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108 Metaphors for Mindfulness: From Wild Chickens to Petty Tyrants
From the author of Mindfulness A to Z !
This engaging and accessible little book is filled with both humor and profound teaching. It presents 108 metaphors for mindfulness, meditation practice, the nature of the self, change, deep acceptance, and other related concepts that Dr. Kozak has cultivated over twenty-five years of meditating, practicing yoga, and working as a clinical psychologist.
Metaphors are indispensable to understanding mindfulness, and to help deeply internalize it and make it a part of everyday life. These mentally catchy images can motivate us to practice, show us how and where to bring mindfulness to life in our personal experience, and help us employ powerful methods for transformation.
This book was previously published under the title Wild Chicken and Petty Tyrants .
This engaging and accessible little book is filled with both humor and profound teaching. It presents 108 metaphors for mindfulness, meditation practice, the nature of the self, change, deep acceptance, and other related concepts that Dr. Kozak has cultivated over twenty-five years of meditating, practicing yoga, and working as a clinical psychologist.
Metaphors are indispensable to understanding mindfulness, and to help deeply internalize it and make it a part of everyday life. These mentally catchy images can motivate us to practice, show us how and where to bring mindfulness to life in our personal experience, and help us employ powerful methods for transformation.
This book was previously published under the title Wild Chicken and Petty Tyrants .
- GenresNonfiction
240 pages, Paperback
Published June 14, 2016
23 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
About the author
Arnie Kozak
15 books29 followersARNIE KOZAK is the founder of Exquisite Mind, a consultation service for individuals, the community, healthcare and other professionals, and corporations. Exquisite Mind teaches mindfulness, the art and skill of living in the present, as a vehicle for managing stress and enhancing quality of life. He was also a Clinical Fellow in Psychology at the Harvard Medical School, where he completed his doctoral training. He lives in Burlington Vermont."
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 29, 2022
O livro é bom. Tem várias maneiras de aprender a ter atenção plena, de maneiras bem simples e ensinam inclusive, maneiras de meditação, várias. Eu fui naquela de querer ler tudo de uma vez, ficou cansativo, aí acabei dando uma pausa na leitura e depois continuei. Mas não parei porque é ruim, mas sim pq são histórias diferentes sobre o mesmo assunto. Então, indico ir lendo aos poucos mesmo.
June 10, 2019
(Background: I've been meditating off and on (mostly off) for about a year, but more seriously in the last 2 months.)
I think this book really helped me improve my meditation!
He gives many, many different ways of thinking about meditation in a very practical way and covers many of the pitfalls which beginning meditators fall into (and which I fell into myself).
Some of the ones which stood out to me:
(1) Don't be frustrated if your mind keeps wandering. The practice of "getting back to the meditation" IS the point of meditation. The more you "get back" the better you'll get at it.
(2) Don't expect that every meditation will reach up to some gold standard of calm and quiet. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. Learn to accept each meditation for what it is without judgement.
(3) Formal and informal practice. Try to infuse your mundane activities like showering, washing dishes, shoveling snow, etc. with a meditative quality.
(4) Don't expect that you'll become a meditation guru and that meditation will ever become "easy" and "automatic" once you've done it long enough. Even after 30 years your mind will still wander!
(5) The mind wanders, that's what minds do.
(6) Don't get too attached to accomplishments in meditation, "I meditated for X hours and I'm this good of a meditator." It's good to have goals, but not good to attach your self-image of them.
There's more, but basically I found it really practical and I think I'm meditating better because of it :)
I think this book really helped me improve my meditation!
He gives many, many different ways of thinking about meditation in a very practical way and covers many of the pitfalls which beginning meditators fall into (and which I fell into myself).
Some of the ones which stood out to me:
(1) Don't be frustrated if your mind keeps wandering. The practice of "getting back to the meditation" IS the point of meditation. The more you "get back" the better you'll get at it.
(2) Don't expect that every meditation will reach up to some gold standard of calm and quiet. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. Learn to accept each meditation for what it is without judgement.
(3) Formal and informal practice. Try to infuse your mundane activities like showering, washing dishes, shoveling snow, etc. with a meditative quality.
(4) Don't expect that you'll become a meditation guru and that meditation will ever become "easy" and "automatic" once you've done it long enough. Even after 30 years your mind will still wander!
(5) The mind wanders, that's what minds do.
(6) Don't get too attached to accomplishments in meditation, "I meditated for X hours and I'm this good of a meditator." It's good to have goals, but not good to attach your self-image of them.
There's more, but basically I found it really practical and I think I'm meditating better because of it :)
April 25, 2025
Love the idea of metaphors as central to mindfulness practice and teaching. Right now a central metaphor for me is cultivation- what grows as nurtured, but will return and refine, redefine. This is a useful tool/ guide on that path. Like 25 master plots foundational for novel/ fiction writing, this serves similarly for orienting practice and teaching.
January 6, 2022
I got a few good nuggets but I had higher expectations.
March 14, 2025
O livro é bom, te mostra várias histórias que te fazem entender melhor a importância da prática da meditação. No final do livro tem várias formas de praticar a atenção plena.
November 8, 2022
genre：non-fiction
“Full of mind” — or empty of it? In fact the term “mindfulness” itself stems from a metaphor that sees the mind as a container: things can be put “into” the mind; advice can go “in one ear and out the other”. As the title suggests , just think wild and random —This book is much about metaphors in mindfulness.
I like several metaphors, for example “thought flakes”,using switching tv channels as analogy of changing thinking style, “perfectomy” for the OC people. And some interesting ideas like suffering=pain x resistance , “if you don’t like the weather, just wait for 5 min until it changes.”
Enjoyed the book? Yeh~ a soothing read and I get a few useful lines for thoughts.
like it:3/⭐️
2 October 2022
“Full of mind” — or empty of it? In fact the term “mindfulness” itself stems from a metaphor that sees the mind as a container: things can be put “into” the mind; advice can go “in one ear and out the other”. As the title suggests , just think wild and random —This book is much about metaphors in mindfulness.
I like several metaphors, for example “thought flakes”,using switching tv channels as analogy of changing thinking style, “perfectomy” for the OC people. And some interesting ideas like suffering=pain x resistance , “if you don’t like the weather, just wait for 5 min until it changes.”
Enjoyed the book? Yeh~ a soothing read and I get a few useful lines for thoughts.
like it:3/⭐️
2 October 2022
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews