Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Thich Nhat Hanh

4.31

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9781483099033: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

ISBN 10: 1483099032 ISBN 13: 9781483099033

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc., 2015

In the rush of modern life, we tend to lose touch with the peacethat is available in each moment. World-renowned Zen master, spiritual leader,and author Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to make positive use of the situations that usually pressure and antagonize us. A ringingtelephone can be a signal to call us back to our true selves. Dirty dishes, redlights, and traffic jams are spiritual friends on the path to mindfulness—theprocess of keeping our consciousness alive to our present experience andreality. The most profound satisfactions, the deepest feelings of joy andcompleteness lie as close at hand as our next aware breath and the smile we canform right now.Lucidly and beautifully written, Peace Is Every Step contains commentaries, meditations, personalanecdotes, and stories from Nhat Hanh's experiences as a peace activist,teacher, and community leader. It begins where the reader already is—in thekitchen, office, driving a car, walking—and shows how deep meditativepresence is available now. Nhat Hanh provides exercises to increase ourawareness of our own body and mind through conscious breathing, which can bringimmediate joy and peace. Nhat Hanh also shows how to be aware of relationshipswith others and of the world around us, its beauty and also its pollution andinjustices. The deceptively simple practices of Peace Is Every Step encourage readers to work for peace in the world as they continue to work onsustaining inner peace by turning the mindless into the mindful.

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Review:

Thich Nhat Hanh's writing is deceptive in its subtlety. He'll go on and on with stories about tree-hugging or metaphors involving raw potatoes; he'll tell you how to eat mindfully, even how to breathe and walk; he'll suggest looking closely at a flower and to see the sun as your heart. As the Zen teacher Richard Baker commented, however, Nhat Hanh is "a cross between a cloud, a snail, and piece of heavy machinery." Sooner or later, it begins to sink in that Nhat Hanh is conveying a depth of psychology and a world outlook that require nothing less than a complete paradigm shift. Through his cute stories and compassionate admonitions, he gradually builds up to his philosophy of interbeing, the notion that none of us is separately, but rather that we inter-are. The ramifications are explosive. How can we mindlessly and selfishly pursue our individual ends, when we are inextricably bound up with everyone and everything else? We see an enemy not as focus of anger but as a human with a complex history, who could be us if we had the same history. Suffice it to say, that after reading Peace Is Every Step, you'll never look at a plastic bag the same way again, and you may even develop a penchant for hugging trees. --Brian Bruya

About the Author:

Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Zen master, poet, scholar, and peace activist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He is the author of many bestselling books, including the classics The Miracle of Mindfulness, Peace Is Every Step, Anger, and The Art of Power. Thich Nhat Hanh lives in Plum Village, his meditation center in France, where his monastic and lay disciples assist him in leading retreats worldwide on the art of mindful living.

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