Mindfulness for the Wandering Mind: Life-changing Tools for Managing Stress and Improving Mental Health at Work and in Life, by Pandit Dasa (Wiley £20.99)
Our author, Pandit Dasa, is a former monk, and this is his second book. His first was called the Urban Monk!
Obvious, meditation plays a big part in his life, and he believes someone who can practice every day will ‘find’ mindfulness. As a monk he got up at 4am to meditate, but he doesn’t want to be too prescriptive. When he suggested people meditate for 15 minutes a day he got a lot of push-back. So now he encourages people to start with three- to -five-minute daily practice and try to do it every day.
All the chapters end with a nice summary, with reflective questions and exercises at the end, which work well. On the chapter about working from home, for instance, he asks the very pertinent question: What do you currently do to create boundaries between your work and personal life?
The chapter that really got me thinking was the one on ‘closing the Apps in your mind’. Dasa compares the mind to a hard drive, which can store millions and millions of files. The human brain similarly can process and retain more data than we could ever imagine, and science still cannot fully explain how this organ operates. Each time we see, smell, taste, or touch something, the experience is recorded in our mind, regardless of our level of awareness. There isn’t anything that the mind does not register.
He thinks we have some apps in our mind that are factory-installed! Like the money app and food app, but like our smartphone he wants you learn to close some of those that have been instinctively left open. Then our minds can function with greater clarity and focus.
PQ rating: 4/5 His 15 years as a monk seem to have shown him how we can start to control our wandering minds to find inner peace.
