Sharon Salzberg

New York Times bestselling author of Real Happiness and Lovingkindness

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Book Recommendations:

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

Tara Brach’s four-step RAIN meditation can be an integral part of anyone’s mindfulness practice. RAIN helps us uncover the states of love, self-care, forgiveness, compassion, and tenderness we each are capable of. It is a useful and elegant system, and Radical Compassion is a beautifully written book. (from Amazon)

One of the most beloved and trusted mindfulness teachers in America offers a lifeline for difficult times: the RAIN meditation, which awakens our courage and heart Tara Brach is an in-the-trenches teacher whose work counters today's ever-increasing onslaught of news, conflict, demands, and anxieties--stresses that leave us rushing around on auto-pilot and cut off from the presence and creativity that give our lives meaning. In this heartfelt and deeply practical book, she offers an antidote: an easy-to-learn four-step meditation that quickly loosens the grip of difficult emotions and limiting beliefs. Each step in the meditation practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) is brought to life by memorable stories shared by Tara and her students as they deal with feelings of overwhelm, loss, and self-aversion, with painful relationships, and past trauma--and as they discover step-by-step the sources of love, forgiveness, compassion, and deep wisdom alive within all of us.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

Pragmatic, thorough, and easy to read, this is a wonderful volume for those new to meditation practices. Ben Decker has captured the essence of what you need to get started on your mindfulness practice journey. (from Amazon)

Connect with your higher nature―a practical guide to universal spirituality A spiritual awakening is taking place around the globe―and you can be a part of it. Discover a new expression of faith at the crossroads of world traditions with Modern Spirituality. This inclusive guide is full of everyday applications for spiritual concepts like mindfulness, karma, and your higher nature―helping equip you on the journey to a more meaningful, fulfilling life. Build your personal practice by tapping into key principles of spirituality while cultivating positivity, power, and purpose. Explore exercises to help you activate the ideas and skills you're learning―all supported by modern psychological and scientific understanding. It's time to embark down the path of healing and growth. In Modern Spirituality, you'll find: Accessible spirituality―Learn seven core principles and delve into approachable practices like mindfulness, yoga, and prayer with this easy-to-follow guide.Eye-opening exercises―Discover guided meditations, mind-body exercises, journal prompts, and other effective tools for spiritual and psychological growth.All are welcome―No matter where you are in your journey of spirituality, or whether you have a religious background, you can draw from these lessons and find support.With a blend of proven techniques and traditional principles, Modern Spirituality is your practical guide to a modern spiritual practice.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

Robert Wright brings his sharp wit and love of analysis to good purpose, making a compelling case for the nuts and bolts of how meditation actually works. This book will be useful for all of us, from experienced meditators to hardened skeptics who are wondering what all the fuss is about. (from Amazon)

New York Times Bestseller From one of America’s greatest minds, a journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. The mind is designed to often delude us, he argued, about ourselves and about the world. And it is designed to make happiness hard to sustain. But if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety, depression, anger, and greed, what do we do? Wright locates the answer in Buddhism, which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only discovering now. Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly—and proposes that seeing the world more clearly, through meditation, will make us better, happier people. In Why Buddhism is True, Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age. At once excitingly ambitious and wittily accessible, this is the first book to combine evolutionary psychology with cutting-edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. With bracing honesty and fierce wisdom, it will persuade you not just that Buddhism is true—which is to say, a way out of our delusion—but that it can ultimately save us from ourselves, as individuals and as a species.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

What Michael Gelb has gleaned from a lifetime of public speaking he shares here as a resource for anyone entering that arena. Those of us who have felt or feel uncertain or downright frightened about reaching an audience will fully relate. Michael presents a helpful checklist of how best to create and hone the content of your presentation and offers often-overlooked considerations that can roadblock the core message of what you have to say and how you actually want to say it. Most resonant are the ways he deals with the butterflies of public speaking so they can work to one’s advantage and not against it. (from Amazon)

Seventy-four percent of Americans suffer from glossophobia, the fear of public speaking. In fact, even top professional speakers and accomplished actors experience butterflies before presenting. They never eliminate the butterflies; they just teach them how to fly in formation. How? Michael Gelb’s techniques will help you clarify and shape your message so that your audience — no matter how big or small, in person or virtual — will care about it. Once the message is clear, he teaches you how to convey it in memorable, creative, and effective ways. Gelb shows that public speaking is a skill anyone can learn and enjoy. Mastering the Art of Public Speaking will guide you to rediscover your natural gift for communication while strengthening confidence and presence.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

It Didn’t Start with You takes us a big step forward, advancing the fields of trauma therapy, mindfulness applications, and human understanding. It is a bold, creative, and compassionate work. (from Amazon)

A groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations, by an acclaimed expert in the field Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood. As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

Matt Licata pinpoints a space within us where healing, awakening, and a vibrant reckoning of who we actually are can be realized. The wisdom hidden deep within our darkest experiences comes from not turning away from these, but by directly tending to them with gentleness, love, and compassion. This book depicts a way of genuine freedom. (from Amazon)

Healing Space book cover

by Matt Licata·You?

