Falling Awake: How to Practice

Think you have no time for mindfulness? Think again.

"Thoughtful and provocative.... The relevance of this work is unquestionable, as it leaves us inspired and optimistic that true healing really is possible" (Sharon Salzberg). For four decades, Jon Kabat-Zinn has been teaching the tangible benefits of meditation in the mainstream. Today millions of people have taken up a formal mindfulness meditation practice as part of their everyday lives. But how do you actually go about meditating? What does a formal meditation practice look like? And how can we overcome some of the common obstacles to incorporating meditation into daily life in an age of perpetual self-distraction?

Falling Awake directly answers these urgent and timely questions. Originally published in 2005 as part of a larger book titled Coming to Our Senses, it has been updated with a new foreword by the author and is even more relevant today. Science shows that the tangible benefits of a mindfulness meditation practice are impossible to ignore. Kabat-Zinn explains how to incorporate them into our hectic, modern lives. Read on for a master class from one of the pioneers of the worldwide mindfulness movement.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, is founding Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is also the founding director of its renowned Stress Reduction Clinic and Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches mindfulness and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in various venues around the world. He received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT in 1971 in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate, Salvador Luria.

His work in the Stress Reduction Clinic was featured in Bill Moyers' PBS Special, Healing and the Mind and in the book of the same title, as well as on Good Morning America, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and Oprah's Super Soul Sunday, as well as NPR. he has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions such as medicine, and psychology, health care and hospitals, schools, corporations, the legal profession, prisons, and professional sports.

He is the author of numerous bestselling books about mindfulness and meditation: Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness; Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life; Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness; and Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness. He is also co-author, with his wife Myla, of Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting; and with Williams, Teasdale, and Segal, of The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness Overall, his books have been translated into over thirty languages.