Publisher's Synopsis
Author John Bruna's essential guide presents a holistic approach to genuine happiness. In contrast to stimulus driven pleasure, contentment comes from living a life of meaning that aligns with one's values. It identifies the common traps that people fall into looking for happiness that actually create stress, worries and fears, offering authentic mindfulness-based solutions to counteract them. THE WISDOM OF A MEANINGFUL LIFE provides readers with accessible wisdom and practical methods to cultivate deeper satisfaction and contentment deeper satisfaction in every day experiences. The real source of genuine happiness, in contrast to stimulus driven pleasure, is living a life of meaning that aligns with one's primary values. The increasing popularity of mindfulness has unfortunately produced a wide variety of teachings and programmes that water-down and misunderstand this important philosophy and approach to living. Mindfulness is often reduced to concentration exercises and a simplistic definition of being aware of the present moment. In nearly all secular presentations of mindfulness, it is taken out of the rich context of the Three Higher Trainings (ethics, concentration and wisdom) of Buddhism in which it was originally taught. The unique feature of this book is that it is able to maintain the substance of the entire teaching as a programme that accessible to people of all spiritual traditions or no spiritual tradition.