A gifted teacher explores how both hardship and joy can lead us back to the sacredness of ordinary life. What does healing mean to you? For many of us, to “heal” is to solve a problem―to remove an illness, put a trauma behind us, or change something we don’t like in our life so we never have to deal with it again. Yet does that idea of healing serve us … or does it cut us off from life’s gifts? “True healing is not a state where we become liberated from feeling, but freer and flexible to experience it more fully,” writes Dr. Matt Licata. “When we experience our suffering consciously, it reveals sacredness and beauty we might not expect. Healing will always surprise us.” With A Healing Space, Matt extends an invitation to explore the endless richness of your life―without minimizing or turning away from hardship, nor by seeking the shelter of comfort or certainty. “I do not have any answers for you,” he writes. “Rather, I see my role as helping to illuminate the immensity and even magic of the questions themselves.” On this journey, you’ll learn to use new tools and perspectives to find your own sources of guidance, including: • Slowness―in a speed-obsessed world, rediscover the revolutionary power of slowing down, listening, and letting the fullness of each moment unfold • Uncertainty―why we often protect ourselves from the unknown at any cost, and how we can gradually learn to open to the gifts of uncertainty • Alchemy―explore the wisdom of transmutation as an inner process of things falling apart and then coming back together in ways that are more integrated and whole • Depth Psychology―integrating modern advances in psychotherapy and neuroscience with the timeless power of a soul-based psychology • Embodied Spirituality―discover the healing potential of an approach to spirituality that honors the body, emotions, relationships, and the shadow • Love―allow yourself to awaken to the revolutionary call to love and participate in the full-spectrum of life, dissolving the “trance of postponement” with the power of an open heart A Healing Space is not a book to be absorbed and processed in one sitting―instead, you will find yourself returning again and again, whenever your soul calls you to examine, transform, and renew yourself. “At times,” writes Matt, “we need to crumble to the ground at the magnificence of it all, awestruck at the bounty that has been laid out before us. To fall apart. To fail. To get back up. To be humbled again. To start over. To be a beginner in the ways of love. To make this journey with our fellow travelers, and the sun, moon, and stars.”

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

A Mindful Year is a conversation between two cherished friends. It is a collection of the authors' back-and-forth correspondence, down-to-earth, practical, and insight-full daily meditations. There are a variety of ways to enhance one's mindfulness meditation practice. A Mindful Year is a very good one. (from Amazon)

Written by two experts in the field of cognitive behavioral therapy--the best tested set of practices for alleviating stress and anxiety--these daily meditations invite you to find contentment, peace, and happiness in place of worry and fear. Each day's reading reveals how the powerful tool of mindfulness can help you to become more grounded, energized, motivated, and satisfied with your life. You'll discover in these pages how to be attentive and open to the present while calmly acknowledging and accepting your thoughts, feelings, and sensations. The authors' deep expertise and clinical experience in the field of psychology lends scientific weight to the mindfulness practices found in this practical and inspirational guide. The daily entries in A Mindful Year will guide you to reconnect with core values: authenticity, compassion, gratitude, simplicity. Each of the 365 readings leads with an uplifting quote from the likes of Kahlil Gibran, Maya Angelou, Alan Watts, Harper Lee, Thomas Merton, Alice Walker, Eckhart Tolle, Rumi, and the Dalai Lama--and is followed by reflections, anecdotes, and timeless insights on all aspects of daily living. Each entry concludes with an invitation, a call to action that will bring the mindfulness practice into your life in a meaningful way. As you spend time each day with the readings you will find yourself feeling less disconnected and empty, and more in tune with what matters most in your life A Mindful Year is a book readers will turn to again and again as it becomes a daily companion in finding wisdom, love, connection, and joy.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

Reading Ayurveda Beginner’s Guide feels like a friend taking your hand and warmly guiding you to feeling a lot better. It’s a wonderful and helpful book. (from Amazon)

