Adela Sandness

Mindfulness - How to Cope with Hard Things Adela Sandness

Fulfillment, achievement, vitality, creativity, wisdom, compassion, intelligence, strength: all these are inherent to the mind as the sun is inherent to the sky. Occasionally, the sky also has clouds. Just because we can't see the sun doesn't mean it has gone anywhere: there is nowhere for it to go. So many people are benefitting from mindfulness practice and including it in their work professionally. Yet, how can we be mindful if we don't understand the nature of mind? Come on a journey to feel in your bones the shape of that world view - where time is round - and the techniques of mindfulness practice are part of a much deeper, richer, ancient, elegant and noble way to dream our world and our place in it. Many mindfulness practices pre-date Gautama Buddha, founder of Buddhist tradition. Their understanding of mind, thought, emotion, person, self, environment, and what it is to struggle and cope with hard things: we will explore these and more as seen in the ancient Indian world, in aspects of Buddhist psychology, and as they form the basis of today's mindfulness practices. We can be "had" by our thoughts and by our emotions. Here we answer: how to have a thought, how to have an emotion, and how to cope with hard things. May the journey bring you joy. Reflections on "Mindfulness: How to Cope with Hard Things: "Unlike many other contemporary manuals on mindfulness, this is not a composite of neuron counts, plasticity measurements and stress charts. Adela Sandness' work places mindfulness within the mytho-poetic world of the ancient Hindu Vedas and the inner cosmology of classical Buddhism. At the same time, it is born of her experience of working directly with the compound emotional and cognitive challenges of today's students coping with an increasingly troubled world. This work is in two parts: a presentation of what might be called the "energetics" of mindfulness and a workbook of questions that the reader can use for self-inquiry and inner exploration. Fundamentally, what sets these rich and intimately written books apart from much of the more secular and scientific literature is that they are rooted in a scholarly evocation of the uncompromising, lyrical - even epic - worldview of centuries-old spiritual traditions that understand humans, not as requiring therapy, but as beings whose true nature is radiant, kind and infinitely wise."- Richard Reoch, Chair of the Board of Trustees of The Mindfulness Initiative, United Kingdom