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LETTING EVERYTHING BECOME YOUR TEACHER: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Linda Woznicki — 2010-03-02T21:14:27-08:00

We are indeed pleased to be able to offer these wonderful excerpts from 100 Lessons in Mindfulness from Jon Kabat-Zinn's new book Letting Everything Become Your Teacher. The 100 lessons are derived from Kabat-Zinn's international best-seller Full Catastrophe Living. Keep checking our site for new lessons. The first is on "Self-Motivation"

LESSON 1: Self-Motivation

In order for meditation practice to take root in your life and flourish, you will have to know why you are practicing. How else will you be able to sustain non-doing in a world where only doing seems to count? What will get you up early in the morning to sit and follow your breathing when everybody else is snug in bed? What will motivate you to practice when the wheels of the doing world are turning, your obligations and responsibilities are beckoning, and a part of you decides or remembers to take some time for “just being”? What will motivate you to bring moment-to-moment awareness into your daily life? What will prevent your practice from losing energy and becoming stale or from petering out altogether after an initial burst of enthusiasm?

Jon Kabat-Zinn on BetterListen!

Excerpt from "Global Mind Change" with Edgar Mitchell

Linda Woznicki — 2010-02-22T07:38:28-08:00

Dr. Edgar Mitchell -- the sixth person to walk on the moon – talks to us about what what it means to be a human and our place in the universe in his series of lectures, “Global Mind Change.” Following is an excerpt from that series.

I like to suggest that there is a challenge here. Throughout most of human history we have strongly believed ourselves to be very physical beings -- rooted in our physicality, experiencing what we would like to think would be a wonderful life. But quite often, experiencing a lot of trauma and pain and all of those things that go with being human, that is the opposite of having ups and ups and ups. And the question is why? We are rooted in our physicality and yearning for a spiritual experience and trying to ask ourselves: Why me? What’s this all about? And we particularly ask that question “Why me?” when things turn sour.

I suggest to you that the way we need to look at it is that we are not really physical beings yearning for a spiritual experience. We are in reality eternal creative beings creating a physical experience, and it takes quite a shift in mindset to get yourself around that one. But tonight we’re going to give it a try. For those of you who haven’t heard me before, why is this important? What is it about now, that I would bring this up? What is it about the contemporary period that we live in that perhaps makes this a vital alternative viewpoint to think about and to look at? I will tell you that in the last year I have seldom spoken with a person who did not think that something very strange was going on, who did not think that the world was in a rather major crisis and it seemed to be deepening. I will suggest to you that in the last six months it has become almost overwhelming. I can’t talk to anyone who doesn’t feel that way. They seek me out and my telephone is ringing off the hook. Things are happening in ways they haven’t happened before.

Next, BetterListen! will offer and excerpt from Edgar Mitchell's recording "Science and the Inner Experience".

Edgar Mitchell Bio and Links

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Great new lectures from Marianne Williamson available on mp3

Publisher — 2010-02-17T08:10:08-08:00

Better Listen! is proud and excited to offer these insightful and brand new titles from Marianne Williamson. Recorded live at her current lecture series In Los Angeles and other recent events, Marianne is a pleasure to listen to.

The new releases include, The Spirit of A New World, Work and Career and From Out of The Blue are now available for sale via digital download in the BetterListen! store,

NOTE: The first 3 titles in the new Marianne Williamson Lecture Series are now live on iTunes!

Of course, we also have our 3 classic Marianne Williamson / BetterListen! titles available for instant access MP3 download as well. Enjoy!

Click here for our complete list of BetterListen!, instant access, mp3 titles from Marianne.

Excerpt from "Don't Bite the Hook" with Pema Chodron

Linda Woznicki — 2010-02-01T06:50:11-08:00

Once again, we are pleased to offer you a transcribed excerpt from Pema Chodron's recording "Don't Bite the Hook".

So -- what is the significance of the teaching on how to work with anger? Well, it has tremendous significance because again and again, whenever we’re challenged, there is opportunity to open to the difficulty and let the difficulty make us more compassionate, more wise. Or the opposite, which is that when things are difficult, the chances instead of it making us more afraid and therefore more vulnerable or more subject to being able to catch the anxiety in the atmosphere and spin off into wanting to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and the tendency for aggression to escalate and violence to escalate under challenge is much greater. I wanted to begin by giving the Dharma talks on the sixth chapter of Shanti Deva -- chapter on working with anger. So, for Shanti Deva teaching as he did in the eighth century in India a long, long time ago, to Yolanda University in India to a entire packed audience of celibate monks, you might wonder what the relevance of such a teaching would be today, and all I can say is at the level of human neurosis, nothing has changed much. And so what he has to say and the way he… you’ll see, it actually has humor in it where he keeps pointing out example after example of our foibles of how we justify our anger and all the many, many situations that make us angry. But it’s more than just like losing our temper or something. We’re talking now about finding ourselves in a situation where many, many people are feeling more vulnerable and the situation is more volatile.

And so, it might be that in the years to come, you might look back and think of it as something like, that was teaching. That was really -- because I have started to use it every day of my life in difficult situations -- has made it possible for me to be become more compassionate, to become more tenderhearted and loving rather than more afraid and full of aggression and wanting to strike out and protect me and mine. You might just look back and say, “This was really important” because right now the key thing is whether it was a difficult situation in the world or not; it’s to use the difficult situations of everyday life to wake us up, to awaken our compassion. To make us feel our kinship with each other rather than to buy into polarization. So Shanti Deva says a lot about our mindset. The mindset of friend and foe. Like and dislike. For me and against me. And how that very mechanism of buying so tightly into this notion of the good people and the bad people -- the ones that I like and the ones I don’t like and how we get so invested in this and how this is “the kindling” or “the fuel” for anger and aggression to escalate. So from this point of view, the teachings are on non-violence and on non-aggression. And you could think of that as a synonym for the word patience.

Click here to check out the Shambhala Audio Complete Collection.

Click here to listen to a preview of this recording.

Excerpt from Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser - Part 5 of 5

Linda Woznicki — 2010-01-25T07:51:04-08:00

This week, we conclude our series of excerpts from the Introduction of BROKEN OPEN: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow.

Whether you are in the midst of a big upheaval or riding the smaller rapids of everyday life, I want you to know that you are not alone, not now, or at any stage of the journey. Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist of the twentieth century, wrote, “We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”

The experience of change and transformation is never complete. Something bigger and brighter always calls to shine through us. We are continually challenged to change and grow, to break down and break through. The first big change made in the name of awakening can be destructive and traumatic. In the midst of my divorce, I agonized over the risks I was taking and the blows I was receiving, and wondered if so much pain could ever lead to anything good. But now, years down the road and many changes later, I trust in the twists and turns of what Joseph Campbell calls the “hero’s path.” Some of us need a cataclysmic event to find our way toward “the center of our own existence.” Some of us don’t. Some of us add up all of the smaller changes into one big lesson, and find our way home as well.

Excerpted from Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser Copyright © 2004 by Elizabeth Lesser. Excerpted by permission of Villard, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Elizabeth Lesser Bio and Links