Practical Mindfulness: A Physician's No-Nonsense Guide to Meditation for Beginners
About this ebook
“A beginner’s guide to the basics of meditation. . . . The combination of Sazima’s expertise and upbeat spirit make his book an inviting reading experience. . . . An insightful and demystifying look at mindfulness practice.” —Kirkus Reviews
2021 INDIES Gold Winner Body, Mind & Spirit
Training exercises that work. Practical Mindfulness approaches mindfulness and meditation from a hands-on, how-to, irreverent perspective–appealing to all readers curious about meditation, and health care and education professionals looking to learn and teach the fundamentals of meditation to their patients and students. By applying Dr. Sazima’s training routines, we can all learn better coping methods and less burnout, in the midst of all that is happening.
An accessible approach to finding “home.” We all search for that safe, comfortable feeling of peace of mind—our inner “home.” When we face challenges—from a tough day at work to a life-threatening health problem—we can realize with blinding clarity there is no sustainable outside solution. Without a more developed interior awareness, we can suffer stress, anxiety, and depression. This guide is the solution to reclaiming your peaceful place in every moment.
Meditation training from an expert. Dr. Sazima is a board-certified psychiatrist, an educator of family doctors-in-training at Stanford’s Family Medicine Residency, and an experienced meditator and meditation teacher. He is also a survivor of a rare bone cancer who has used the powerful practice of meditation to navigate his own medical crisis. Now, he is on a “pay it forward” mission to show us why and how meditation works, in an accessible and entertaining way.
Readers of books such Think Like A Monk, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, or 10% Happier will love Practical Mindfulness.
“Dr. Sazima brings mindfulness down to its nuts and bolts and out of the lofty air where it too often floats out of reach.” —Chris Aiken, MD,Psychiatrist, Director of the Mood Treatment Center, Wake Forest University School of Medicine
About the author
Greg Sazima's initial exposure and interest in mindfulness began in the mid 1990s, while working to incorporate Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) tactics into chronic disease management programming at the Family Medicine Residency Clinic. His personal passion for the benefits of an individual meditation practice followed. He has studied and practiced vipassana (insight) meditation with a teacher and training group in the Tibetan Kagyu lineage for almost twenty years. Over time, he has gradually integrated awareness practices into his clinical and teaching work.
His writing career began with medical lectures and journal articles. Academic publications and presentations include works on doctor/”difficult” patient relationships and incorporation of meditation training into outpatient clinical practices. More recently he has written for mass media, with opinion essays on mental health issues published in the Sacramento Bee and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Dr. Sazima is currently in sustained remission after a riveting decade of recurring medical crises due to chrondrosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, located in his cervical spine. In many ways, Practical Mindfulness, conceived out of his crucible of suffering and uncertainty, was a parallel process to keeping his personal and professional life on track in the midst of chaos. His “pay it forward” mission in Practical Mindfulness is to help others gain a practical understanding and basic mastery of the built-in, human privilege of mindful awareness, so that meditation becomes a potent, sustained act of self-care.
Dr. Sazima’s wife of thirty years is a family physician. They have three adult sons. Besides his volunteer work at Capital Public Radio, he serves on the Board of Directors of Snowline Hospice, a non-profit palliative care provider in the Sierra foothills and Sacramento.
