Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation

By: Mark W. Muesse, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Mark W. Muesse

Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

Meditation - the technique of mental focusing for enhanced awareness and self-mastery - offers deep and lasting benefits for mental functioning and emotional health, as well as for physical health and well-being.

This practice is closely related to "mindfulness," which Professor Muesse defines as "a deliberate way of paying attention to what is occurring within oneself as it is happening. It is the process of attentively observing your experience as it unfolds, without judgment or evaluation."

"Meditation," he adds, "refers to certain exercises that can be used to enlarge and refine mindfulness." Meditation cultivates mindfulness by training you to develop deep attention to the present moment, allowing the mind to become settled and centered. These 24 detailed lectures teach you the principles and techniques of sitting meditation, the related practice of walking meditation, and the highly beneficial use of meditative awareness in many important activities, including eating and driving. You will also learn how to use the skills of meditation in working with thoughts and emotional states, in deepening sensory awareness of the body, and in becoming deeply attentive to the operation of your mind.

You'll come away with a solid basis for your own meditation practice and for bringing meditation's remarkable and empowering benefits to every aspect of your life.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2011 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2011 The Great Courses

great curse. recommend

the meditation is great. the content is perfect. I found this course very good and contributing if you you a beginner ( such as myself ).
bottom line one of the best courses you will get as far as I have listened too.

Life changing

One of the best books (courses} I've ever listen. Humanity will really evolve when a critical mass knowledge and practice on this subject is achieve

Eye opening

I make this caveat up front, I haven't gotten all the way through this course yet. I don't normally do this, but I have a purpose in writing the review before I have completed the whole series. That purpose is in the first 2 lectures. This course is worth it if all you do is listen (carefully) to the first 2 lectures. The whole course is about using meditation as a tool, but the goal is mindfulness. If you can stand to look at yourself critically, listen to the first 2 lectures and then objectively consider where you fall on being mindful. Just the mere understanding of this concept, which is expertly explained and demonstrated, is eye opening. If you want to get more out of your life, your day-to-day existence, take 1 hour and listen to the first 2 lectures.

Educational

I certainly learned a lot about meditation but I did not find the lecture to be engaging.

Very helpfully

Listening chapters change mindset improves daily. Reminds anxiety forget about leaving go away anxiety your doing best can

Lots of great insights

This is a great series for those just starting out on the mindfulness path. The speaker has a lot of great insights. I’m sure that even if you have been practicing mindfulness for awhile that you will be able to glean some good ideas from this series. Highly recommended.

Intermittently thought-provoking

I learned a lot from this course, although parts of it are more valuable than others. The best sections are those which give advice on meditation practice and how to overcome the difficulties that challenge the beginner. The lecturer has lots of useful, practical ideas that are very helpful. I found the later sections where he spends a great deal of time moralizing in a rather banal way to be less interesting, although here and there I found nuggets of thought-provoking ideas about how mindfulness can help us live our lives better - the chapter on accepting mortality is particularly good.

The lecturer speaks WAY too slowly and has a slightly condescending tone, as if he is explaining the subject to a small kitten. However, I found that if I played him at 2x speed he sounded like a normal human being and was perfectly listenable.

Good recorce if you ignore the Narrator's bias

It was a practice in Mindfulness to regain concentration every time the speaker diverged from actually teaching into repetative moralistic preaching. I reject many of the authors views on sexuality and purity of though. In fact I find that attempting to achieve perfect thought and the idea of injecting morality actively work against the kind of flow and inner tranquility one can achieve through basic Mindfulness.

I really wanted to give this a 4 out of 5. Glad for some of the better parts for sure. The 3/5 is just honest from my perspective. The tangents just added up to where they reduced actual value.

I could honestly give this a higher score had the title been "Mindfulness from a heavily Christian Perspective" - at least then I'd have known what to expect.

Annoying narrator.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Professor Mark W. Muesse?

Dr. Muesse seems to be knowledgeable about the topic, but his cadence and voice was very annoying. He had very little enthusiasm and read in almost a monotone. I could only do a very short session because I kept getting rapped up in the voice and delivery.

Any additional comments?

I was interested in the topic, but had a hard time getting into the book because of the delivery by the reader.

A Good Agnostic Introduction.

Where does Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Well, it's the first audiobook I've listened to, so I'd say it's #1 right now.

What about Professor Mark W. Muesse’s performance did you like?

Having explored meditation in different religious traditions - both willingly as an adult and unwillingly as a child - I've disdained how the meditation aspect is sometimes 'sold' with dingleberries of the specific religion. I suspect his background in teaching Comparative Religion allowed him to allow the mindfullness and meditation to seep through.

That has great value to me since he's done much of the footwork that I tired of.