Ed Halliwell, the Guardian: Mindfulness meditation was once a tool of the counter-culture. But now it’s transforming the minds of conservative America.

“A quiet revolution is happening in America.” So says Tim Ryan, Ohio congressman and author of A Mindful Nation, which documents the spread of mindfulness meditation across the US, and argues for its widespread adoption as a way to favourably affect the country’s healthcare system, economy, schools and military.

Just published, the book is significant not so much for what’s being said – evidence for the benefits of mindfulness has been piling up in scientific journals over recent years – but …

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Daniel Burke: By age 35, Congressman Tim Ryan had been one of Ohio’s youngest state senators, served two terms in the U.S. Congress and hobnobbed with presidents and prime ministers.

But a different story, full of unmet ambitions and caustic self-criticism, coursed through Ryan’s mind, carrying him away from even the most important moments.

“I was so caught up in my story that I missed my life,” the Ohio Democrat writes in his new book, “A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit.”

Practicing mindfulness meditation, Ryan says, has quieted the nattering internal …

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Dorothy Brown reviews The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards, by William J. Broad.

If practicing yoga is a right-brain experience, involving meditation, movement, and a detachment from the everyday, then reading The Science of Yoga is a jolt to the other side of the brain: analytical, historical, scientific, and sobering.
But to underscore the proven value of yoga, considered so wifty by so many, New York Times science writer William J. Broad has brought an arsenal of data.

At the front of the book, he lists 68 “main characters,” devotees of yoga and the science of yoga many of whom have …

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NZ Herald: What happens to Hollywood superstars when they semi-retire? They meditate, of course. And if anyone is going to do it with a smile on her face, it’s Goldie Hawn.

Except for her, inner peace has turned into an international mission. This week, Hawn is in the UK to promote her meditation manual, 10 Mindful Minutes. Already a New York Times bestseller, the book is aimed at parents and teachers in the hope they will encourage children to practise the basics of yoga and meditation.

In recent years, Hawn, 66 has reinvented herself as a philanthropist and sort of “mindfulness campaigner”. Because, if she …

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Here is a mindfulness practice from Lewis Richmond’s book, Aging as a Spiritual Practice: Think of your life and its major events as a horizontal line. Your past stretches to the left of wherever you are on that line; your future stretches to the right. The events that stretch into the past are clear and unchangeable; the future is blurred: you don’t really know what events will eventually occupy that line or how long the line will eventually be. Think of this as horizontal time.

Title: Aging as a Spiritual Practice
Author: Lewis Richmond
Publisher: Gotham Books
ISBN: 978-159-24069-0-6
Available from: Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk Kindle Store,

…

Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom and Just One Thing: Developing A Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time, talks about how to develop compassion for yourself.

Danny Penman and Mark Williams: The gloomy days of January can be the most miserable and stressful of the year, but it doesn’t have to be this way. If you follow this ten step guide to destressing your life, then the next few weeks just might become the most serene and fulfilling ones of the year.

One step should be carried out on each of the next 10 days. They’re based on the ideas found in the international best-seller “Mindfulness: An Eight Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World.”

The book uses a program based on mindfulness meditation developed by us at Oxford …

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We’re delighted to announce that through a partnership with More Than Sound, an independent production and publishing company, we now have some excellent new audio digital downloads in our online store.

More Than Sound aims to benefit the world by making available audio programs on Emotional Intelligence, leadership, and meditation and mindfulness, and they have excellent materials presented by world-class authorities, such as Dan Goleman, Daniel Siegel, Naomi Wolf, Richard Davidson, and even George Lucas.

More Than Sound is the brainchild of Hanuman Goleman, who developed and participated in The Wisdom Preservation Project, recording interviews with Buddhist masters in Myanmar, and who started the company after …

Therese Borchard: Ah patience. How do we cultivate you without driving ourselves more crazy?

Being that my new year’s resolution is to be more content with living with the questions in my life versus rushing towards the answers, I found useful the advice in Allan Lokos’s new book, Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living.

Lokos is the founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center in New York City, and the author of Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living.

Here are the three themes that I found most helpful in his book.

1. See things as they are.

Writes Lokos:

In the …

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