Mindful Books and Podcasts to Curl Up With This Fall ow.ly By Barry Boyce, Amber Tucker, Oyinda Lagunju, Ava Whitney- Coulter and Stephanie Domet
As the weather changes, we’re spending a little less time outdoors and a little more time inside staying warm.
Here are the Mindful editors’ recommendations for a cozy night in.
Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, Peak Mind is written by a leading neuroscientist studying the effects of contemplative practices on our attention system.
In Grow Wild, Katy Bowman offers ideas, science, and stories to help the reader become more aware of ways we can rethink areas of our lives to make space for movement and nature.
5 Mindfulness Books to Read This Fall
1) Peak Mind
Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day
This long-awaited book from the leading neuroscientist studying the effects of contemplative practices on our attention system doesn’t disappoint.
It’s an intricate subject, so it would be easy to get lost in the weeds.
Not so here.
You can read a chapter and turn to a ten-year old and explain what you just learned.
It’s not simplistic, however. It’s simply clearly written and organized, as befits an expert in how our attention can remain focused (or go all to hell).
Peak Mind is one of those books written by a leader in the field that’s wrapped in the kind of self-help package publishers hold dear but that delivers so much more.
It does offer help, but it also educates.
It invites you to contemplate how something so innately part of who we are functions and malfunctions.
In the early pages, I was taken by the explanatory power of this simple summation of ways attention breaks down: depleted attention, hijacked attention, fragmented attention, disconnected attention.
Yikes! Has Amishi Jha been shadowing me?
Because that sure sounds like the description of an average day.
The (mostly) good news follows, in equally succinct terms: Attention is powerful, fragile, and trainable.
The book delivers on those first two with a thorough roadmap to what we know today about the brain’s complex attention system and why it’s like any high-performance vehicle: delicate and finicky.
It needs care and feeding.
That’s where the trainable part comes in, which includes mindfulness meditation—which Jha has studied extensively—identifying and counteracting bias, and strengthening meta-awareness.
It’s an uplifting read that makes a good case that taking care of our attention not only makes us more attentive, but less stressed out as well. –BB
Time Management for Mortals
With to-do lists that rule our days and sometimes feel infinite, it can be difficult to remember that we have a finite amount of time on earth.
Just how fi nite?
Well, according to Oliver Burkeman, 4,700 weeks, and that’s if you’re lucky.
In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman uses wit and humor to lay down a hard truth: that never ending to-do list?
You’re never going to get it all done.
With this dose of reality, Four Thousand Weeks is not like other productivity books.
While Burkeman isn’t going to tell you how to work faster or how to use your limited time, his approach forces you to examine just how you want to spend your time.
In the words of Burkeman,
“Once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing [the] things that count.” –OL
3) Grow Wild
The Whole-Child, Whole-Family Nature-Rich Guide to Moving More
Humans are part of nature, writes Katy Bowman, biomechanist and movement expert, and, like any flora or fauna, we grow and adapt to our environment—for better or worse.
Children today are what Bowman refers to as “sedentary natives,” the younger siblings of digital natives, although the two grew up hand-in-hand.
In Grow Wild, Bowman offers ideas, science, and stories to help the reader become more aware of the ways we can rethink areas of our lives to make space for movement and nature.
The book is fun, colorful, and doesn’t ask us to add activities to our already tight schedules, but helps us figure out the best ways we can weave movement into our daily lives so we can grow resilient kids and families. –AWC ..
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