Mindfulness for Beginners Review

This is a review of the Mindfulness for Beginners CD set developed by Jon Kabat Zinn.

Kabat-Zinn has written several books focusing on mindfulness as a means to reduce stress and live life fully.

His books include: Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are, Coming to Our Senses and The Mindful Way Through Depression.

Kabat Zinn has also developed a series of CDs for guided meditation. If you haven't read or listened to Kabat Zinn's work, you may want to start with the Mindfulness for Beginners CDs. They give yo a nice introduction to what mindfulness is all about, plus several exercises to get you started being mindful.

The beginners CD set is life changing, it has transformed the lives of many people, including mine. When I began to listen to these CDs I noticed that my ADHD-like behavior decreased, I became more centered and less forgetful. I guess you can say that I slowed down, a much needed move on my part.

The package includes two CDs. In the first CD, the author starts by explaining what mindfulness is: "paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, as if you life depended on it, non-judgmentally". It explains how the mind is always busy thinking about one thing after another, incessantly. You can lilsten to this CD more than once, and every time you'll get something more out of it.

In the second CD Kabat Zinn gives you several guided mindfulness exercises that allow you to quiet the mind in a progressive way. This is perhaps the most valuable aspect of this CD, that it guides you, step by step, down the path of meditation.

The author leads you first to focus on a simple task: eating a raisin. As you discover that you can focus on that, the CD then takes you to focus on other things like sounds, and sounds only. As you do the sound exercises, you begin to witness your thoughts, how you judge the sounds, how you interpret the sounds and so forth.

The last exercise is mindfulness as pure awareness. You no longer focus on anything but experience life by witnessing everything: sounds, thoughts, emotions, and anything else that comes in and out of your awareness. This step has the odd effect of giving you extreme peace of mind.