Paul Raymond Gilbert

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZufW5Jf9QUQ
(This meditation is my current favourite guided meditation, but it is quite unrelated to the book. Just wanted to share it with you guys, and it seemed fitting.)

Title: Mindful Compassion: How the science of compassion can help you understand your emotions, live in the present, and connect deeply with others.
Author: Paul Gilbert and Choden
Source: Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review
Tl;dr: Psychology and Buddhism and a practical and open show more approach to mindfulness and meditation. I enjoyed this book and would advice it to all interested in these topics.

For the past few years, I've meditated on an (almost) daily basis. I did a few meditation courses, with different orientations (from a more eclectic approach to an official mindfulness course), and read up on Buddhism and Zen However, I am also allergic to woo and I am an atheist. I read other books from this publisher, and the amount of woo in between seemingly solid science, made me worry about this book.

I did not need to: this book is awesome. It connects Buddhism with psychology, uses the correct sources and also refrains from spritual blabla. It gives a background framework of the psychology of compassion, and the core place it has in mindfulness and how life could benefit from more compassion. The second half of the book gives practical and useful mindfulness and meditation exercises to bring the practice of all that is mentioned into your life. And it's written in an accessible way, without being condescending to the reader, but also without making all kinds of shortcuts for the sake of simplicity. This I especially appreciated, because mindfulness, meditation and psycholohy are topics I have quite some background knowledge on, and I hate it when I am undervalued as a reader.

What made this book different than other books on the topic of mindfulness, is the emphasis on how you accept the feelings and thoughts you have. How you can learn to be compassionate towards yourself. Many books just mention that you should "just accept all that arises", but this is often incredibly hard, especially if you are dealing with the harder emotions and moods of life: anxiety, depression, grief. And in those cases, mindfulness and meditation can be extra helpful, but also extra hard. I loved that this book gave actual, practical, advice on this.

There were some few minor points I disliked. The sudden appearance of politics every once in a while: I agree with their political view, but it often came unsuspected, and might turn certain readers off completely. The mention of mindfulness-like things in Christian traditions: although I liked this broad view, I would have appreciated insights from Islam, Judaism and Hinduism as well. This made it very western focused (which I suppose was their projected audience), but I like inclusiveness too much not to mention it. Lastly, I would love the meditations they describe in an audio-format. I really appreciated they mention often that you should only do what you feel comfortable with, but as the instructions for the meditations grow longer, they get harder (at least for me) to actually follow all instructions, while sitting on my cushion. But these are all details, and did not stop me giving this book 5 stars on goodreads.

If you have an interest in mindfulness and meditation, being a beginner or quite experienced, I would really advice to getting this book. It came out at april 1st of this year. show less

This is a series of eight accounts by sufferers from depression, how their lives have developed and how they have, often over a period of many years, managed to overcome their depression through combinations of different strategies. One feature that they nearly all have in common is the difficulty they have found in communicating the true impact of the disease to non-sufferers, as it doesn't leave the visible evidence that a physical disability does; and, consequently, the difficulty in show more being accepted and even believed by many in society to whom mental ill-health still carries a great stigma. Things are much better than they were, though, and in my own case I have found sympathy and support from friends and colleagues I have told. It is a known fact that women suffer more from depression than men and I must confess that as a male sufferer, I was slightly disappointed that nearly all the accounts here were by women (and two of them specifically about post-natal depression), but there was still much that I could draw on from these stories. There is nothing startlingly new in these accounts, but nevertheless some hope and inspiration of finding a way through. 4/5 show less

Probably generally a good book, but it just didn't work for me. Some of the hints I had worked out by myself years ago; some are common Buddhist principles retold for Western audience; but mostly it's about being compassionate towards oneself, and my problem has always been the exact opposite: forever making excuses, and blaming anybody and anything other than myself for the things which depress me.

Read this as part of the 'books on prescription' scheme in my area.

It's taken me nearly three months to work my way through all the exercises in the book and I feel like its been a long haul.

When my GP asked me to read this, I was quite adamant that I wasn't depressed. I now realise that I was just pretening that I wasn't depressed and trying to soldier on and prove that I could cope.

I will be returning the book to the library today and feel a bit vague about what to do next, the book does show more recommend some possible next steps but I don't really feel that any of them are for me but no doubt my GP will want to discuss things with me in the near future.

Overall this book has been very helpful but part of the reason its taken me so long to get through it is because you need to be in the right frame of mind to pick it up in the first place, if you're not and you try anyway it might as well just say "blah blah blah blah" on every page. The exercises at the end of each chapter are not easy, although I believe they are helpful if you can commit the time and energy to it (most of the time I couldn't)

I suspect everybody who begins to read this will soon identify with a great deal, and if they don't the chances are that it will help them to understand someone close to them, if and when the need arises. show less