Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends with Yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness

"It’s Mindfulness in Action by Chögyam Trungpa. This is the only book in the list that is by a great Buddhist meditation master. Mindfulness training does have a lineage coming from the Buddhist tradition and I chose this book because Chögyam Trungpa was a brilliant teacher who spoke in a fresh and direct way to Westerners. He was Tibetan, left Tibet in 1959, and taught mainly in America. He’s been dead for 30 years, so this book was based on talks he gave in the 70s and has been very skilfully edited. The editor, Carolyn Gimian, has gone through hundreds of talks to put this together. It reads surprisingly coherently, given that he didn’t write it himself. He spoke it—and it gives you a sense of the profundity of mindfulness in a way that can only come from someone who’s so firmly rooted in the tradition. He was trained as a Rinpoche, recognised as a high teacher in Tibet, as a very small child. He was a full-time—you could say professional—meditator. He was quite a maverick teacher, he had a very fresh approach to meditation where he was trying to find ways to talk about it that would make sense to Americans in the 70s, rather than just using the formulas of Buddhism. I think that it’s often the case that people who take up mindfulness find it so beneficial that they want to go and tell their friends. It’s important not to be evangelical. Generally people come to mindfulness in their own time, but I certainly find that, in my own courses, a large percentage of the people that come will come because their mother, or their child, or their friend has really convinced them of the benefits of mindfulness. Not always so much by speaking about it as by the way that they themselves have manifested, have changed in some way. I’ve definitely changed. I would say that I can relate to other people much better, that I’m less caught up in my own worries and projects, and more able to connect with other people through mindfulness. I’m more relaxed, I’m more creative. I feel I appreciate the magic of the world more, that vivid quality of experience, of simple things like the trees, and the sky, and the whole experience of being alive. All of that is more intensely vivid since I took up mindfulness."