Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

An excellent guidebook for facing the worst things in life. The best book I know of for those facing overwhelming problems & disasters & catastrophes -- which is almost everyone, sooner or later. Especially if you're facing serious physical problems & illnesses, but also for anyone in an equally terrible states for any reason. Condensed wisdom on how to live, and live a basically good and meaningful life, in the midst of the worst things happening to you. This is one of those extremely rare books that I think everyone would benefit from reading, and enormously so. Wish I had read it every year since I could start reading. The only real issue I have with it is that he doesn't condense the distilled wisdom as much as he could. I will try summing up the main things here, though this list of actions to take is oversimplified & biased towards my own experiences: 1) Find the best doctors and therapists in your area, including a Stress Reduction Clinic, or something like it. If they aren't working out, find ones that will. Probably will be lifechanging. 2) Visit a professional Pain Management clinic. Crucially important. 3) Learn to meditate, and do it daily. It's simple, easy, and surprisingly effective. The better you get at it, the more routine it is, and the more you can DETATCH from pain and suffering. Absolutely essential. (If you can't do it alone, get help & training. Also: you might learn it best through Yoga or Tai Chi -- all of which go hand-in-hand). 4) Be with others who are going through catastrophes. Especially catastrophes similar to your own, if possible. Alone, you'll probably feel overwhelmed and hopeless; with others, you probably won't. Helps massively. 5) Do Dry Sauna OR some form of intense cardiovascular exercise every day (treadmill, elliptical exerciser, bicycling, aerobics, sports, martial arts training -- SOMETHING), if at all possible. Might be hard at first, but you'll get addicted to it sooner or later, and then it will be effortless. Will help you intensely, and in multiple ways, by a) releasing tons of painkillers into your system b) dramatically improving your emotional state c) killing stress d) helping you detatch from both physical pain & emotional suffering e) radically improving your immune system f) flushing toxins from your tissues, which are constantly adding to the pain & stress. 6) Do Yoga, Tai Chi, or something similar every day. Deeply relaxing, pain-detatching, and helps your ability to meditate dramatically. 7) Find the best-tasting foods that are super healthy & nutritious & preservative-free & pesticide-free, and focus on eating them all the time, so you can avoid the terribly toxic foods that are multiplying your stress/pain/suffering drastically. 8) Listen to audio tapes on meditation, stress, tai chi, health, and all the other things listed above & related to them, while doing these activities. This will a) reinforce everything you're learning b) keep you maximally informed on all these things c) distract you & detatch you from pain/suffering/problems d) keep you INSPIRED and MOTIVATED to do them & keep doing them. 9) Get as deeply into spirituality as you can (or a profound form of existentialism if you're non-spiritual). Helps profoundly, and may be the most important thing of all. 10) Understand that EVERYONE goes through catastrophes, sooner or later, in one form or another. This is the way life is. Learning to accept this will help enormously. I could go on, but those are the most crucial things. Good luck.

I teach mindfulness and I started with one of Kabat-Zinn's easier books: "Mindfulness for Beginners". It wasn't until I starting working on my dissertation that I got this book a year or two later. This book is the complete course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). There are other books that are a spin-off or they use Kabat-Zinn's teachings, however, this book gives you everything including a complete program. The only issue that I had was that I had to buy the CD's separately. This is a heavy course and while some of the information in the book is from the 80's and 90's, there are updates to this book that make it relevant even for those of you who are looking for things that are current. It took me quite a while to read this book, it is not easy. I mean it is written with simple language but it is extremely deep and at over 600 pages, it took me some time as I flipped back and forth between the charts and took time to compare it with my own teaching of mindfulness. You can read this book over and over and over again and every time you go back, you will find something new and you will learn something different. This is a book that will remain on my shelf for the remained of my life and it is a resource that I turn to when I need something that is mindfulness related. If you are a teacher in a school district that infuses mindfulness for your children as part of a mental health initiative, this book may be a little too much. I would not start with this. I would start with Chambers & Hassed (2015): "Mindful Learning" or begin with one of Kabat-Zinn's other shorter books such as: "Wherever you go, There you are."

This is an excellent book about meditation, stress reduction, health and healing, and the mind/body relationship as it applies to disease. Kabat-Zinn clearly explains not only how to meditate, but why. He discusses a wide variety of related issues, such as stress, emotions, and attitude, using examples from medical studies to illustrate much of the book. However, this book is 15 years old. In the introduction, Kabat-Zinn explains that that text has not been changed; this is unfortunate. So much research has been done since this book was written that Kabat-Zinn could have many more precise examples as illustration. There has been a great deal of research on meditation and healing, the mind/body connection, stress reduction, and all the issues he raises. (Such, for example, as we now know that stress is _not_ the cause of ulcers - he mentions the supposed link between stress and ulcers once or twice in the book.) I admire Kabat-Zinn and find this book to be very useful, as are his other books and relaxation tapes and CDs. I would very much like to see an updated version of this book, however, which would look more closely at the large amount of research that has been done since it was written. Yes, it would be a big job to update it, but, in a way, the author owes it to his readers.

