Little Book Of Momfulness

You've run out of diapers, you also haven't eaten in well over twelve hours and your house is beginning to look like it has been burglarized. If you're at the end of your tether and wondering if it's just you (it isn't), then you need The Little Book of Momfulness. In The Little Book of Momfulness, a non-expert mom takes you through the non-perfect guide to getting through motherhood without losing your mind from exhaustion. It includes advice on how to take time throughout the day to restore your equilibrium (like having a long, loud scream in a closet), how to shortcut child-related tasks (by avoiding them altogether) and how to let off steam through momful exercises. It also includes the news that IT'S NOT JUST YOU who is struggling with the demands of being the 'perfect' mother, and if you need a long swig of prosecco (or any wine from the fridge, or the cupboard for that matter) at the end of a day of parenting, then that is more than a-ok.

A “delightful . . . engaging” spiritual handbook for busy moms of all faiths by a marriage and family therapist, spiritual director and mother of five(Publishers Weekly). Denise Roy combines the hard-won wisdom of a parent with the insights of meditation to create a spiritual practice that goes to the heart of everyday life: mothering with mindfulness. Through anecdotes, reflections, and specific practices, this book invites mothers to wake up and embrace their lives, discovering that they are always standing on holy ground. “Momfulness is a wonderful guide for conscious mothering in an all-too-busy world. I love this book!” —Michelle Borba, author, Twelve Simple Secrets Real Moms Know

Thirty years ago, "mindfulness" was a Buddhist principle mostly obscure to the west. Today, it is a popular cure-all for Americans' daily problems. A massive and lucrative industry promotes mindfulness in every aspect of life, however mundane or unlikely: Americans of various faiths (or none at all) practice mindful eating, mindful sex, mindful parenting, mindfulness in the office, mindful sports, mindfulness-based stress relief and addiction recovery, and hire mindful divorce lawyers. Mindfulness is touted by members of Congress, CEOs, and Silicon Valley tech gurus, and is even being taught in public schools, hospitals, and the military. Focusing on such processes as the marketing, medicalization, and professionalization of meditation, Jeff Wilson reveals how Buddhism shed its countercultural image and was assimilated into mainstream American culture. The rise of mindfulness in America, Wilson argues, is a perfect example of how Buddhism enters new cultures and is domesticated: in each case, the new cultures take from Buddhism what they believe will relieve their specific distresses and concerns, and in the process create new forms of Buddhism adapted to their needs. Wilson also tackles the economics of the mindfulness movement, examining commercial programs, therapeutic services, and products such as books, films, CDs, and even smartphone applications. Mindful America is the first in-depth study of this phenomenon--invaluable for understanding how mindfulness came to be applied to such a vast array of non-religious concerns and how it can be reconciled with traditional Buddhism in America.

A guidebook to making life meaningful by cultivating compassion, embracing adversity, and training the mind—from one of the foremost living Buddhist nuns. Freeing ourselves from our habitual emotional patterns starts with taming the mind. Why is this so important? Because a wild mind tends to hurt rather than heal. Taming the mind helps us uncover our true nature and connect with those around us from a grounded place of self-awareness. Through caring for others you can walk the Buddhist path of bodhisattvas, becoming a spiritual hero of compassion. Based on the classic fourteenth-century mind training text of Tibetan Buddhism called the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, this guidebook shares pithy advice on how to act as bodhisattvas in our everyday lives, enabling us to possess compassion in an authentic way. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, an exemplary spiritual teacher who spent over a dozen years meditating in the Himalayas and one of the first Buddhist nuns to be ordained in the West, shares her reflections on this famous teaching and how to live a life of mindfulness and selflessness.

This playful and accessible guide presents a Buddhist psychological system for enhancing self-awareness, interpersonal communication, and creativity This book invites us to celebrate our strengths and work with our weaknesses by learning to identify and utilize five basic personal styles or energies based on a Tibetan Buddhist practice. Each of the five wisdom energies is associated with particular ways of perceiving and interacting with the world and also with particular colors, elements, senses, seasons, and times of day. With easy, fun, and engaging exercises and stories, Irini Rockwell shows us how to identify which energies are active in our lives, and how we can work with them in any situation to improve self-awareness, communication, and creative expression. According to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, each of us has one or two dominant energies, but these can shift and change over time, and we can manifest different energies in different areas of our lives. Each of the five energies has its unique wisdom, but also its neurotic tendencies. By learning to recognize which energies we possess—and which are present in those around us—we can learn to relax and appreciate our natural traits and those of others, and we can move away from our neuroses toward the wisdom-aspects of our character.

Fresh and never-before published talks on the crux of Buddhist practice and how to uncover wonder in your daily life from legendary Zen teacher and bestselling author Charlotte Joko Beck. "As you embrace the suffering of life, the wonder shows up at the same time. They go together."--Charlotte Joko Beck In this collection of never-before published teachings by Charlotte Joko Beck, one of the most influential Western-born Zen teachers, she explores our “core beliefs”—the hidden, negative convictions we hold about ourselves that direct our thoughts and behavior and prevent us from experiencing life as it is. Wryly humorous and relatable, Beck uses powerfully clear language to show how our lives present us with daily opportunities to move from thinking to experiencing, from compulsivity to confidence, and from anguish to peace. Whether you are a Zen practitioner or a reader interested in exploring these teachings for the first time, Ordinary Wonder offers the depth and breadth of Beck’s remarkable experience in an accessible guide to practice amidst the struggles of daily life.

An interdisciplinary deep dive into Buddhist jhāna meditation and how it can transform our understanding of self and consciousness States of profound meditative concentration, the jhānas are central to the earliest Buddhist teachings. For centuries in Southeast Asia, oral yogāvacara (yoga practitioner) lineages kept traditional jhāna practices alive, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reforms in Theravāda Buddhism downplayed the importance of jhāna in favor of vipassanā (insight) meditation. Some began to consider the jhānas to be strictly the domain of monastics, unattainable in the context of modern lay life. In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the jhānas, and as researcher Paul Dennison shows, the esoteric and sometimes “magical” pre-reform practices of Southeast Asia hold powerful potential for modern lay practitioners living in a more scientifically minded world. Drawing on traditional Buddhist doctrine, teachings from lesser-known meditation texts such as the Yogāvacara’s Manual, and findings from the first in-depth, peer-reviewed neuroscience study of jhāna meditation, Dennison unpacks this ancient practice in all its nuance while posing novel questions about perception, subjectivity, and the nature of enlightenment.