The Mindfulness Code: Keys for Overcoming Stress, Anxiety, Fear, and Unhappiness

The price we pay for today's fast-paced, always-connected life is often stress, anxiety, and depression. While drawing on ancient wisdom, Donald Altman embraces twenty-first-century brain science to create practical, everyday strategies for experiencing a less-encumbered, less-entangled state of being. These techniques reactivate natural abilities you already possess.

The four keys for unlocking mindfulness are the body, the mind, the spirit, and relationships. Altman presents practices for turning each key toward contentment, confidence, and joy, including shifting our mental and emotional perceptions, inhabiting the body and its "sense-abilities", exploring spiritual connection, and tapping into the healing powers of community and relationship. Inviting and accessible to those new to mindfulness but comprehensive enough for more experienced practitioners, these powerful tools will help you transform your life from the inside out.

The price we pay for today’s fast-paced, always-connected life is often stress, anxiety, and depression. While drawing on ancient wisdom, Donald Altman embraces twenty-first-century brain science to create practical, everyday strategies for experiencing a less-encumbered, less-entangled state of being. These techniques reactivate natural abilities you already possess.

The four keys for unlocking mindfulness are the body, the mind, the spirit, and relationships. Altman presents practices for turning each key toward contentment, confidence, and joy, including shifting our mental and emotional perceptions, inhabiting the body and its “sense-abilities,” exploring spiritual connection, and tapping into the healing powers of community and relationship. Inviting and accessible to those new to mindfulness but comprehensive enough for more experienced practitioners, these powerful tools will help you transform your life from the inside out.

Publishers Weekly

In Art of the Inner Meal and Meal by Meal, Altman, who is also a therapist, explored healthy, conscientious food relationships. Though diet only plays a supporting role in this joyful look at residing in the present moment, reading Altman remains a profoundly nourishing experience. This is one of stacks of books to feature mindfulness exercises (observing breathing and emotions, sensing the body, loving-kindness prayers), but the added discussion of neuroscience studies that support the practice and the author’s conversational, intimate tone make it one of the most worthwhile. Altman’s four “keys” to mindfulness—mind, body, spirit, and relationships—are each given 11 concise, straightforward chapters. Autobiography, lecture, stories form counseling sessions, and exercises for tuning into the now with greater clarity are the teaching tools for each key. Targeting stress and anxiety, Atman’s prose and message is a peace-promoting prescription for anyone frazzled by life’s breakneck speed. Mindfulness veterans and newcomers alike will find a trustworthy guide to a discipline gaining greater popularity and scientific validation. Altman addresses the mind while writing from the heart. (June)

Donald Altman is a psychotherapist, former Buddhist monk, and adjunct professor at Lewis and Clark College Graduate School and Portland State University. He conducts mindful living and mindful eating workshops nationally. A member of the Burma Buddhist Monastery Association, he lives in Portland, Oregon.