Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Dummies

I must admit, I was sceptical at first, how could something as complex as Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) be simplified, but this book does it elegantly.  It begins with a brief 'Contents at a Glance' page and then much more detailed 'Table of Contents' including all the icons used in the book which make it easy to navigate: tips; things to note down and to try, warnings, jargon explanations and tracks to play from the online spoken guided meditation tracks.

The book begins with an introductory part I: a clear explanation of what MBCT is, it's origins and benefits, the problems MBCT can address and what the challenge of taking on the full 8 week course entails

Part II is the 8 week course itself, each chapter covering a single week and each building on the one before to develop becoming mindful of your body and mind and how to deal with setbacks and difficult emotions to enable you to come to a point where you are fully in control of your own physical and mental wellbeing and able to live a life far more connected to your own life.

Part III is on using MBCT for specific afflictions: depression, addiction, anxiety, pain, ageing and the work-life balance.

Part IV enables you to go beyond the book, giving list of 10 ways to expand your mindfulness practice, 10 inspirational people and 10 inspirational places to visit.

All in all a welcome addition to the mindfulness bookshelf, straightforward but not shallow.

A Big Little Life by Dean Koontz

Koontz's biography of Trixie, the golden retriever who changed his and his wife Gerda's lives from a work dedicated childless (but happily so) couple and turned them on to an awareness of the joyfulness with which an extraordinary dog such as Trixie meets and experiences every day.  There is no doubt that Trixie is extraordinary but it is also true that the revelations she brings to Koontz are those that experiencing life through the lives of any pet, or indeed, of a life lived in the moment, can and do bring.  Yes, it is overly sentimental and bucolic but sometimes that isn't a bad thing

DYSTOPIA #8
Island by Aldous Huxley

Journalist and life long cynic Will Farnaby wakes up to the insistent call 'Attention' after being shipwrecked on the forbidden island of Pala, located geographically somewhere around Bali.  Sent by the head of his paper, oil tycoon Aldehyde, to find out whether Pala will be easy to take over and exploit, Will finds himself in a world where the inner life is cherished and valued and even the birds in the trees have a part to play in reminding the inhabitants of this utopia how best to live and be.   Wonderful and sad.

DYSTOPIA #7
The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Herman Hesse

Like nothing I've ever read before.  The presumably fictional but utterly convincing biography of Joseph Knecht, the man who in the 23rd Century becomes Magister Ludi (Master of the Game) in the Kingdom of Castalia, an elite community who preserved the integrity of humanity when it dissolved into anarchy and dangerous superficiality centuries earlier.  Castalian's are the intellectual elite of their society but they no longer create, rather they study earlier cultural achievement and play the Glass Bead Game, a game that is never completely defined but appears to be an intellectual exercise in pure brilliance of the mind.  The Glass Bead Game taught me a lot both about the need for me to become more centred and the value of meditation, and also the implicit dangers of intellectualism and seperatism.

What Our Children Teach Us: Lessons in Joy, Love and Awareness by Piero Ferruci

Does what it says on the tin and wonderfully, affirmed my joy in sharing my life with my little girl and enabled me to relax in being able to see the wonder of her. Can't recommend enough.

AZ: 'A thoughtful, deeply honest look at the transforming experience of parenthood and how our children can lead us to a more profound understnading of ourselves. 'Live with children long enough and beauty, love, innocence, play, pain, and death, everything appears in a new light...' Children: they have the ability to turn our lives upside down, to disrupt our plans and our sleep, to try our patience, and to elicit our most ferocious love. But children also have the power to teach us the greatest lessons we'll ever learn. Now Piero Ferrucci, a noted psychologist, author, and the father of two young sons, reveals how the journey of parenthood can be a learning path, a succession of experiences that can enrich and transform us like no religious retreat or course of psychotherapy ever could. Not obsessed with the usual equation of what we must teach our children, Ferrucci rather looks into the mirror our children hold up to adult behaviour and tries to integrate the spontaneity, originality and ethical awareness that he finds in his sons into his own attitudes and conduct. WHAT OUR CHILDREN TEACH US is a charming book, full of delightful wit as well as seriousness of purpose. Through lively, moving and charmingly candid anecdotes that will strike a chord with every parent, Piero Ferrucci shows us the myriad ways in which our children can help us rediscover wonder, cultivate joy and patience, and open ourselves to a richer and more vital world.'

The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness by Mark Rowlands

I reviewed this for Augment's MAD news (Monthly Augment Deliberation):

The truth is, I suppose, that I’ve always been a natural misanthrope’: A misanthrope is defined as a ‘hater of humans’, Rowlands prefers the company of his wolf Brenin, and dogs Nina and Tess. It seems impossible that a book written by such a man can give any positive information about the advanced apes that we are. And indeed his accounts of what makes apes different from other animals are very bleak, identifying in us ‘the tendency to base relationships with other on a single principle, invariant and unyielding: what can you do for me, and how much will it cost me to get you to do it?’. Rowlands demonstrates how our ‘finer’ qualities such as love and joy are not unique and we tend to base our assessments of animal intelligence on our terms: ‘they are poor only in the way we measure things’. We are creatures that tend to define ourselves by what we do and have rather than what we are, we see the world ‘as a collection of resources; things to be used for its purposes’. We tend to view love and happiness as feelings that we pursue with desperation, but I agree with Rowlands in his view that they are the byproduct of those moments in our life that may not always be pleasant but of which you can be proud, when you did something for the first time, when you stood up when something was unjust. This is empowering.

Here is Rowlands talking about he the subject of moments:
‘Moments, for us, are transparent. They are what we reach through when we try to take possession of things.’, ‘
For us, no moment is ever complete in itself. Every moment is adulterated, tainted by what we remember has been and what we anticipate will be.’
‘Anything we can have, anything we can possess, time will take it from us. But what time can never take from us is who we were in our best moments.’

Rowlands says ‘In saying that the meaning of the life is to be found in moments, I am not repeating those facile little homilies that entreat us to ‘live in the moment’. I would never recommend trying to do something that is impossible.’ But I disagree. It’s not impossible. The main avenue I use is mindfulness in which meditation is used to create awareness of the moment and the ability to stop the ‘chattering ape’, the endless stream of thoughts and feelings that intrude. My cats and my young child draw me into the moment, losing myself in a purring bundle of alpha waves or daughter’s fascination with a single leaf. There are ways to get round the worst of what we can be, but it isn’t easy.

Molecules of Emotion: Why you feel the way you feel by Candace B Pert

AZ: "As a graduate student in 1972, the author was part of the team that discovered the brain's opiate receptors. In this text, she provides an in-depth look at the science that led to this and other findings, such as the fact that similar receptors exist in the glands, spleen, bone marrow and other organs, which convey information in both directions via "neuropeptides" to all parts of the body. The author argues that this complex communications network invalidates the distinctions between mind and body"

Brilliant, I understood a little about neurotransmitters and thought I understood that SSRIs inhibit retaike because that is where most bodily communicatin takes place, but Pert's discovery that neurotransmitters and other bodily drugs dock bodywide affecting vastly separated organs and systems was a revelation. It helped me make sense of the need for a holistic approach to bodily health and makes me more determined than ever to find a balance.