, societally, and globally.
Book 1: Meditation Is Not What You Think
Book 1, Meditation Is Not What You Think, addresses the essence of mindfulness, what it is, where it comes from, and why it is so important. You can think of this book as the what and the why of mindfulness, both in terms of your personal life, and in terms of the planet and the threats it is facing, all stemming from human activity, and in particular, the human mind when it doesn’t know itself.
An excerpt may be found at: Medium.com
Book 2: Falling Awake
Falling Awake describes various ways to cultivate mindfulness as a formal meditation practice and as a way of being. You could think of it as the how of mindfulness, what it takes to cultivate it in your own life in ways that might be deeply satisfying, meaningful, and ultimately, liberating; or put differently, to engage in the practice as a love affair with what might be most important to you. It includes instructions for both literally and metaphorically tapping into your sensory experience in both formal practice and in everyday living. It provides detailed instructions and guidance in the body scan (lying down meditation), sitting meditations, standing meditations, gentle mindful hatha yoga, and walking meditation. It also describes how to utilize all your sense doors to take up residency in awareness, moment by moment by moment, fully embodied, and paradoxically, outside of time – not only during formal meditation practice but in everyday living, which, when all is said and done, is the real meditation practice.
Book 3: The Healing Power of Mindfulness
The Healing Power of Mindfulness, is about the science of mindfulness and what is known about its potential for handling stress, pain, and illness more effectively, and ultimately, for healing — for coming to terms with things as they are in ways that can be life affirming and transformative, and that take us beyond the confines of our own habitual self-centeredness. In engaging the present moment in this way, even in the face of the unpleasant and the unwanted, a boundless spaciousness within the very nature of awareness itself is revealed. That boundless spaciousness not only recognizes and values the deep interconnectedness of the world, it also reveals new possibilities of being and acting that are intrinsically both freeing and loving. You could think of this book as elaborating the promise of mindfulness, both inwardly and outwardly. That promise is different for each one of us, and the only way to experience it is through throwing yourself into the practice wholeheartedly, as so many scores of thousands of people have done through the vehicle of MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction) and other mindfulness-based programs now broadly available.
Excerpt may be found at Medium.com: The Infidelity of Busyness
Book 4: Mindfulness For All: The Wisdom to Transform the World
Mindfulness For All: The Wisdom to Transform the World, addresses how the practice of mindfulness is applicable and relevant not just to our own individual bodies and wellbeing, but to the body politic and the future of humanity. It addresses the potential realization of mindfulness through our cultivation of everything that has come before in the earlier volumes. Part I emphasizes that we need to keep in mind that we are simultaneously practicing mindfulness not just as individuals but also as members of the human species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. This means that we need to adopt an evolutionary perspective on what might be possible if we are to find authentic ways to wake up to our own true nature as human beings (as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, or the species that is aware and aware that it is aware) and face the ever-increasing disruptions, challenges, and threats that our precocity and creativity as human beings, along with our tendencies toward mindlessness and self-centeredness, greed and delusion, have created, along with all the beauty, mystery, and wonder. This evolutionary perspective on the role of mindfulness in healing and transforming the body politic is especially relevant as we move more and more deeply into the third decade of the 21st Century. It inevitably and axiomatically includes racial, economic, and social justice and environmental justice as inevitable and necessary outgrowths of the cultivation of mindfulness, and a ripening into greater wisdom and compassion, necessarily reflected in our laws and in our actions in facing the universal threats that we ourselves have created. Part II brings us full circle, to contemplate the uniquely personal, situated in what we know about the universe and our place in it. It celebrates the poetics of mindfulness, through our personal practice and through its embodied flourishing in the more than human world, the world we will leave to our children and grandchildren.
Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, Revised and Updated
This book, originally published in 1997, was revised and updated in 2014. It makes the practice of mindful parenting as accessible and commonsensical as possible to parents, who inevitably find themselves in a vast landscape of varying conditions and resources. Mindful parenting is not a prescription for how to parent, but an invitation to listen deeply to and trust your own instincts so you can parent with greater awareness and balance. Over the years, we have heard from many parents that Everyday Blessings became the foundation for their approach to parenting. And indeed, mindful parenting has become its own field within psychology and behavioral health, supported by a growing scientific literature. There has never been a better time or more support for cultivating greater mindfulness in our lives as parents, and allowing it to embrace and nurture our children, our families, and ourselves.
“I consider this a necessary book. If you are a parent, you will read it with fascination and return to it again and again throughout your life. If you are not a parent, the same is true, because it not only is an invaluable how-to-parent guide, but a beautiful and wise how-to-live primer. Reading this book could become a life-changing event. I recommend it enthusiastically.”
― Marion Wright Edelman, President, The Children’s Defense Fund
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Second Edition, Revised and Updated.
Second Edition, Revised and Updated
This book is the foundation of the curriculum of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a program currently available in over 720 hospitals, and clinics in the U.S. and abroad. It articulates the transformative potential of cultivating mindfulness in one’s own life in the face of stress, pain, and illness, and documents its clinical effectiveness.
A vibrant and ever-growing science of mindfulness has documented a broad range of positive effects on the brain, on gene expression, on cellular factors associated with aging, and on the immune system, as well as on our own mind and its habitual patterns. This edition makes some of the more exciting and promising of these scientific findings available to the reader, as well as explaining the benefits of MBSR for anxiety, depression, and other mental afflictions. It is meant to be a friendly guide and ongoing support if you wish to begin or to deepen a daily practice of mindfulness in your own life, especially in the face of stress, pain, or a chronic illness.
“A book for everyone... Jon Kabat-Zinn has done more than any other person on the planet to spread the power of mindfulness to the lives of ordinary people and major societal institutions.”
Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D. Founder and Chair, Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin - Madison
author of The Emotional Life of your Brain (with Sharon Begley)
Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning, Origins, and Applications
This volume contains a wide range of papers by Buddhist scholars, contemplatives, philosophers, scientists, clinicians, and educators addressing various perspectives on mindfulness. It was originally published as a special issue of a journal, Contemporary Buddhism, Volume 12, 2011. That issue was so popular and sold out so quickly that it was decided to publish its contents as a book so that it would be much more widely available as a resource for anyone, scholar or practitioner alike, who might be interested in taking their personal understanding of mindfulness to a deeper level by encountering differing views. All of the contributions break exciting new ground: in our understanding of the various ways in which mindfulness has been understood within the Buddhist traditions themselves; in how those traditional views may be changing; in regard to the ways in which the cultivation of mindfulness can transform our relationship to suffering; in terms of technical questions concerning whether and how mindfulness might be directly and indirectly “measured;” and in terms of specific innovative applications in different contexts in education and leadership. This is not an instructional book for those who wish to bring mindfulness into their own lives. Rather, it is for those who wish to broaden their horizons around the practice of mindfulness itself within different frameworks and disciplines. A final chapter by Jon recounts some of the history of MBSR and how it came into being, its universality, the different dharma streams on which it is based, and some of the challenges associated with becoming an effective MBSR instructor.
Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—And Your Life
This book is meant to be a doorway into the cultivation of mindfulness for both beginners and for those who have a long-standing relationship to the practice of mindfulness. It is accompanied by a CD of five meditations guided by Jon [mindfulness of eating; of breathing; of the body as a whole; of sounds, thoughts, and emotions; and as pure awareness] that, as part of a two-CD set, was the original ground for this book. The material of the introductory CD has been expanded and refined to become the book’s text. It is structured in five parts: Entering; Sustaining; Deepening; Ripening; and Practicing. Brief chapters invite the reader to drink in, explore, and experiment with embodying a range of essential dimensions of mindfulness, including formal meditation practices and the cultivation of mindfulness in everyday life. Since the cultivation of mindfulness in one’s life always follows a non-linear trajectory, it only matters that one begins. The rest unfolds as with any adventure, with a degree of mystery and unknowability, as life itself becomes both the practice and the teacher.