Full Catastrophe Living, Revised Edition: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using mindfulness meditation

In the old days, if a king didn’t like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing.

The main source of stress in my life for some years had been airports and airplanes, necessitated by a heavy speaking and conference schedule.

If the painful sensations in a particular region do change in some way, see if you can note precisely what the qualities of that change are. Let them register fully in your awareness and keep going with the body scan. It is not helpful to expect pain to disappear. In fact, it is helpful not to expect anything at all. But you may find that the exper

willingness to be kind and gentle with yourself.

It means working at your limits, but gently, not trying too hard, not exhausting yourself, not pushing too hard to break through. The breakthroughs will come by themselves in their own good time if you put in the energy in the spirit of self-discovery. Mindfulness does not bulldoze through resistance. You have to work gently around the edges, a lit

Imagine the mind as a “sound mirror,” simply reflecting whatever arises in the domain of hearing.

At other times we may cover all of them sequentially in one practice period and finish by sitting with awareness of whatever comes up, not looking for anything in particular to focus on, whether it be sounds or thoughts or even the breath. This way of practicing is called choiceless awareness or, alternatively, open presence. You can think of it as

The path to developing our capacity to express love more fully is to bring awareness to our actual feelings, to observe them mindfully, to work at being non-judgmental and more patient and accepting.

The only way to free yourself from a lifetime of being tyrannized by your own thought processes, whether you suffer from excessive anxiety or not, is to come to see your thoughts for what they are and to discern the sometimes subtle—but most often not-so-subtle—seeds of craving and aversion, of greed and hatred, at work within them. When you can su