Book Review - The Zen Habit's Beginner's Guide to Mindfulness

In today’s world, especially with the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election’s smoking gun looming just behind us, it can be difficult to stay mindful. To not let our emotions run away with us when we are speaking with others. To be as honest with ourselves and others as we can and communicate our feelings efficiently with others. To not cling desperately to our ideals. To develop patience and learn to deal with overwhelming feelings. To work on developing our focus and changing our habits for the greater good. The Zen Habits Beginner’s Guide to Mindfulness addresses these topics and provides practical advice for working on them in our own lives.

Leo Babauta (the ebook’s author) is the creator of the Zen Habits website, author of many books, and a vegan who spends the majority of his personal time running, reading, meditating, lifting weights, and hiking. He has been an inspiration to thousands of people by helping them simplify their lives and change their habits through his Sea Change membership program.

The Zen Habits Beginner's Guide to Mindfulness was published solely in ebook format, it is fairly short (only 47 pages), and it contains many helpful words that may help you in your own path toward developing mindfulness. However, as the ebook even mentions itself, the true onus is on the reader. There is only so much a book can do to help develop a meditation practice, work toward changing habits, or develop patience. The true work must be done by the reader.

To address this, Babauta includes in each chapter: a description of the issue (including its common causes), a step-by-step method to address the issue, and an exercise that can be practiced during meditation or day-to-day life. The final chapter of the book focuses on how we can get better, which includes practicing nearly daily, reviewing the exercises, and working with whatever arises.

I greatly enjoyed and valued this ebook, and would have loved to give it five stars. However, there were some typos due to some sloppy editing and a few of the chapters were merely slight variations of copied-and-pasted content from previous chapters. Because of those two things, I decided to ding The Zen Habits Beginner's Guide to Mindfulness by one star. However, I would still recommend this ebook to anyone interested in developing their own mindfulness practice. And in case you don't find them valuable, the author even promises a 100% money back guarantee on all of his books! It is definitely aimed at beginners, but serves as a helpful review for those further along the path as well. I plan to read one or two more of Babauta’s books that take the topic a bit further, but I am glad that I started with this one.

4/5 stars. 47 pages.

Click here to buy the book.

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Weekend Thoughts - 5.7.16

Image from Francis Chung, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Although it is the safest it has been to be a U.S. police officer since alcohol prohibition, cops and firefighters have been pushing to make themselves a protected class under the federal hate crimes statute. Dubbed the "Blue Lives Matter" bill, cops are attempting to appeal to lawmakers emotionally to receive additional protections related to their occupations, rather than the set of currently-approved protected class guidelines. Right now, a hate crime is defined by Congress as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation." The proposed change would add the following: "...because of actual or perceived membership or service in, or employment with, an organization, or because of actual or perceived employment as a law enforcement officer or firefighter." Any perceived crime against police officers would be classified as an act of hate and add another five years to a person's sentence. Considering both the record-high numbers of civilians being murdered by cops and the record-low numbers of police officers being murdered by civilians, this initiative seems a bit unnecessary to say the least, and perhaps even entirely blind to the actual situation at hand.

2. Trees are pretty awesome. They contribute a lot of positive things to an ecosystem, are amazing to look at, and have a special superpower—an incessant appetite for human-made objects. Here is a collection of photos of trees growing to eat things attached or next to them.

3. Learning to navigate around a city can be difficult, but a recent article from the excellent blog Zen Habits gives some advice for learning how to create a mental map of any location. There are plenty of tips and tricks that will help you map both new and familiar locations! The most helpful advice that I picked up from the article was to continually be aware of which direction I am facing—something that I have not developed in the past. This article would be helpful for those planning to travel to lands far away or become more in tune with their current cities.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.