Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of the widely praised Wherever You Go, There You Are shows how the power of mindfulness can bring profound changes to your personal life. As stress continues to exact a toll on everyday life, we are increasingly turning to ancient, meditative methods, which have been tested by science, to reduce stress and become more focused and healthy in our everyday lives. Jon Kabat-Zinn has been for decades at the forefront of the mind/body movement and the subsequent revolution in medicine and health care, both demystifying it and bringing it into the mainstream. In Coming To Our Senses, he shares his belief that every human has the capacity to mobilize deep, innate resources for continual learning, growing, healing and transformation through mindfulness. Woven into eight parts, Coming To Our Senses: Uses anecdotes and stories from Kabat-Zinn's own life experiences and work to illustrate the realm of healing possibilities: Offers a remarkable insight into how to use the five senses - touch, hearing, sight, taste, and smell - as a path to a healthier, saner, and more meaningful life.

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Publishers Weekly Review

"For any of us, perhaps our greatest potential regret may be that of not seizing the moment and honoring it for what it is when it is here," writes bestselling author Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living; Wherever You Go, There You Are; etc.). The scientist who pioneered the use of the Buddhist technique of mindfulness (or moment-by-moment awareness) to help patients cope with the stress and pain of illness arrived at this poignant lesson after seeing the way his father, an eminent immunologist who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, lost all sense of who he was and what was happening to him. In a passionate tour de force that blends personal experience with cutting-edge science (his own and others'), poetry and insights culled from many traditions, Kabat-Zinn sets out to awaken us to the true potential and value of a gift that most of us take for granted: sentience. Our lack of awareness of our impact on the rest of the world amounts to "a kind of auto-immune disease of the earth." Borrowing an analogy made by the neuroscientist Francisco Varela, Kabat-Zinn compares the way our immune system senses the whole of our bodily self to our potential for a mindful awareness. That is, the practice of cultivating this conscious, heightened sentience leads to the realization of our wholeness, as we begin to realize that we don't live just within the envelope of our own senses, sensations and thoughts but within the whole of all that is. Kabat-Zinn illuminates the many facets of this selfless way of being, not just with Buddhist understanding and verse but with quotes from Einstein ("A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe' "), Dickinson, Rilke and many other Western greats. Ardent, personal, frankly opinionated in places, this book seeks to wake up as individuals and as a culture. It is a treasure trove of contemporary wisdom. Author tour. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jon Kabat-Zinn PhD is founder and director of the famous Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and Associate Professor of Medicine.