Compassion toward absolutely everyone doesn’t condone wrongdoing or excuse bad behavior, nor does it ask us to feel differently than the way we feel. All agendaless compassion asks is that we incline our hearts and minds in its direction —that we lean toward the light like sunflowers angle toward the sun.
If you measure what people care about by who's clicking on what, it's no surprise that our readers are most interested in materials to help them share mindfulness and meditation with youth. For your reading, listening, and watching pleasure, here are our most popular links of last year.
To many Western eyes, monasticism looks about as “real world” as a Jane Austen novel. But to teacher/author Oren Jay Sofer, who spent two and a half years in a Thai Buddhist monastery as part of his spiritual training, the skills of contemplative practice are ideal preparation for living in a flawed, fast-moving world. Even the title of his new book—Your Heart Was Made for This—affirms his view of embracing the world, not escaping it. In many ways, it’s a natural follow-up to his first book, Say What You Mean, which applies mindfulness and meditation skills to effective communication. By deepening that skill set, Sofer now shows how we can live with hope and gratitude in our complicated world of AI, war, climate change and click-bait—all of which became a lot more immediate and personal to Sofer himself when he recently became a first-time father.
When he wrote The Mindful Teen: Powerful Skills to Help You Handle Stress One Moment at a Time, adolescent medicine specialist pediatrician Dzung Vo couldn’t have envisioned the Zoom classrooms, social isolation, and ferocious college competition of today’s pandemic era. Then again, he didn’t have to. Today’s stressors may be unprecedented, but for teens, the path to mental health resilience—mindful self-care and self-compassion--has always been clear. That’s one reason Vo’s book has continued to sell strongly since its publication in 2015, and no doubt will gain more adherents in the post-pandemic era to come. Here, Vo talks about what he’s witnessed among his teenage patients over these rough times and what he hopes for in the years ahead.
“Perfection isn’t possible,” says psychologist/author Shauna Shapiro in her TEDx Talk, The Power of Mindfulness. “Transformation is.” That’s something Shapiro learned firsthand when her own “perfect” high-school life—volleyball captain, homecoming princess—came to a skidding stop. At age 17, emergency spinal surgery put her flat on her back in a hospital bed for six months. Emaciated, deeply depressed and scarred, Shapiro found a lifeline in a book her father gave her, Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. From there, she trained in Thailand, earned a PhD, and spent the next 30 years teaching, speaking and writing about mindfulness and neuropsychology. “That book changed my life, and made me believe in the power of books,” she says today. Now, with her first children’s book, Good Morning, I Love You, Violet, Shapiro, a mom and stepmom of four young adults, shows how one simple, mindful practice can be a game-changer for kids (and adults) to become more resilient, compassionate and self-aware.
My wonderful stack of wordless children’s books, thanks to all of your thoughtful and incredibly helpful recommendations! 📚 I am so blown away by how many responses we got, and I wanted to share with you the list of over 80 (!!) wordless books, a collection of yours and my favorites. I wish I could take them all. Thank you Diesel Bookstore for carrying so many of these great titles, just in time for my trip! 🧳 Heading to Nepal brimming with books and gratitude 💌