Archives de catégorie : Self Help / Mind, Body & Spirit

BEYOND DISTRACTION de Shaila Catherine

Learn how to overcome distraction in meditation practice and develop clarity in your relationships, work, and activities with this new guide from a beloved meditation teacher.

BEYOND DISTRACTION:
Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind
by Shaila Catherine
Wisdom Publications, May 2022

The mind can be a potent tool, used to guide extraordinary achievements, inspire good works, and incline your spiritual path toward peace and awakening. But the mind can also produce thoughts that lead to suffering. For many people, thoughts run rampant and seem to oppress or control their lives. Even the Buddha tells us that before his enlightenment, he sometimes found his mind preoccupied by thoughts connected with sensual desire, ill will, and harm. But he figured out how to respond to thoughts skillfully and developed a step-by-step approach to calm the restless mind.
Now, Insight Meditation teacher Shaila Catherine offers an accessible approach to training the mind that is guided by the Buddha’s pragmatic instructions on removing distracting thoughts. Drawing on two scriptures in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Shaila shows you how to overcome habitual modes of thinking, develop deeper concentration, and discover the insights into emptiness that are vital for a liberating spiritual path.
Following the Buddha’s pragmatic approach, Shaila guides you through five steps for overcoming distraction and focusing the mind. Each chapter includes exercises and reflections to help you cultivate the five steps to deeper concentration. You’ll learn about your mind and develop your ability to direct your attention more skillfully in meditation and daily activities. And ultimately, you’ll discover for yourself how these five steps boil down to one key realization: In the moment you recognize that a thought is just a thought, you will find yourself on the path to a life of remarkable freedom.

Shaila Catherine has been leading meditation retreats worldwide since 1996, emphasizing deep concentration, jhana, and the path of liberating insight. Shaila is the founder of Bodhi Courses, an online Dhamma classroom, and Insight Meditation South Bay, a Buddhist meditation center in Silicon Valley in California. She has practiced meditation since 1980, studied with founders of Western insight meditation centers, and accumulated more than nine years of silent retreat experience. Shaila spent most of the 1990s practicing with eminent masters in India, Thailand, and Nepal. From 2006 to 2014, she practiced under the guidance of Pa-Auk Sayadaw and twice completed his rigorous training in jhana and vipassana. Shaila loves deep meditation, and appreciates a variety of approaches to exploring, developing, and liberating the mind. Shaila is the author of Focused and Fearless: A Meditator’s Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity and Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana.

DELIBERATE CALM de Jacqueline Brassey, Aaron De Smet & Michiel Kruyt

A trio of McKinsey & Company veterans draws from a unique combination of psychology, neuroscience, and consciousness practices plus a combined 50-plus years of international board room experience to offer a unique approach to learning and leading with awareness and intentional choice, even amidst the most challenging circumstances.

DELIBERATE CALM:
How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World
by Jacqueline Brassey, Aaron De Smet & Michiel Kruyt
HarperBusiness, November 2022

As the speed of change in our increasingly complex world accelerates daily, leaders are tasked with performing outside of their familiar zones both in their personal and professional lives. This requires us to adapt. Yet, the same conditions that make adapting so important can also trigger fear, leading us to resist change and default to reactive behavior. The authors call this the “adaptability paradox”: when we most need to learn and change, we stick with what we know, often in ways that stifle learning and innovation. To avoid this trap, leaders must become proactive so they can lead ahead of the curve.
Enter DELIBERATE CALM, a tangible guide that combines cutting-edge neuroscience, psychology, and consciousness practices, along with the authors’ decades of experience working with leaders around the globe. By practicing Dual Awareness, which integrates our internal and external experiences, leaders can become fluid and respond to challenges with intentional choice instead of being limited by their old success models. With DELIBERATE CALM, anyone can lead and learn with awareness and choice to realize their full potential, even in times of uncertainty, complexity, and change.

Jacqueline (Jacqui) Brassey started at McKinsey & Company in 2013 as an expert consultant in the organization practice where she further specialized in transformational change, diversity & inclusion, human capital and leadership development. She has led the learning & development of McKinsey’s top 600 most senior leaders and serves on the firm’s global learning team. She has a PhD in Economics and Business from Groningen University, MS in affective neuroscience from the University of Maastricht and Florence, BA and MA cum laude in policy and organization sciences from Tilburg University and a bachelor’s degree in international business and languages from Avans University of Applied Sciences. She coauthored over twenty book chapters and articles in the area of organizational behavior and leadership development. Additionally, she serves as a board member of Save the Children. Jacqui and husband, Nicholas, live in the Netherlands with their 12-year-old twins.
Aaron De Smet joined McKinsey and Company in 2003; he has led the firm’s thinking on organizational health and leadership. His articles in McKinsey Quarterly are among its most-read and he is a member of the master faculty of the Change Leaders Forum and of the Organizational Agility Forum, which he helped establish. He leads McKinsey’s thinking on organizational health and was on the team that developed the Organizational Health Index (OHI) and OrgLab. Aaron has a PhD in social and organizational psychology from Columbia University, where he specialized in organizational dynamics, culture, leadership, and strategic change. He also has an MBA and BA in psychology. He lives in New Jersey with his family.
Michiel Kruyt is currently CEO of Imagine.one with a mission to create systemic transformation towards a more sustainable and equal planet. Before joining Imagine, Michiel was a partner and one of the leaders of the Organization Practice of McKinsey & Company, and co-founder and former managing partner of Aberkyn, a pioneer specializing in performance transformations, culture change and executive team and leadership development. The first 15 years of his career he worked for Unilever in marketing, sales and general management roles in The Netherlands, Italy and the USA. He is a member of the Board of the non-profit Urban Consciousness Center De Roos in Amsterdam. Michiel, his wife Christine, and their three children live just outside Amsterdam.

