Peace Is Every Step
The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
In the rush of modern life, we tend to lose touch with the peace that is available in each moment. World-renowned Zen master, spiritual leader, and author Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to make positive use of the very situations that usually pressure and antagonize us. For him a ringing telephone can be a signal to call us back to our true selves. Dirty dishes, red lights, and traffic jams are spiritual friends on the path to “mindfulness”—the process of keeping our consciousness alive to our present experience and reality. The most profound satisfactions, the deepest feelings of joy and completeness lie as close at hand as our next aware breath and the smile we can form right now.
Lucidly and beautifully written, Peace Is Every Step contains commentaries and meditations, personal anecdotes and stories from Nhat Hanh’s experiences as a peace activist, teacher, and community leader. It begins where the reader already is—in the kitchen, office, driving a car, walking a part—and shows how deep meditative presence is available now. Nhat Hanh provides exercises to increase our awareness of our own body and mind through conscious breathing, which can bring immediate joy and peace. Nhat Hanh also shows how to be aware of relationships with others and of the world around us, its beauty and also its pollution and injustices. the deceptively simple practices of Peace Is Every Step encourage the reader to work for peace in the world as he or she continues to work on sustaining inner peace by turning the “mindless” into the mindFUL.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you want to fill every day with more happiness and calm, Peace Is Every Step is an ideal place to start. In simple, poetic language, the late Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh explains the concept of mindfulness and how you can use it to live a more peaceful and contented life. He offers a series of easy breathing exercises that you can use anytime, anywhere to help ground you in the present moment, connect you to the world around you, and bring you peace and joy. The book also reveals how mindfulness can boost your health, help you deal with toxic emotional cycles, and even deal with global problems that affect us all. We loved Nhat Hanh’s clear, gentle writing style, especially how he uses delightful fables to shrink big issues down to a size we can handle. Give your mind and spirit a tune-up with this wise guidebook.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
``Next time you are caught in a traffic jam . . . sit back and smile . . . a smile of compassion and loving kindness.'' While such sappy Zen advice from a Buddhist monk, a Vietnamese resident in France following his exile in 1966, could send Western seekers of enlightenment into overdrive, fortunately most of the suggestions offered in this slim guidebook are of more substance. In a series of vignettes and short passages, e.g., ``Cooking Our Potatoes,'' Nhat Hanh outlines techniques for living mindfullly, that is, in the present. Emphasizing that all things are interconnected on personal and political levels, he notes, for example, that the wealth of one society is based on the poverty of others. This book of illuminating reminders bids us to reorient the way we look at the world, turning away from a goal-driven, me-first modality toward a humanitarian perspective.
