Awake & Read! Books For Wakefulness
Some call it mindfulness but I like to call it wakefulness. Yes, the practice of present moment awareness is to become aware of our thinking, but that’s just a small part of it. What the mind does, is think. A lot. Our minds think just like our hearts pumps blood and our lungs respire air.
The meditation I love to practice and teach allows us to go beyond those 60,000-80,000 thoughts we experience in a day. Around 95% of the thoughts we have today are the same as yesterday. Living a life inside my noisy head was no fun. I had 40 years of that. Then I learned this meditation. What we experience when we transcend our thinking, even if just for a moment, in our meditation shows us something. We are not our thoughts. We don’t have to live inside our heads. And this, dear reader, is really good news.
Mindfulness is a meditation practice anyone can incorporate into their life every moment of everyday. I tried it before I learned this transcendent practice of meditation. It felt impossible. Since I learned, mindfulness and Vedic meditation fit like a hand in glove, it goes together like peas and carrots, like chocolate and peanut butter.
It took awhile, it’s simple and not always easy, and I never “graduate.” I learned to become mindful and non-judgmental of my thoughts and awake to the present moment. Come to my senses, to practice being present now and now and now… Here are some short but powerful books I highly recommend that helped me along the way. If you prefer audiobooks, I believe most of the list below is available in that form. All the same I am so grateful they did some heavy lifting for us.
The Pocket Pema Chodron By Pema Chodron
The Little Book of Mindfulness By Dr. Patrizia Collard
The Miracle of Mindfulness By Thich Nhat Hanh
The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
The Power of Now By Eckhart Tolle (Or Practicing The Power of Now for the short version)
Wherever You Go There You Are By Jon Kabat-Zinn (Definitely the longest read of the bunch by far)