WARUM ES SO SCHWER IST, EIN GUTER MENSCH ZU SEIN d’Armin Falk

Why we want to do the right thing, but do the wrong thing instead – and how to become a better person.

WARUM ES SO SCHWER IST, EIN GUTER MENSCH ZU SEIN
(Why It Is So Hard to Be Good)
by Armin Falk
Siedler Verlag, May 2022

Would you save a life for 100 euros? The answer has to be yes – doesn’t everyone want to do the right thing? But Armin Falk, Germany’s leading behavioural economist, shows that we often do bad things despite wanting to be good, and are far from being as good as we like to think.
Why is it that we don’t do the right thing day in and day out: help others, give to those in need, protect our climate or care for the well-being of animals? Using many concrete examples and the insights he has gained from years of research, the Leibniz Prize-winner reveals under what circumstances people are likely to act morally – or immorally – and the role that personality, gender, education and culture play. Once we have understood this, we’ll find it easier to change – not only ourselves, but the very fabric of our economy and society.

Armin Falk, born in 1968, is the director of the Institute for Behavioural Economics and Inequality (BRIQ) and of the Laboratory for Experimental Economic Research, as well as Professor of economics at the University of Bonn. He is one of the world’s most highly regarded economic scientists. His work has won him the 2009 Leibniz Prize (the ‘German Nobel’) and a 2013 Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, the world’s highest prize for economists.

THE POWER OF MANTRA de Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the respected and beloved cofounder of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, offers us a significant book that is both a beautiful tool for experienced practitioners and a how-to for beginners.

THE POWER OF MANTRA:
Vital Practices for Transformation
by Lama Zopa Rinpoche
‎ Wisdom Publications, February 2022

Revitalize your practice with the potent energy of mantra. In this book, beloved teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche guides us through the most popular mantras in Tibetan Buddhism: Shakyamuni Buddha, Chenrezig, Manjushri, Tara, Medicine Buddha, Vajrasattva, and more. A mantra—literally “that which protects the mind”—is a series of Sanskrit syllables that evoke the energy of a particular buddha or bodhisattva. It works as a sacred sound that brings blessings to ourself and others, and as a tool to transform our mind into one that is more compassionate and wise. In clear and succinct teachings, Lama Zopa shows us why we need different mantras and how each mantra works. He also explains their importance and power, giving specific instructions for practicing them. The exquisite, full-color illustrations of the deities that accompany the text make this book a beautiful guide, one suitable for both beginners and experienced practitioners.

Lama Zopa Rinpoche is one of the most internationally renowned masters of Tibetan Buddhism, working and teaching ceaselessly on almost every continent. He is the spiritual director and cofounder of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), an international network of Buddhist projects, including monasteries in six countries and meditation centers in over thirty; health and nutrition clinics, and clinics specializing in the treatment of leprosy and polio; as well as hospices, schools, publishing activities, and prison outreach projects worldwide.

POSSIBLE de William Ury

According to the Pew Research Center, in the US alone, the share of Americans who say having conversations with those they disagree with politically is “stressful and frustrating” has increased dramatically in recent years. POSSIBLE is for all of us who feel that frustration and seek to uncover new possibilities for the challenges in which we find ourselves. It offers a way out of the seemingly impossible, no-win conflicts of our time, a creative and collaborative method that can transform even our toughest conflicts.

POSSIBLE:
Transforming Our Toughest Conflicts
by William Ury
‎ HarperBusiness, Fall 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

According to the Pew Research Center, in the US alone, the share of Americans who say having conversations with those they disagree with politically is “stressful and frustrating” has increased dramatically in recent years. As individuals, we are finding it increasingly hard to engage in civil discourse to negotiate our struggles and conflicts. We are stuck in difficult, intractable challenges and conflicts – with the characteristic fear and anger, entrenched positions, and destructive fighting – in all aspects of our lives.
POSSIBLE is for all of us who feel that frustration and seek to uncover new possibilities for the challenges in which we find ourselves. Based on four and a half decades of real-life experiences grappling with the world’s toughest conflicts — from wildcat strikes to family feuds, boardroom battles to civil wars – William Ury, co-author of Getting to YES, the world’s all-time bestselling book on negotiation, offers a way out of the seemingly impossible, no-win conflicts of our time, a creative and collaborative method that can transform even our toughest conflicts.
In POSSIBLE, Ury invites readers to become possibilists. Possibilists aren’t optimists or pessimists, but rather believers in our human potential to transform our conflicts and relationships. Possibilists see, create, and act on new possibilities to deal with our deepest differences. They are willing to engage any conflict, no matter how heated, in order to explore possible openings. In their minds, conflict isn’t bad. In fact, it is natural and even necessary.
Transforming a conflict is not the same as resolving it, which may be impossible right now and sometimes not even desirable. We don’t always need to agree. A possibilist aims to change the conflict’s fundamental form from destructive fighting into creative negotiation and constructive coexistence so that we can begin to open up new possibilities for mutual satisfaction. Then, over time, conflicts can be more easily resolved or just remain creative tensions.
Ury’s triple-win method works even if the other side at first does not go along. Just as it takes two to tango, it takes two to fight. And it only takes one to stop. It is your choice. There is a switch, and you can decide to pull it whenever you like. This book will show you how.

William Ury, cofounder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, is one of the world’s best-known and most influential experts on negotiation. He has served as a mediator in boardroom battles, labor conflicts, and civil wars around the world. Ury is the coauthor of Getting to Yes, the bestselling negotiation book in the world, and seven other books, including the New York Times bestsellers Getting Past No and The Power of a Positive No. An avid hiker, he lives with his family in Colorado.