I once had the opportunity to offer an introduction to mindfulness and meditation to a group of high profile women working in global healthcare.
I was mildly surprised to see that most of them had never meditated or practiced mindfulness. While I always offer extra resources with my group classes and for corporate client mindfulness programs, I took this as an opportunity to gather all my favorite resources, teachers and books, so that they could dip into any of them in case they wanted to follow up with a personal practice.
Being a a bit of a meditation nerd and a book enthusiast, I decided to offer these same resources for you as well, hoping this will serve you and support your discovery of meditation and mindfulness practices. Have fun!
Recent Articles I enjoyed
Recent article on mindfulness and self-care:
https://www.mindful.org/the-power-of-sustainable-self-care/
Why try Loving Kindness? Here are 18 Science Backed reasons for you:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201409/18-science-backed-reasons-try-loving-kindness-meditation
Favorite Teachers
My favorite teachers – in no particular order – all offer a lot of wonderful talks and guided meditations. I learned so much from them, it feels only right to recommend them.
Jack Kornfield is a wonderful teacher, as wise as I think him funny. There are many talks and resources available on his website: JackKornfield.com
Tara Brach, who works closely with Jack and was taught by him, has a great podcast since 2011, via which you can access weekly talks illustrating how we can explore mindfulness in daily life, as well as guided practices.
Sharon Salzberg is another great mindfulness teacher and the most well-known for Loving Kindness. She has written several great books, including her most famous, ‘Loving Kindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness’ which I warmly recommend as well as her most recent ‘Real Change’.
I also recommend her 10 day Metta Meditation challenge on Youtube, which I discovered only recently, a wonderful way to explore Loving Kindness with a master teacher on the practice.
Thich Nhat Hanh is an incredible teacher, activist and writer. I’m not the only one who thinks so, as attested by the quotes on the back of his books, by his Holiness the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King and Sogyal Rinpoche.
He has authored dozens of books, all in pursuit of helping us communicate better and find relief in our lives with the help of mindfulness.
I happily recommend several really short and accessible books from his How To series:
- How to Love
- How to Walk
- How to Eat
- How to See
I also enjoyed The Miracle of Mindfulness and this excellent one (which I keep on going back to) called The Art of Communicating – very fitted to our times.
Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and New York Times best-selling author. I discovered him as a guest lecturer in my mindfulness certification course (MMTCP) when he offered a class on positive neuroplasticity and the way in which this is linked with mindfulness and compassion practices. He has a great podcast co-hosted by his son Forrest, called Being Well, where he uses a mindful lens to discuss the science of positive brain change.
Dan Harris is an ABC news anchor and a meditation enthusiast who launched a podcast and an app with the same name, Ten Percent Happier. I haven’t used the app but I hear good things, and he interviews all the greatest meditation teachers on his show, including most of the teachers I mention above. There are plenty of short guided practices you can tap into as well from the same platform.
Other wonderful teachers to discover, from other practices, include:
Sally Kempton – teaches meditation as a process of inner exploration, in which we learn to integrate heart, mind and body in order to experience our natural state of wisdom and love. Widely considered a teacher’s teacher, her books are a great way into this different lineage: Meditation for the Love of It and Awakening Shakti.
Dr Kristin Neff – is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a leader with Chris Germer on Self-Compassion. She is the author of two seminal books, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself and more recently Fierce Self-Compassion written specifically to support empower women.
‘With self-compassion, we give ourselves the same kindness and care we’d give to a good friend.’
