With topics ranging from learning meditation to supercharging leadership, investigating technology or parenting or social justice, here are 13 of our editors’ favorite picks out of all the books we’ve enjoyed this year:
1. The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness
Diana Winston, Sounds True
It’s no small thing to take on the responsibility of teaching others how to work with their minds, no less teaching teachers to do that. (It’s not like teaching, say, tennis; it’s the mind after all. Nothing is subtler or more elusive). A meditator since she was a teenager, a meditation teacher for decades, and a teacher of teachers for quite a while, Diana Winston—director of mindfulness education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center—writes from direct experience. What she has learned in all those years comes through in The Little Book of Being, which focuses on “uncovering your natural awareness.”
At a critical point in her life, Winston says, she realized, “It’s time for me to relax, stop trying so hard, and recognize the natural awareness and goodness already inherent in my being—and in all beings. It was time to simply rest in awareness itself.” Highfalutin words, but Winston shows how to adopt relatively simple practices that allow one to gradually move from a more effortful approach to mindfulness to one that doesn’t consume so much energy, that has faith and conviction that we’re already aware and don’t need to be fixed.
This viewpoint alone allows us to stumble more easily on the kind of childlike mind that can simply appreciate the next thing in front of us: whether it’s as small as a ladybug, or as serious as someone telling us how much they hurt.
2. Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication
Oren Jay Sofer, Shambhala
In this era of polarizing rhetoric from every direction, it’s easy to get caught up in the emotion of discourse without really…communicating. Written by meditation teacher and mindful communication expert Oren Jay Sofer, Say What You Mean is surely a book for such charged times. But it’s also for anyone simply interested in learning how to deepen their own relational experiences, on any scale. And perhaps that should be all of us, for as Sofer writes, “What we say matters.”
Further, “Intention is the single most powerful and transformative ingredient in dialogue,” he writes. “It shapes our verbal and nonverbal communication, directing the course of a conversation.”
The book is structured around three fundamental skills for mindful communication: Lead with presence; come with curiosity and care; focus on what matters.
Through discussion and example, and supported by reflections and practices to ground the teaching, he helps us explore our own habituated styles of not just communication, but of viewing the world, and how this impacts how we speak to one another and how we listen.
The book is also chock-full of “ahas”—gems and statements that immediately hit you as important and true. Things like:
Everything we do, we do to meet a need.
The less blame and criticism in our words, the easier it will be for others to hear us. When someone trusts that we’re actually interested in understanding them[…]they can stop defending themselves and just hear what we’re saying.
To say what we mean, we must first know what we mean. To know what we mean, we must listen inwardly and discern what’s true for us.
At the end of each section Sofer offers a useful Q+A to explore the reality of wanting to follow the principles and guidelines of mindful communication, and getting tripped up in real time. The advice is succinct and practical and delivered with a bid for compassion, for ourselves and for everyone just trying to be understood.
3. Mindful Eating On the Go: Practices for Eating with Awareness, Wherever You Are
Jan Chozen Bays, MD, Shambhala
To consume food or drink, these days, is not only about keeping ourselves alive. It’s about constantly measuring our consumption and our body image against the thousands of ads and other messages about food that we’re bombarded with, day in and day out. It’s hardly news that this inescapable reality can do a number on our ability to freely enjoy fuelling our bodies. For those who want to reclaim that freedom, this pocket-sized book on the key principles of mindful eating is a great place to start. Chozen Bays teaches how we can discern the “nine aspects of hunger” that we experience, approaching our needs and cravings with full, nonjudgmental awareness, so we can heal our relationship with food.
4. From Suffering to Peace: The True Promise of Mindfulness
Mark Coleman, New World Library
Longtime meditation teacher Mark Coleman—author of Make Peace with Your Mind: How Mindfulness and Compassion Can Free You from Your Inner Critic and Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-Discovery, among others—is at pains to demonstrate in his new book that mindfulness is definitely, incontrovertibly not about finding an escape from the pain we find in the midst of everyday life.
The book, in fact, is filled with poignant stories of students who have come to him with immense pain. One woman, for example, came to a retreat having, over a two-year period, lost her sister in a car accident, her brother to a heart attack, and her father to cancer. Shortly thereafter, her only living aunt died, and weeks before the retreat, following several agonizing months, her mother passed away in a state of dementia.
Stories like this from students demonstrate, however, that the “true promise of mindfulness” in the subtitle is that if we turn toward pain, rather than seek escape valves in temporary states of mind, we may find ourselves on a path toward genuine, sustainable peace. Maybe not overnight. But over time.
The 36 chapters in From Suffering to Peace are short, and all end with a practice or contemplation. They’re divided into four parts corresponding to four areas of practice. The body section asks us to explore what it means to have a body (and to know that at some point “we” won’t). The mind section focuses on thoughts and our conception of a self. The heart section treats our emotions, and the world section explores our relationships with those around us and the natural world. It’s a very filling meal.
5. Alphabreaths: The ABCs of Mindful Breathing
Chris Willard, David Rechtschaffen, and Holly Clifton-Brown, Sounds True
“Spread your arms like a butterfly, imagine blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, or be still and silent as a ninja.” Psychologist Chris Willard and Mindful Education director Daniel Rechtschaffen—each having written several previous titles on bringing mindfulness into children’s lives—offer 26 imaginative ways for kids and their adults to pay attention to the breath all day, from All