To the days of my life before I found this book, or as I sometimes like to look at it, before this book found me. I was a high strung mess of anxiety, even afraid to go to work and face the "challenges" of a day of social interaction and internal struggle and emotions. I wasn't completely sure what I was, but I was pretty sure I was suffering from what doctors would call social or maybe generalized anxiety. And with that came depression and sometimes hopelessness of ever changing and moving on. This went on for years--for as far back as I can remember--and it only seemed like it was getting worse, and I was never able to accept myself, I thought myself a failure of some sort. What had I or my parents done wrong in raising me? Why me? When I found this book, I had been through several programs for anxiety that I had found and downloaded online--none of them helping much--and when I read the introduction, something about it clicked with me. It somehow subconsciously made sense and I knew that I had found something that might actually change the way I WAS, and unknowingly but much more importantly, change the way I viewed myself. Over the next 8 months, I almost religiously followed the exercises in the book. I learned more about myself and the world around me in those eight months than I have in the past ten years, at least it feels that way. To cut a long story short, I still have anxiety, but on a scale of 1-10 it is now a 2 where it was an 7 or an 8 before. Simply put, practicing mindfulness pulls the rug from under anything that bothers you in any way. It teaches you that it's ok to feel any emotion and think any thought because that is what is already here. It teaches you to accept those things, and in the process of doing that, those horrible horrible things lose their power over you, and you can begin to heal. To anyone suffering from emotional pain of any sort, please let me be an example to you that you don't have to be controlled by these terrible feelings. Learn to accept them as they are, and they will go away by themselves. This book is a great way to start. Please consider

I highly recommend the books written by Jon Kabat-Zinn, especially Where Ever You Go, There You Are. This book, Full Catastrophe Living, follows the basic principles of the mindfulness stress-reduction program, and gives very thoughtful information on how to become more aware and mindful of the present moment. It is more detailed than Where Ever You Go, There You Are (which has nice short chapters, perfect for reading right before practicing the mindfulness exercises), the chapters are longer, and it goes into more detail on how to get into the habit of being more aware (and awake), instead of unconscious. I highly recommend the Series 1 Guided Mindfulness Meditations (can be purchased in CD or MP3 format), to use in conjunction with the book. The Body Scan (the first meditation) is a wonderful way to practice present-moment awareness while learning how to get in touch with the body. I was able to cure a nagging right shoulder bursitis by visualizing breathing into this area after only a couple of days. I also woke up with a severe headache and was able to breathe into it and make it disappear. The Series 2 meditations go with the book, Where Ever You Go, There You Are, while Series 3 meditations go with the book, Coming to Our Senses, Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. I bought these books on the Amazon Kindle version, a great way to get it immediately, it is uploaded on my iPhone, I can read it whenever I want, and it saves my place when I exit the book.

Suffering from ever increasing depression, anxiety and some pretty severe "road rage" due to my Parkinson's Disease with Mild Cognitive Impairment diagnosis almost four years ago, I finally sought help from a Psychiatrists and (almost) the first words to come out of his mouth (after giving a background of my situation) were "You will need to look into "Mindfulness" and "you will need to attend the 6 week MBSR training offered through (my healthcare provider)". MBSR or Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, which began over 20 years ago at U. Mass, is what this book is all about and it is required reading as part of the course. The classes were great for asking questions, getting clarifications when needed and to practice the meditations, but honestly, what I learned by reading the book was the primary catalyst that drove me to meditate and has allowed me to achieve a calm and peace of mind that I previously had believed was going to be impossible to attain. Mindfulness is an ongoing practice, you must commit to it and use it daily but the changes it has brought about in my peace of mind, calmness, equanimity, and sense of well being is quite honestly...priceless! Not cured mind you; I will always be a work in progress, especially as my disease progresses, but where I am at today...is an infinitely better place than before I read this book. With all the stories that are shared this book reads more like a novel and not at all like a textbook! My wife is reading it now and will begin classes shortly and she is using the techniques I shared with her to cope with a stressful work environment. Must read for those coping with health issues.

Some things were a hit or miss as I was reading this anecdote. I agreed with some things like breathing techniques, concepts of creating different awarnesses of the self and the enviornment. I didn't totally agree with having a sense of higher awareness and some other concepts that were mentioned in the book, because sometimes the purpose of meditating can be to just learn to be in a state of doing nothing and just being content with doing nothing. I wish there was incorporations of ACT therapy in the book when Dr. K-Z glossed over explaining why we should meditate, because we realistically want to meditate or do something in relation to meditating for different reasons, that are supposed to be meaningful to us. I recall one part where he was explaining how to acknowledge eating a raisin, how to pay attention to the color, texture, sweetness, how it feels chewing it, etc. Maybe in the future for other books try to expand on the idea of how we have to acknowledge on other things in this manner because the state of stress comes from particular things in everyday life to begin with. How can one be in a cool-headed or conscious-cleared state while their at school, work, exercising, etc.? There's real issues one searches to meditate for other than the simplicity of eating a raisin.

Jon Kabat-Zinn presents a program of stress reduction that will help derail some of life's most stressful situations. A doer of Kabat-Zinn's stress reduction program will alter the way one looks and deals with life. We, as a society, are so use to rushing about doing and complaining that we have too much to accomplish in one day. We run in circles getting nowhere, and while we are running as fast as we can, more burdens are heaped upon our road of busyness. We become overwhelmed. We need help. But, where to find it? This book and the lessons therein deal with the many stresses due to life in general, emotional/physical pain, sleeplessness, illnesses, fear and anxiety and many more "catastrophic" events that we humans are heir to. Whatever pushes your stress button, Jon Kabat-Zinn directs his attention on you. This book is about you. This book is not for those who are looking for a magic pill; this book helps those who help themselves. For it is the individual who is ultimately responsible for his/her own healing of these stresses. After all, the catastrophic stresses belong to us individually. Jon Kabat-Zin shows us the way. We must be the doers. This book is a winner in that department; I only wish that I had been guided to this program 20 years ago. My life would have been a lot smoother; I would have been kinder to myself and enjoyed the ride much more. Did I say that I love this book? I am a staunch advocate of this book and the knowledge within these pages. This book treats the whole body: mind and body. After all, the mind is often the dictator of the body. Therefore, each must work in concert with each other and fuse to make one whole. Yes! I love this book.