"Susan's approach to Ayurveda is simplicity itself. In Ayurveda Beginners Guide she has described the complex network of Ayurvedic information in a very practical, straightforward way so that every person can understand the healing modality of Ayurveda."―Vasant Lad, BAM&S, MASc, Ayurvedic Physician Founder of the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, advisor for the National Ayurvedic Medical Association, and author of numerous books including Ayurveda: Science of Self-Healing and The Complete Book of Ayurvedic Home Remedies Ayurveda is a profound science with wisdom spanning so wide that it can be difficult to know exactly where to begin. As an Ayurvedic consultant, Susan Weis-Bohlen helps those who are new to Ayurveda address this exact issue. In Ayurveda Beginners Guide Susan explains of the holistic principles behind Ayurveda, and offers gentle guidance for incorporating its restorative practices in your everyday life. Designed with the newcomer in mind, Ayurveda Beginner's Guide presents: A concise overview of Ayurveda that covers its historical roots, concepts, and various healing methodsA 3-week Ayurveda plan for beginners to introduce Ayurvedic concepts into one's lifestyle gently and practicallyA wide range of Ayurveda techniques such as recipes, yoga, aromatherapy, meditation, seasonal cleanses, and moreA simple dosha quiz and in-depth descriptions of each doshaAyurveda Beginner's Guide will show you how to unlock the transformative powers of Ayurveda and move forward in your journey towards a healthier state of mind, body, and spirit.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

Ideally, meditation is not something we do, but something we live. Jon Kabat-Zinn points the way to this living spirit with clarity, ease, and poetry. (from Amazon)

Find quiet reflective moments in your life—and reduce your stress levels drastically—with this classic bestselling guide updated and featuring a new introduction and afterword. When Wherever You Go, There You Are was first published in 1994, no one could have predicted that the book would launch itself onto bestseller lists nationwide and sell over 1 million copies to date. Thirty years later, Wherever You Go, There You Are remains a foundational guide to mindfulness and meditation, introducing readers to the practice and guiding them through the process. The author of over half a dozen books on mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn combines his research and medical background with his spiritual knowledge to help readers find peace and change their lives. In this new edition, readers will find a new introduction and afterword from Kabat-Zinn, as well as factual updates throughout to address changes in research and knowledge since it was originally published. After the special tumult of the last few years, as well as the promise of more unrest in the future, Wherever You Go, There You Are serves as an anchor for a whole new generation of readers looking to find their center and achieve their true self.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

From their extensive insight and experience, Drs. Neff and Germer provide a friendly, easy-to-use workbook. Its powerful exercises will help you uncover your innate capacity to hold yourself--and the world around you--with compassion. Whether or not you take a formal Mindful Self-Compassion course, using this workbook can effect profound change in your life. (from Amazon)

Are you kinder to others than you are to yourself? More than a thousand research studies show the benefits of being a supportive friend to yourself, especially in times of need. This science-based workbook offers a step-by-step approach to breaking free of harsh self-judgments and impossible standards in order to cultivate emotional well-being. In a convenient large-size format, the book is based on the authors' groundbreaking eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program, which has helped tens of thousands of people worldwide. It is packed with guided meditations (with audio downloads); informal practices to do anytime, anywhere; exercises; and vivid stories of people using the techniques to address relationship stress, weight and body image issues, health concerns, anxiety, and other common problems. The seeds of self-compassion already lie within you--learn how you can uncover this powerful inner resource and transform your life. See also Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program, by Christopher Germer and Kristin Neff, a thorough overview of conducting MSC (for professionals), and The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, by Christopher Germer, which delves into mindful self-compassion and shares moving stories of how it can change lives.

Recommended by Sharon Salzberg

In Dancing with Elephants, Jarem Sawatsky offers a powerful example of the art of real happiness. This inspiring story reminds us just how essential it is to bring lovingkindness into every step of life. (from Amazon)

Want to enjoy the life you are living, even as you face major life challenges?Is your mind succumbing to age? Is your body failing you? Can you ever find joy, peace, or fulfillment in these challenging conditions? The answer is a resounding YES. Author Jarem Sawatsky saw the countless guides out there for those caring for the ill and healing the curable, but when he was diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease he found there was nothing for those living with an incurable illness. He quit his job as a professor and devoted his life to exploring the possibilities of living with chronic conditions. Now he’s bringing his findings and insights to you in this empowering mindfulness guide. In Dancing With Elephants you’ll discover:Simple practices to bring healing to your heart and life to your new outlookHumorous (and occasionally heart-wrenching) stories of Sawatsky’s own journey of self-discovery and surprising family caregivingMultiple ways to build confidence in yourself, even when you’ve been shaken to the coreA new perspective to transform your pain and renew your spiritPractical tools to face your seemingly inescapable fears, and much, much more!Based on the popular blog of the same name, Dancing With Elephants includes insightful interviews with compassion experts Jon Kabat-Zinn, Lucy Kalanithi, and Patch Adams. Sawatsky’s landmark book provides support that only a fellow traveler down this road can offer. If you like touching stories, mindful wisdom, and a touch of irreverent humor, then you’ll love Sawatsky’s life-changing book. Buy Dancing With Elephants today to discover a new way to live with joy!