Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Jan 19, 2012 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it it was ok

Shelves: religion, ultimate-reading-list, reference, spirituality, self-help, non-fiction, philosophy, psychology

The introduction tells us this book "is meant to provide brief and easy access to the essence of mindfulness meditation and its applications." By "mindfulness" is meant focused awareness of the "present moment." And meditation is "the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives." The book is divided in three parts. Part One, "The Bloom of the Present Moment" seeks to give some background and definitions ...more

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Jul 02, 2021 Girish Joshi rated it really liked it

There is a demon that lives inside each one of us, and humankind has discovered two ways to deal with this demon. The first way is to run — to run away from it as fast as possible. But since this demon lives inside us, we have to run away from ourselves. We spend our lives doing things that help us escape from ourselves — and in turn the demon inside us. From the moment we wake up, we are engrossed in some work or another, we are obsessed with some passion or another. And even when we sleep, we There is a demon that lives inside each one of us, and humankind has discovered two ways to deal with this demon. The first way is to run — to run away from it as fast as possible. But since this demon lives inside us, we have to run away from ourselves. We spend our lives doing things that help us escape from ourselves — and in turn the demon inside us. From the moment we wake up, we are engrossed in some work or another, we are obsessed with some passion or another. And even when we sleep, we are not sleeping idly, we are dreaming. The urge of doing something becomes the grease upon which the gears of our lives run. But running gears are running gears, after all, they break, no matter how much you lubricate, that's the law of nature. In despair, we eventually realize that we carry with ourselves the demon we are running away from. We realize that running away is not a long-term solution to deal with this demon, sooner or later we'll have to confront this demon, we'll have to fight its vices, and it is then we place our hopes on the second way — meditation. Meditation is simply looking that demon in its eyes with serenity and saying: stay here as long as you want, I'm not afraid of you. It is about being yourself and knowing something about who that is, about knowing this demon that we carry within us. It is about realizing that we'll have to walk this path called life with this demon holding our hands whether we like it or not. It's when we extend our hand towards the demon we were running away from all our life we become mindful. We pay attention to it in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality. It wakes us up to the fact that our lives unfold only in the moments. In other words, mindfulness is simply the art of conscious living and courageous living. It's simple, but by no means it's easy. We are so habitual to running that to face our demon requires effort and discipline. But it is an enlightening experience because it puts us in touch with ourselves, and in turn our with demon. We begin to see things that we always overlooked when we were busy running. We may encounter deep emotions — such as grief, sadness, woundedness, anger, and fear — that we never allowed ourselves to hold when we were running from our demon. As we get to know our demon, we learn to appreciate feelings such as joy, peacefulness, and happiness which often used to go by fleeting and unacknowledged. The demon empowers us by opening channels to our deep reservoirs of creativity, intelligence, imagination, clarity, determination, choice, and wisdom which was always there within us, right beside where the demon used to live. When we say to our demon that we've to get some errands done, it says: "Don't just do something, sit there". The demon that lived inside each of us was just running behind us to say: "stop and sit beside me, live with yourself, live in the present moment". The present is all that there is, and that is the present that the demon and this book are trying to give. The question is: are we willing to sit with ourselves and accept this present?

My father always indicated to me that I was not mindful in the everyday life, I was always lost in my own thoughts, going places riding my thought train. The consequences of living this way were mostly harmless and sometimes deadly — the times I'd forget to flush after shitting. A few months ago when I decided to make mindfulness meditation part of my life, I was looking for a place to start. I had some experience with the guided meditation sessions on mindfulness by Headspace. It had calmed my nerves in the moments of anxiety in my college life, and I needed that calmness more than ever in both my personal and professional life. Even before I began, I had my reasons why I wanted to do this. I wanted to make peace with myself, I wanted to learn to be able to sit by myself and not feel as if there was an anvil on my chest. I wanted to make the demon that lived inside me, my friend. I always told myself that: "no amount of shame could undo the past, and no amount of worry would predict the future" . But it is one thing to say platitudes and an entirely different thing to apply it to your everyday life. I needed an escape from my own mind, I wanted to leave the thought train and board the peace plane. And this book was my boarding pass. Wherever You Go, There You Are is a good resource to begin your journey to learn mindfulness meditation. In fact, I'd say that reading this book in itself is meditative and brings peace to mind. Have I succeeded in what I started? I don't think so. But it's a good start. ...more

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Apr 05, 2015 Rick rated it it was amazing

This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to really mindfully experience the moment. The title is in itself a play on word so to speak. Of course we are where we physically are, but even when we go someplace new to 'escape' our current situation, we are still there. Thus, we may essentially take the problem with us. The book is part teaching on the practice of mindfulness and part discourse on the subject. It is a book I intend to visit from time to time to refresh and renew my own mindfuln ...more

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