Coming To Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
In COMING TO OUR SENSES, Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches us how to find a collective balance by tuning in to our bodies and minds. He shares how discoveries in mind/body medicine have formed a new definition of "health" which involves the maintenance of body and mind through modes of restorative healing - primarily meditation. Meditation awakens our senses into an awareness of our interconnected relationship to others and the world. Kabat-Zinn believes every human has the prenatal capacity to mobilize deep innate resources for continual learning, growing and transformation. Mindful awareness promotes better health and an individual empowerment to contribute to the world. Woven into eight parts, Kabat-Zinn uses anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences to illustrate the realm of healing possibilities. At its core, the book offers remarkable insight on how to use the five senses - touch, hearing, sight, taste, and smell - as a path to mindfulness and a more meaningful life.

Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Incredible book! Jon Kabat-Zinn delivers... January 27, 2005
167 out of 173 found this review helpful

*****
This book woke me up, literally. "Coming to Our Senses" is a large, long, and for me---difficult, book about mindfulness. That said, it is well worth the read. The experience of reading this book was an awakening for me to the world outside my head, where I live most of my life, and where I suspect most of us live our lives. I don't think how I can explain HOW this happens, either, but I know it does.

I started reading it on vacation in Hawaii on my balcony outside, and slowly but gradually I became aware of the environment all around me----the sounds, the smells---and the environment within me---my aches and pains, my feelings, bodily sensations, etc. It was a new experience for me. It was really exciting to have it happen on vacation in Hawaii. I would think though, that wherever you are, if you make the time for the adventure of reading this book, and stick with it, you will have this same "awakening" experience.

Much of the book is about meditation as well as mindfulness, the author's own experiences, and his reflections on our society. He also writes about conventional medicine and how it is beginning to utilize mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn is a fine writer, and though the book is a tome, it is SO worth it. He got me excited about meditation, whereas other books have not. I am a Type A person, so I get anxious at just the thought of sitting around doing nothing for even a few minutes (or seconds); however, the author describes the incredible benefits to be delivered from a simple meditation practice after only several weeks of daily effort, so for me this would be well worth it. It gives you enough information to get started (you apparently really don't need that much), but the author also has references, further reading lists, web site lists, and his own CDs and resources (which he doesn't push but simply offers). After spending almost 700 wonderful pages with him, I trust the author and feel very privileged to have read his book.

The writing style of the book is scientific, philosophical, and grounded, not "new age" at all, another aspect I appreciated. I would encourage you to buy it and read it if you enjoy reading AND thinking, and if you're intrigued at all by the subject matter. I haven't read any of his other books, so I don't know how this one compares. I truly am baffled by previous reviewers who were "disappointed"; in this book, the author definitely delivers! It is a gorgeous hardback book with rough-cut edges (and it smells great too)---well worth the retail price (unlike many hardback books) let alone Amazon's discounted price.
*****

3 out of 5 stars

Four books trying to be one... June 2, 2006
96 out of 104 found this review helpful

I'm going to be harsher in this review than I should be, since I think the message of the book is essential. I have read Kabat-Zinn's other books, and have the same ambivalent feeling about his first, Full Catastrophe Living, though his second, Wherevery You Go There You Are is much more to the point.

The problem is this: there are four books in here, struggling to break out of a single binding and become individual. Unfortunately, while Kabat-Zinn has great ideas, he is not the best writer, and he rambles. Oh, does he ramble... This 600-page book would have made a great 200 page book, with a great deal of editorial guidance to give it direction. As it stands, it is a mish-mash of unrelated essays about three different subjects: meditation; stress reduction and neuroscience; living in the present; and finally some ramblings about politics.

The meditation parts are well-written, concise instructions on how to meditate, why we want to do so, what sort of techniques to use, etc. The stress reduction and neuroscience parts should be a separate book, where the author could exercise his penchant for wordy sentences and references to studies and tests (and citing his stress reduction clinic over and over). As for the rest, the "living in the present" part, there is a great deal of waste. He says the same things over and over - not necessarily a bad thing, since it gives you different ways of reading similar ideas - but after a while his wordiness gets to you. He can't say something simply; he has to use too many words to say something that could be more poetic. Example: "Our bodies, quantized condensations of vital protoplasm, the most complex and differentiated conglomerations of matter and energy we know of in the universe, arise and pass away." That second clause could be nuked, leaving a more pithy: "Our bodies arise and pass away." Or, with a few modifiers, "Our bodies, complex and uncomprehended, arise and pass away."

In a way, this book seems to be a "toss it all at the wall and see what sticks" collection. There is some internal organization, but not enough. There is no macro-editing (that is, selecting what is really worth saying, and getting rid of the rest). While it is full of good ideas, you need to wade through a lot of chaff to find the wheat. And that is a shame, because Kabat-Zinn is one of the most perceptive authors of books on meditation in a non-religious context.

I hope his next book will be better edited, more taut and concise, and less a compilation of everything he thinks about everything. There is ego in this book, and it disappoints.

