New World Mindfulness: From the Founding Fathers, Emerson, and Thoreau to Your Personal Practice

Description

. Reveals the medical benefits of mindfulness for stress, anxiety, and depression as well as for coping with serious illness and major life changes . Offers a wide range of techniques, including a "high-speed" form of contemplation, from the authors' extensive experience working with this practice as a healing modality We are all busy--and we all long for quiet and connection. Yet despite the growing body of evidence supporting the benefits of mindfulness, the hectic pace of modern life leaves little time to devote to meditation, relaxation, and contemplation. In NEW WORLD MINDFULNESS, mindfulness teacher and therapist Donald McCown and physician Marc Micozzi provide techniques to successfully integrate mindfulness into real life so we can rise above the stress of work, family, and community that can easily pull us out of the moment and into states of tension, anxiety, or depression. Dispelling the two big myths of mindfulness--that it is an "exotic" activity and that it requires you to "slow down and find more time"--the authors present a history of mindfulness in the West, from the American Founding Fathers, Thoreau, and Emerson up to present-day leaders in the field such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, and reveal a high-speed form of contemplation ideal for even the busiest of lives. Exploring the physiological impact of mindfulness practices for stress, anxiety, depression, and coping with serious illness and major life changes, the authors show that mindfulness is not about being silent and alone--it can even be practiced as a family or community. Not prescribing change but rather working from within, this book connects Western no-nonsense, get-it-done pragmatism with the yearning for beauty and balance that makes a full life truly fulfilled.

Donald McCown is assistant professor of integrative health at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and the former director of the Mindfulness at Work program at the Jefferson-Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine. With Marc Micozzi, McCown is the coauthor of Teaching Mindfulness. He lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D., is adjunct professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University School of Medicine and the founding director of the Policy Institute for Integrative Medicine in Washington, D.C. The author and editor of Fundamentals of Complementary & Alternative Medicine and coauthor of The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion, he lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and Rockport, Massachusetts.

"The book is a multi-layered, stress-reduction gold mine." * Anna Jedrziewski, Retailing Insights, October 2011 * "McCown and Micozzi also explore the history of mindfulness in this country in a tone at once scholarly and accessible, using the evocative stories of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as exemplars of the practice. Quotes from other mindfulness practitioners, both ancient and modern, are woven throughout the book, allowing readers to understand the concept from multiple perspectives and reinforcing the author's idea that mindfulness is multifaceted." * Jill Allen, Foreword Magazine * "...for those who've thought mindfulness is just too 'foreign' or who need that extra push to give it a try, this book might just do it for you. After all, if Jefferson and Thoreau tried it, it can't be all bad." * Greater Good * "In New World Mindfulness therapist Donald McCown and physician Marc Micozzi show how to integrate the seemingly difficult process of mindfulness into real life. History comes alive with insights from the American founding fathers, Thoreau and other mindfulness pioneers, helping you to create a high-speed form of contemplation." * New Connexion *