Description: Given the state of the world these days, many of us are asking: Can anyone (everyone) learn to be wiser and kinder? Meeting the Moment with Kindness offers a resounding yes, as well as a roadmap for cultivating seven aspects of mindfulness that can help us access our inherent wisdom, stability and compassion.

Verdict: Our effort to develop mindfulness is not a small or simple undertaking, but one that is urgently needed. Many of us desire to slow down, quiet the mind and attain greater contact with our lives, but we get stuck in habits and behaviors that don’t support our aspirations.

This book can help us get unstuck by exploring three fundamental questions: How do we develop the inner resources needed to care for ourselves and our world mindfully? What stands in the way of living mindfully, seeing clearly and acting wisely? How do we meet our obstacles with curiosity and compassion?

Through wisdom teachings, personal stories and evidence-based research, Meeting the Moment with Kindness offers a pragmatic framework for developing mindfulness and befriending the inevitable obstacles on our path.

In what is a magnificently wise and wholly inspirational guide for new mediators as they embark on the path of a more mindful, openhearted and joyful life, author Sue Schneider’s new book Meeting the Moment with Kindness: How Mindfulness Can Help Us Find Calm, Stability, and an Open Heart, is one of the most endearing, informatively sculpted, and magnificently impassioned reads on the subject matter top hand that I have had the pleasure to read in the past few years.

Inclusive of the seven aspects of mindfulness that can help us access our inherent wisdom, stability and compassion - Meeting Our Unconscious Habits, Remembering to Pause and Attune, Relaxing Our Reactivity, Redirecting Our Negativity, Turning toward Emotional Difficulty, and both Surrendering to Groundlessness and Freeing Our Compassion Energy - the book is a wholesome, encapsulating, yet expansive teaching on the topic matter.

Having been in this scene for a long time now myself, I can honestly say that everything here from Sue is amazingly inspirational, thought-provoking and most assuredly heartfelt. A book that also asks, and sets out to answer, the premise of when we get stuck, how to get unstuck by exploring three fundamental questions: How do we develop the inner resources needed to care for ourselves and our world mindfully? What stands in the way of living mindfully, seeing clearly and acting wisely? How do we meet our obstacles with curiosity and compassion? to have this book within arms reach at all times is a polite suggestion I highly recommend you keep in mind.

For the record, the versions that I myself grew up with are these not too dissimilar 7 dictates: Non-judging. Be an impartial witness to your own experience; Patience. A form of wisdom, patience demonstrates that we accept the fact that; Beginner’s Mind. Remaining open and curious allows us to be receptive to new; Trust. Develop a basic trust with yourself and your feelings; Non-Striving; Acceptance and Letting Go.

Non-judging: Mindfulness is compassionate, openhearted, choice-less awareness. It is cultivated by taking the position of an unbiased attentive witness to your own experience as it happens in the present moment.

Patience: Patience is the ability to bear difficulty with calmness and self-control. It requires connection with your calm inner core and also some faith and courage. Patience also requires a degree of kindness and compassion for yourself as you bear the upset of the situation.

Beginner’s Mind: When you begin to observe what is here in the present moment, the thinking mind tends to believe it knows all about what is happening, or it tries to control what is happening by desperately seeking more information.

Trust: A basic part of learning to meditate is learning to trust yourself and your feelings. You learn to trust that you can see clearly what is actually happening to you. As you practice mindfulness, you will deepen your awareness of life and your own moment-to-moment experience.

Non-striving: We spend so much of our lives doing things and trying to change things. This habit of doing often carries over into meditation, and it can be a real problem. The ego mind wants to get more of what it likes and wants to get rid of what it doesn’t like. When it decides you aren’t the way you should be, the ego mind even puts on the pressure to change you.

Acceptance: The process of acceptance begins with the willingness to see things exactly as they are in the present moment. Can you keep your attention focused exactly here and now, taking each moment as it comes and connecting with whatever presents itself? Often, to be able to accept what comes into awareness, you must pass through periods of intense feelings such as anger, fear, or grief.

Letting Go: Letting go, or non-attachment, is another attitude essential to mindfulness. Much of the time, people are practicing the opposite attitude, clinging, without even knowing it. Often, what you cling to most strongly are ideas and views about yourself, others, and situations. It is a kind of clinging on the inside. It may be difficult to see, but is easily felt.

Thus, through wisdom teachings, personal stories and evidence-based research, Meeting the Moment with Kindness offers a pragmatic framework for developing mindfulness and befriending the inevitable obstacles on our path.

About the Author Sue Schneider, Ph.D., is a medical anthropologist, integrative health coach and certified mindfulness instructor. She leads community health and wellness initiatives as an Extension Professor and State Health Specialist at Colorado State University and has an integrative health coaching practice in Fort Collins, CO, where she lives with her husband and son.

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