A Fearless Heart – Thupten Jinpa
There are many mindfulness books to tempt us with, this one I would highly recommend! Self-compassion is the overlooked key to achieving our goals. It can lead to increased happiness, stress reduction, a stronger sense of purpose, better health and a longer life. Yet many of us struggle with compassion, thinking that if we are too compassionate with others we will be taken advantage of and if we are too compassionate with ourselves we won’t achieve our goals.
The Buddhist practice of mindfulness caught on in the West when we began to understand the every day personal benefits it brought us. Based on the unique course in compassion training that Thupten Jinpa helped create at Stanford Medical School, this book shows us that we actually fear compassion. Using science, insights from both classical Buddhist and Western Psychology, and stories from others and his own extraordinary life, Thupten shows us how to train our compassion muscle to relive stress, fight depression, connect with others and change our world.
A former monk, Thupten Jinpa holds a PhD from Cambridge University and has been the principle translator to the Dalai Lama for nearly thirty years. He now lives in Montreal with his wife and daughters. Perhaps check one of the many you tube videos he appears in. I particularly like this interview with Dan Harris ABC News.