Mindfulness by Olivia Telford

Practical, Helpful Mindfulness Exercises

Mindfulness definitely seems to be a buzzword these days. This book attempts to define it and help you use it to help your life, both dealing with the negatives and cultivating the positives. The book is relatively simple and straightforward beginning with the definition of mindfulness, some simple exercises, and meditation information and techniques. The first section after that goes into detail about destructive negatives, like stress, anger, and anxiety, that mindfulness could potentially help with. The next section looks at how mindfulness can be used to help build better habits (or beat bad ones), relationships, and perhaps a better life. Both of these practical sections have a little article about the topic and include mindfulness exercises that the author believes will help. One tiny little thing bugged me. The author clearly states at the beginning that mindfulness is not meditation, yet she includes meditation in the subtitle, perhaps making the potential reader think that meditation is the only way that mindfulness can be achieved or that this book is only about mindfulness through meditation. As noted above, meditation does have its own chapter, but the exercises in the rest of the book don’t focus on meditation.

I think this is a solid introduction to mindfulness that contains simple, practical exercises could be helpful if you have issues like I mentioned above.