4 out of 5 stars

A book about much more than healing January 12, 2005
75 out of 83 found this review helpful

If I taught a class in being fully alive and well, this would be the assigned text. Not that it resembles a textbook. It doesn't. It is as comprehensive and well organized as an academic might wish, yet it has the personal story-telling flow of the popular self-help genre. So, it is easy to read while it weaves together complex philosophical, spiritual, scientific and practical living issues and makes them understandable and immediately useful.

The author does indeed teach about the application of mindfulness meditation and other practices to the healing of our bodies and minds. (In fact, this book is a treasure chest filled with what-to's, why-to's and how-to's.) And, he teaches us how to create a mentally and spiritually rich life, filled with well-being. But, as a further accomplishment, he points the way to healing the existential wound of our conceptual "separateness" from each other, our world and the universe.

Perhaps the appreciation of our interconnectedness will lead us to the healing of the world.

2 out of 5 stars

Huge disappointment full of nonsense January 23, 2005
57 out of 76 found this review helpful

I hate to be the one to say so, but this book is a great disappointment. I have read all of the author's other books and have his mindfulness compact discs which I use on a frequent basis, and found them all terrific and very helpful. But this book is a mismash of short essays, with no pattern or insight in most of the chapters, although I did find the discussion on our relationship with time worthwhile. For me though, the biggest problem with the book is that it is full of cliches with no thought behind them. In one brief sitting, I came across the following nonsense: "no one's views, opinions, and feelings in a group are invalid" (p. 449); "in life there are actually no problems" (p. 462); and the unbelievably false and pc statement concerning rap music that it is "much more creative, poetic, nuanced and socially aware than anything" that the author and his friends did in their youth, specifically, playing stickball (p. 470). Well, I don't know much, but I do know that there are views and opinions that are invalid (e.g., women are not as smart as men), that there are problems in life (the author's detailing the medically extraordinary efforts of Christopher Reeve to retain and regain some of his body's functions certainly qualify as a problem he had in his life), and that rap music is horrible, debased, and qualifies as a virus (try this on: "Kill the white people; we gonna make them hurt; kill the white people; but buy my record first; ha, ha, ha" ("Kill d'white people," Apache, courtesy of the slime at Time Warner, 1993.) I found all this nonsense in just one sitting at which point I gave up. I may not know as much as the author does about mindfulness, but I do know when someone's not thinking. And the author was not thinking when he put this one together. Buy one of his earlier works, and take a pass on this one.

3 out of 5 stars

Where's the Editor? May 29, 2006
36 out of 37 found this review helpful

First, I'm a big fan of "Wherever You go There You Are," Kabat-Zinn's previous book. There, in a series of pithy chapters, he encourages readers to slow down and be fully aware in the present moment. It's very inspirational. The writing is eloquent; it is simple, spare and unhurried and, as such, itself exemplifies the idea of an uncomplicated here-and-nowness.

With "Coming to Our Senses," however, the writing has changed. We now have lengthy, complicated sentences, repeated ideas, and frequent use of many words where a few will do. For example, from the Introduction: "This capacity for paying attention and for intelligent action can be cultivated, nurtured, and refined beyond our wildest dreams if we have the motivation to do so." Cultivated, nurtured, AND refined? Yes, all three words do have subtly different meanings, but how about "developed" for all three? Plus, the idea itself is just a bit trite, and comes complete with that "beyond our wildest dreams" cliche.

OK. What follows is the reason for my "Where's the Editor" heading. It too is from the Introduction. Take a deep breath and prepare to exhale slowly:

"Even so, these hidden dimensions, or what we might call new degrees of freedom, are potentially available to us, and will gradually reveal themselves to us as we continue to cultivate and dwell in our capacity for conscious awareness by attending intentionally with both awe and tenderness to the staggeringly complex yet fundamentally ordered universe, world, terrain, family, mind and body within which we locate and orient ourselves, all of which, at every level, is continually fluxing and changing, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, and thereby providing us with countless unexpected challenges and opportunities to grow, and to see clearly, and to move toward greater wisdom in our actions, and toward quelling the tortured suffering of our tumultous minds, habitually so far from home, so far from quiet and rest."

Wow! Editors! Where were you? How did this sentence escape the scalpel? Also: "fluxing" AND "changing?" This sentence is continually fluxing and changing and transposing, shifting, metamorphing, varying and permutating.

Note too that, like "Wherever You Go...," each chapter is a self-contained short essay on a topic. In "Wherever...," all chapters hew fairly closely to the overall theme of mindfulness. Here, while mindfulness and meditation are often front and center or lurking in the background, to my mind the topics range much further afield. The result is a volume that reads like a collection of fairly disparate columns the author could have written for a newspaper or magazine. That's OK, but expect observations that come at you from a hundred different directions, rather than chapters which necessarily build on the one(s) preceding.

Jon Kabat-Zinn has done an incredible service in expressing the value of mindfulness for the general reading public in "Wherever You Go...." But this one is flabby and indulgent. It could have been much better.

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