This is a (very) partial list of books and podcasts that I recommend getting started with if you’re interested in learning to let go of mental baggage so that you can experience the richness of the present moment.
One of my go-to workbooks is Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Stephen Hayes (2005). In it Hayes offers a series of exercises that help the reader to stop believing the hurtful inner critic who arose (mostly) out of a childhood need for safety as well as from years of wrong-headed conditioning by well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) parents, teachers, peers and others. Hayes and his associates designed and researched an approach to therapy that highlights three pillars of a satisfying life: mindfulness, acceptance, and commitment to values-based living. The point that I find most useful is that life is not pretty; fighting against hard experiences, rather than accepting them, intensifies our suffering. How do we accept loss, grief, disappointment, and discomfort and yet live fully, with many happy moments? Hayes has lots of strategies for doing this.
On my bedside table for over a decade I’ve had a small nice-to-hold book by Brenda Shoshanna, a psychologist who shares Zen insights into the challenges of loving ourselves, others, and life. In Zen and the Art of Falling in Love (2003) Shoshanna narrates the likely thoughts of students learning Zen practice in the meditation room of a Zen monastery. Her simple and profound lessons help me to let go of the memories, mental arguments, and re-runs of emotionally intense (usually distressing) moments that my mind wants to keep rehashing. Chapter titles are small lessons in themselves: “Take off Your Shoes (Becoming Available),” “Sitting on the Cushion (Meeting Yourself),” “Cleaning House (Emptying Yourself)” or “Cooking (Nourishing Others and Oneself), for example. This book helps me to focus on what is right before me to do, rather than to torture myself with the “wouda, shoulda, coulda, haveta:” story lines that lead to distress.
Psychologist Tara Brach teaches hour-long lessons each week and offers shorter guided meditations on a readily available podcast. Throughout her teachings, and from her first book, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (2003), to her most recent, Trusting the Gold: Uncovering Your Natural Goodness (2021), she consistently teaches a practice of compassion and acceptance (as opposed to resistance) that guides readers and listeners to nurture themselves toward liberation and wholeness. She often says, “It’s not the survival of the fittest, it’s the survival of the most nurtured” as a way to overcome resistance to self-kindness and self-compassion. I use her RAIN method (Recognize the feeling, Acknowledge that it belongs, Investigate it, and Nurture oneself) personally and with clients to cultivate emotional softness and healing.
Last year a dear friend told me about an author whose work I’m surprised I hadn’t encountered earlier. Michael Singer founded a yoga and meditation center in 1975 and published a best seller, The Untethered Soul, in 2007. I found the book surprisingly helpful, and I’ve listened to all available episodes of his energetic podcast. He teaches, in fun, plain spoken, and non-esoteric language, the same insights as virtually all of my favorite mindfulness teachers. He invites and sometimes cajoles us into practicing acceptance, mindfulness, living in the moment, and finding freedom by stepping away from what some call “the thought-machine in the brain” and Singer calls “my inner roommate.” I haven’t yet read his second book, The Surrender Experiment (2015), but I expect it to reinforce the same powerful lessons.