Everyday Mindfulness: Meditation for Beginners and a Meditation Practice

Publisher Marketing: Yoga pioneer and bestselling author Beryl Bender Birch offers a clear and compelling introduction to the history and evolution of mindfulness meditation in this exceptional recording ideal for beginning meditators. In Everyday Mindfulness: Meditation for Beginners, Birch, through lecture and a guided meditation, guides listeners through a meditation program that helps us relax, focus, and be more mindful of whatever we are doing, not just during meditation, but throughout the day, every day. Based on principles from a variety of meditative traditions, Birch s program offers an accessible practice for quieting and focusing the mind, gaining a greater awareness of the self, and connecting us with the present moment where the true joys of life are lived. Excerpt from recording: Now see if you can step back and listen to the inner environment. What is going on? What thoughts are taking your attention? Are you bored? Restless? Anticipating my next words? Depressed? Excited? Let s take a couple moments here to just observe what s going on with us now. Are you rerunning an event that took place earlier in the day? Notice who or what is taking your attention. Are you thinking about something to eat? To do? An obligation that is hanging over you? Whatever you notice go ahead and think it, notice it, let it bubble up, welcome the thought. Watch it bubble up from the floor of the unconscious, like bubbles from the bottom of a lake. Don t suppress or judge your thoughts. Simply watch them. Bonus CD: This new guided meditation is an excellent follow-up to the Meditation for Beginners recording. To be used after practitioners have completed the Beginners recording, but would like to add a new guided meditation to their practice." Contributor Bio:  Birch, Beryl Bender Beryl Bender Birch, a renowned visionary and author of Power Yoga and Beyond Power Yoga, has been an avid student of yoga and the study of consciousness since l971. With degrees in philosophy and comparative religion, Beryl has traveled extensively in India, has been teaching yoga for 33 years, and training yoga teachers as spiritual revolutionaries since l980. Beryl began teaching astanga yoga to a handful of adventuresome and ahead-of-their-time runners in New York City in 1981 at the prestigious New York Road Runners Club. She became the Wellness Director of the Club and slowly continued to grow the classes. She pioneered (along with husband Thom, a world class runner at the time, who joined Beryl as a teacher at the NYRRC from 1985 through 2001) the introduction of yoga to the traditional athletic community. In 2000 she was named by Yoga Journal as one of only seven American women in their Innovators Shaping Yoga Today issue. She is the director-founder of The Hard & The Soft Yoga Institute.