Buddhist meditator and scholar Bhikkhu Analayo introduces the Buddhist backgrounds to mindfulness, ranging from mindful eating to its formal cultivation as satipatthana (the foundations of mindfulness). He also offers a historical survey of the development of mindfulness in different Buddhist traditions. Providing an accessible guide, he offers practical exercises on how to develop mindfulness. The orally transmitted early teachings examined here provide a range of perspectives on mindfulness, with a clear overarching focus on the role of mindfulness in the path to `awakening', to an understanding of reality as it is. Analayo shows how mindfulness is a central tool for recognizing the influence of greed, anger and delusion, and how to emerge from these to progress on the path of practice to liberation. He shows how mindfulness brings about a clear vision of reality, fostering a gradual freeing of the mind from these influences, and enabling us to be more fully in touch with what is taking place and remain in the present; we learn to slow down and come to our senses. As well as being directed within, Analayo demonstrates how mindfulness helps us discern how what we do impacts others, and thus naturally strengthens our compassion, helping us avoid harming others and ourselves. Mindfulness is something to be practised, and at the end of each chapter Analayo provides instructions for developing mindfulness step by step, bringing it into our personal experience.

About the Author
Bhikkhu Analayo is a scholar-monk and meditation teacher whose published works include Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization, Perspectives on Satipatthana, Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation, Mindfully Facing Disease and Death, A Meditator's Life of the Buddha, Satipatthana Meditation and Mindfulness of Breathing.

Reviews
'A wise and helpful presentation of essential elements of the Buddha's teaching . . . it will be of great value for those who wish to put these teachings into practice. A wonderful Dharma gift.' - Joseph Goldstein, author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening; 'A gold mine for anyone who is working in the broad field of mindfulness-based programs for addressing health and wellbeing in the face of suffering - in any or all of its guises.' - Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Meditation Is Not What You Think: Mindfulness and Why It Is So Important; 'Bhikkhu Analayo offers simple skilled mindfulness practices for each of the dimensions of this book. Open-minded practices of embodied mindfulness are described, beginning with eating and health, and continuing with mindfulness examining mind and body, our relation to death, and the nature of the mind itself. Significantly, by highlighting the earliest teachings on internal and external mindfulness, Bhikkhu Analayo shows how, individually and collectively, we can use mindfulness to bring a liberating understanding to ourselves and to the pressing problems of our global, social, modern world. We need this more than ever.' - Jack Kornfield, from the Foreword



Book Information
ISBN 9781911407577
Author Bhikkhu Analayo
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint Windhorse Publications
Publisher Windhorse Publications