I finished reading Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Hyperion, 2005). I started reading it about two years ago, which works out to about two pages a day. I actually did the first half of the book in 2005, but then needed to take a break. I started up again about a month ago. And I should probably go back and read several chapters again because they really helped clarify key ideas in my mind: about the nature of Buddha and Buddhism, meditation and its use in dealing with depression, and possibility of human change, to name just a few. Each chapter could serve as a starting point for meditation.

Kabat-Zinn really wrote several books under one cover, and he might have been better served by breaking it into separate publications. He was ambitious, ranging from the intimately personal to the globally political. That's a narrative arch that's pretty hard to sustain. I don't regret have bought and read it, but I've read all Kabat-Zinn's books so I am an exception to the average reader who might want something more focused.

Labels: reading