Mindfulness for Busy People – Michael Sinclair, Josie Seydel & Emily Shaw

I was immediately attracted to Mindfulness for Busy People for the title and of course, thought it would be a “fast track” approach to that inner peace that I’d been looking for.  At the time of reading this book, my awareness had been heightened and knew that I ‘needed to do something’, but my knowledge of exactly ‘what’ was pretty sparse.

This is quite a detailed book, and I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the fast track I hoped for.  It does, however, replace the need to go and sit in silence at the top of a mountain for a month.  If you want to invest some time in yourself, Mindfulness for Busy People actually gives a lot of really flexible options, but you do need to do the work.

I really liked the no-nonsense approach of this book, and it was whilst reading I first realised the difference between self-compassion and self-care, which I hadn’t realised were two separate things.  After working through some of the exercises in this book, I started dipping my toes in the water of emotion – something I’d been quite smashing at avoiding up until this point.

One comment from the book really stood out for me “emotions are a condition of life, not a problem to solve” and what’s really powerful about the book is the search for what’s behind the busyness.  Rather than give an easy answer for us avoiders – it really forces you to put the brakes on and consider taking a different road.

There’s definitely work to be done to get the most out of this book.  The design is very accessible, particularly for a newcomer to mindfulness, and the exercises are very doable no matter what busyness excuses you can come up with!

Definitely worth a read if you want to get practising and exploring.  It’s almost certainly an ideal “companion” to any other self-discovery work you may be doing.  If this was your starting point, however, I might point you to an app like Headspace instead of the book, this would guide you more to getting stuck in straight away and maybe return to the book once you’ve done a bit of work.