Jon Kabat-Zinn - 1 July

Mindfulness for Beginners:
Reclaiming the Present Momentand Your Life

Mindfulness:
Diverse Perspectives on Its Meaning, Origins, and Applications
(co-editor with Mark Williams)

The Minds Own Physician:
A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation
(co-editor with Richard Davidson)

Letting Everything Become Your Teacher:
100 Lessons in Mindfulness

Arriving at Your Own Door:
108 Lessons in Mindfulness

The Mindful Way Through Depression:
Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness
(with Mark Williams, John Teasdale, and Zindel Segal)

Coming to Our Senses:
Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

Wherever You Go, There You Are:
Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Full Catastrophe Living:
Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

In writing this book together, we wrote chapters by ourselves initially, then gave each other feedback on them through many iterations and changes. For this revised and updated edition, we followed the same approach. We each went over our individual chapters first, making whatever changes we felt necessary, and then, side by side, we went over it all, revising drafts and writing new material. Every chapter became the product of our dual scrutiny in both the thinking and the writing. The final product is truly a collaborative effort of our hearts and our minds, and, of course, of our lives together.

We want first and foremost to thank our childrenfor their honesty and insight, and their forbearance with our sharing something of their lives with the world beyond our family. Ultimately the stories from their childhoods reflect precious moments that are truly theirs alone. We are blessed by their being and their love.

We also want to acknowledge our parents, Sally and Elvin Kabat and Roslyn and Howard Zinn, for their love, for everything we learned from them, and for the remarkable ways they manifested their love in the world.

At various stages of the writing of the first edition, we asked for feedback from our friends. We wish to express our thanks and gratitude to them. Larry Rosenberg, Sarah Doering, Robbie Pfeufer Kahn, Becky Sarah, Norman Fisher, Jack Kornfield, and Trudy Goodman read the manuscript and gave us invaluable perspectives and suggestions. We also thank Hale Baycu-Schatz, Kathryn Robb, Jenny Fleming-Ives, Mary Crowe, Nancy Wainer Cohen, Sala Steinbach, Sally Brucker, Barbara Trafton Beall, and Nancy Bardacke for their suggestions.

A number of people contributed their own writing and, in that way, a part of their own hearts and souls to our effort. We are deeply indebted to them for their generosity and their eloquence: Caitlin Miller for her poems in Letters to a Young Girl Interested in Zen; Lani Donlon for the story in Family Values; Cherry Hamrick for her letter in Mindfulness in the Classroom; and Rebecca Clement, her student, for hers; Ralph and Kathy Robinson for the poem written by their son Ryan Jon Robinson, and for Ralphs account of Ryans life and untimely death in Impermanence; and Susan Block for the material in Its Never Too Late.

Rose Thorne, Becky Sarah, Hale Baycu-Schatz, Kathryn Robb, Robbie Pfeufer Kahn, and Levin Pfeufer also contributed material to the book, for which we are grateful.

I (mkz) would like to thank Robbie Pfeufer Kahn for our many conversations over the years regarding the needs of children. Gayle Petersons seminal work on the mind/body connection in birthing, and her book Birthing Normally: A Personal Growth Approach to Childbirth, published in 1984, informed my view of labor and birth and some of the content of the childbirth education classes I taught in the 1980s.

We also want to express our appreciation to all of the people who shared stories about their parenting experiences with us. Many of those stories are included anonymously at their request. Some, for reasons of space and content, we were unable to include in the book. Nonetheless, we are grateful to those people who reached out to us with their poignant stories.