Meditation Is Not What You Think was originally published in 2005 as part of a larger book entitled Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. This book is the first of 4 parts.

'Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of the finest teachers of mindfulness you will ever encounter.'
-Jack Kornfield, PhD, author of No Time Like the Present


We think we know what meditation is -- especially in an era when 'mindfulness' has rocketed into the mainstream. Millions of people around the world have taken up a formal mindfulness meditation practice as part of their everyday lives. But there's no hard-and-fast rule that says you have to meditate in a certain way, in a particular place, or following a specific tradition. So what is meditation anyway? And why might it be worth trying? Or nurturing further if you already have practice?

Meditation Is Not What You Think was originally published in 2005 as part of a larger book entitled Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. Updated with a new foreword by the author, these questions (and their answers) are particularly relevant today. If you're curious as to why meditation is not for the 'faint-hearted', how taking some time each day to drop into awareness can actually be a radical act of love, and why paying attention is so supremely important, read on for a master class from one of the pioneers of mindfulness in the mainstream world.

More than twenty years ago, Jon Kabat-Zinn changed the way we thought about awareness in everyday life with his now-classic introduction to mindfulness, Wherever You Go, There You Are. He followed that up with 2005's Coming to Our Senses, the definitive book for our time on the connection between mindfulness and our well-being on every level, physical, cognitive, emotional, social, planetary, and spiritual.

Now, Coming to Our Senses is being repackaged into 4 smaller books, each focusing on a different aspect of mindfulness, and each with a new foreword written by the author. In the first of these books, Meditation Is Not What You Think (which was originally published as Part I and Part II of Coming to Our Senses), Kabat-Zinn focuses on the "what" and the "why" of mindfulness--explaining why meditation is not for the "faint-hearted," how meditation can actually be a radical act of love, and why paying attention is so supremely important. By "coming to our senses"--both literally and metaphorically--we can become more compassionate, more embodied, more aware human beings, and in the process, contribute to the healing of the body politic as well as our own lives in ways both little and big.