Books on mindfulness are excellent resources for mindfulness beginners and experts alike. Sifting through books to determine which ones are great mindfulness resources, though, can be overwhelming. To help you select a book (or multiple books) on mindfulness that are right for you, we’ve chosen 16 outstanding books by renowned and respected mindfulness experts and described them here.
1. A Year of Mindfulness: A 52-Week Guided Journal to Cultivate Peace and Presence
If you need a guiding hand on your mindfulness journey, you’re not alone: Mindfulness can be a tough habit to start on your own. These journal prompts give you the opportunity to add mindfulness into your day with daily entries, weekly overviews, and more.
This is perfect for beginners or those who need a little bit of help being more mindful.
2. Mindful Eating on the Go: Practices for Eating With Awareness, Wherever You Are
Dr. Jan Chozen Bays has combined her medical background with her experience as a Zen teacher to provide a resource for both physical and mental health. For our best life, it’s important to tend to both what we eat and how we eat it, and this guide shows us how.
Develop a new, pleasant relationship with food and learn to use mindfulness to nourish your entire self—mind and body—with this enlightening book. It’s short, simple, and user-friendly, packed with information and exercises to help you create joy and wellness around food.
3. From Suffering to Peace: The True Promise of Mindfulness
Mindfulness has helped people with stress, problems, and suffering for thousands of years, and mindfulness meditation teacher Mark Coleman presents why it works and how to practice it in this book. Here, you’ll learn what mindfulness is and discover how it’s been used for ages.
Discover modern applications of mindfulness across many settings and how you can use it to deal with struggles in your own life.
4. The Little Book of Mindfulness: 10 Minutes a Day to Less Stress, More Peace
Just a few minutes every day can ease stress, help you focus, and set a healthy intention for the day. Whether you’re new to mindfulness or just low on time, The Little Book of Mindfulness is perfect for those with busy lifestyles, or those who need a helping hand when establishing a mindful practice.
It tackles topics like acceptance, gratitude, and even mindful eating. Ease into mindfulness with this accessible, illustrated guide.
5. Pause, Breathe, Smile: Awakening Mindfulness when Meditation Is Not Enough
Drawing on more than five decades of mindfulness study and practice, Gary Gach offers simple yet profound mindfulness wisdom in Pause, Breathe, Smile. The book explores three concepts integral to mindful living: pausing to choose an intentional response in any situation rather than reacting emotionally; breathing to unite body, mind, and spirit; and smiling to be open nonjudgmentally to each moment as it comes.
This book offers insights and wisdom for beginners and seasoned practitioners alike.
6. Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
This comprehensive work, written by Joseph Golsdstein, an expert who has taught and practiced mindfulness for over forty years, is a go-to resource on mindfulness. In this book, goldstein discusses what mindfulness is, where the principles and practice came from, and why people practice it.
Learn about mindfulness of the body, mind, feelings, and experiences from the perspective of Buddhism and Buddhist principles. As you read and begin to practice, discover and embrace the inner freedom that comes from a mindfulness practice.
7. A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook
If you want to learn real mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) techniques in your own time, then this handbook is for you.
Whether alongside clinical treatment or as a solitary journey, this workbook provides well-renowned programs to reduce stress, find resilience, and process painful emotions.
8. The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation
Hanh’s short and powerful book helps readers gain understanding of mindfulness and use the practice to better understand themselves. Typical of his style, Hanh, who is a Buddhist monk and Zen master, uses brief stories and practical examples to show the way to mindful living. You’ll gain insights for living mindfully in all of your daily tasks and experiences.
9. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
Another short and simple yet profound work from Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Steplights the way along the path toward a new relationship with yourself and your world. Through brief anecdotes, personal examples, and practical exercises in mindfulness and meditation, discover how to find inner peace despite problems and stress.
While two separate works that stand alone, Peace is Every Step and The Miracle of Mindfulness can also complement each other, deepening your understanding of mindfulness and helping you build and solidify your own practice.
10. Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body & Mind to Face Stress, Pain, & Illness
Living in constant stress or chronic pain can impact our lives, our moods, and our connections with others. If you don’t listen to your body, you’re likely to end up burnt out and exhausted. This book offers a mind-body connection to break free from that constant “stress-response” style of living.
If you’re constantly living in high-stress mode, then this all-hands approach from Jon Kabat-Zinn is a thorough game plan to combat that constant fatigue.
11. Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness
In this comprehensive book on mindfulness, mindfulness guru and founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction Jon Kabat-Zinn takes readers on a deep journey into mindfulness. As readers travel with Zinn through the eight sections of this book, they learn about the depths of connection between mindfulness and wellbeing.
This book claims that it can help people heal themselves both physically and mentally and then show them to use the principles in their lives to help heal the suffering in the world around them. Explore meditation, sensory awareness, the mind-body connection, and more.
12. Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life
Kabat-Zinn has created an excellent resource for people new to the practice of mindfulness. It’s a gentle invitation to explore mindfulness as a way of living and being. This book and CD combination presents the foundations of mindfulness in short, easily-digestible segments. Enlightening and gentle rather than heavy-handed and overwhelming, this book allows people to internalize mindfulness in their own way.
Open it to a random page and learn a key mindfulness principle, work through it from beginning to end a principle per day to give yourself time to internalize it, or sit and read it from cover to cover. However you use this book, you’ll emerge from it a more mindful being.
13. Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World
This guide is rooted in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which was co-developed by co-author Mark Williams. According to his findings, it’s been as effective against depression as clinical drugs.
Whether you’re struggling with depression or just struggling to keep up in a busy world, this book provides a cognitive take to mindfulness you may find helpful.
14. The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: A Revolutionary Guide for Living an Awakened Life
Learn to release yourself from mental chatter and demanding thoughts through mindfulness with this guidebook. Begin to hone your inner wisdom, compassion, and joy in each and every moment of your life. This book is full of information and practices to help you awaken to your true self with the five foundations of Effortless Mindfulness.
15. Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out
In this timely book, author, educator, and meditation leader Ruth King discusses tools of mindfulness, teaching readers how to use them in their own lives in a very practical way. Readers will learn to apply principles of mindfulness to explore their own emotions and experiences around race.
The book approaches an important and sensitive issue with deep compassion, helping readers develop deeper compassion for and understanding of themselves so they can approach racism with wisdom and clarity.
16. No Time Like the Present: Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy Right Where You Are
In this lighthearted yet profound book, established and respected mindfulness guru Jack Kornfield walks with readers on a journey to freedom. He explains that mindfulness meets you exactly where you are—you don’t have to achieve a certain skill or acquire material goods before you can learn and apply it to your life.
Use Kornfield’s words and wisdom to free yourself from problems in your past and present and develop inner peace and freedom with mindfulness. He gently shows you the way as you read the book. Discover how to live mindfully, joyfully, and freely from the beginning of the book long past the last page.
17. Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader
Himself a business leader, Marc Lesser has taught mindful leadership to large, powerful companies for over 20 years. Now, with this book, all leaders can benefit from the mindfulness principles he teaches. Whether you are in business, run a household, or are in any other position of leadership (if you work with people in any capacity, you likely find yourself using leadership skills), Lesser’s book can help you live your role mindfully and calmly.
The seven steps in this book will provide you with mindfulness tools to enhance your awareness, communication skills, reduce conflict and drama, build trust, and rid yourself of fear and self-doubt. This book offers a very practical application of established mindfulness principles.
18. Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World
Sharon Salzberg is a prominent expert on mindfulness and lovingkindness meditation, and she brings her knowledge and experience to her book Real Change. This book is full of useful wisdom, insights, and practical advice to help readers use mindfulness to heal from the stress, anxiety, and negativity that is so prominent in our current world.
Gain mindfulness techniques and principles to help you deal with a wide variety of challenges within yourself and around you in your world. Learn ways to heal and change things you need or want to change.
19. Practicing Mindfulness: 75 Essential Meditations to Reduce Stress, Improve Mental Health, and Find Peace in the Everyday
Mindfulness meditation leader and teacher Matthew Sockolov has created this book of useful techniques and practices to help you use mindfulness meditation in your own life. In this book, you’ll learn some basic information about what mindfulness meditation is and how it works to bring peace, calm, and focus no matter what obstacles you are facing. You’ll also gain insight and advice for how to handle your own wandering thoughts and other blocks that interfere in your life.
The heart of the book is its collection of exercises and meditations you can use to form a daily mindfulness meditation practice to help you stay calm and centered in the face of challenges.
20. Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends With Yourself Through Meditation and Everyday Awareness
This book by the late Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa is an excellent resource for people at all levels of a mindfulness practice. Beginners learn the basics that underlie a mindfulness practice, and advanced students of mindfulness have the opportunity to delve more deeply and learn greater insights into meditation and a mindful way of life.
Trungpa’s thoughts on mindfulness, life, and the human experience in general help deepen understanding, and practical advice allow people to take the information off the pages and into their own lives.
21. The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness
Rather than a comprehensive guide to mindfulness, this book explores and expands the concept of awareness, a key mindfulness principle. A mindfulness educator at UCLA, Diana Winston shares her knowledge of mindful awareness with readers in this insightful book. It’s useful for people who are new to mindfulness and established practitioners alike, for this book provides fresh and deep insights into simple present-moment awareness.
The book consists of 72 short chapters, little bursts of awareness, insight, exercises, and meditations to help you live life more deeply. Awareness is at the heart of mindfulness, and this book shows you how to hone your natural ability to be fully aware and present in each moment of your life.
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