Category: Books

  • MBSR, Year One

    On my blog at Psychology Today, a brief interview with Trudy Goodman about the dawn of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in anticipation of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s UCLA appearance this Wednesday. Full Catastrophe Living (pictured) is Kabat-Zinn’s big book of MBSR.  If you’re just curious and testing out mindfulness, you might try Wherever You Go, There You Are…

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  • Thousands of Years of Monogamy

    There’ve been only thousands years of monogamy, that is–since agriculture got underway–according to the newish book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. When people started farming, say the authors, they started thinking about things like ownership and where babies come from.  Monogamy followed–meaning that lifelong pairing doesn’t necessarily come naturally to us. Here’s Dan Savage…

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  • Radical Acceptance

    A possibility for your on-deck reading pile:  Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach.  A favorite in the genre for some.  I could summarize, but I’ll radically accept the job done by Publishers Weekly and posted on Amazon: Brach offers readers a rich compendium of stories and techniques designed to help people awaken from what she calls…

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  • What Happens in Therapy?

    What happens in therapy?  Good question.  Couch Fiction, a book-length comic by British psychotherapist, Philippa Perry, offers some answers. Based on a case study of Pat (our sandal-wearing, cat-loving psychotherapist) and her new client, James (an ambitious barrister with a potentially harmful habit he can’t stop), this graphic novel follows the anxieties, frustrations, mind-wanderings and…

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  • The Wisdom of Insecurity

    Worry a lot?  To consider: The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. You may know Alan Watts from oft-broadcast lectures–eager audience hanging on every wryly wise, British-accented utterance.  (Lectures can be sampled via this podcast or downloads around the net.) In this short book, Watts takes on worry and anxiety–a.k.a. insecurity.  He argues that to live is…

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