The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness

Winston (Fully Present), director of Mindfulness Education at the UCLA Semel Institute, offers helpful tools for meditators of all experience levels who “can’t seem to soften and relax in meditation,” or who simply want to freshen up their traditional meditation practices. In 72 short chapters that at times feel padded and repetitive, Winston defines and redefines natural awareness practices (“keeping focus on awareness itself rather than on the things we are aware of”) that can enhance traditional meditation or even provide “quicker access” to states of awareness, ease, or contentment. Winston intersperses valuable “Glimpse” exercises made up of a prompt and meditation questions. For example, Winston advises sitting among nature and engaging sights, sounds, and sensations before beginning a mediation that asks, “Who is aware? Can I sense the awareness that is the knowing expansion?” While Winston will lose some readers with overly meticulous categorization of different types of awareness, she also discusses better-known, more informal meditation techniques, such as “focused awareness” and “flexible awareness,” that will appeal to novice meditators. Helped along by anecdotes about her own experiences and meditation breakthroughs, Winston’s concise, easy-to-follow examples of how to cultivate a more self-compassionate meditation practice will appeal to meditators of all levels. [em] (Mar.) [/em]