When Andrew Weiss began teaching meditation, taking over a class started by renowned insight meditation teacher and author Larry Rosenberg, he discovered that his students responded best when he broke down the process of learning mindfulness practice into discrete and progressive steps.
Knowing that most people had little time to devote to meditation, he also made it his priority to teach the direct application of mindfulness to daily life. Instead of focusing solely on sitting meditation, he found that people needed to see everything they did as an opportunity to awaken the meditative inquiry of mindfulness. While he taught the practices of sitting and walking meditation, he paid equal attention to everyday life activities. Gradually he created handouts for each week’s instruction and “home-play” assignments, turning his teaching into a progressive, easy-to-follow path to give people mindfulness skills. Through the years, his handouts developed into a self-bound handbook, which quickly became the preferred text for groups wanting to learn mindfulness in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing. Classes in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, California, and elsewhere now use it.
Like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are, Beginning Mindfulness is intended for lay-people practicing in their work and family lives without the luxury of long meditation retreats. It is deeply rooted in Buddhist practice but remains unbound by one particular Buddhist tradition. Weiss skillfully blends the traditions of his teachers: that of Korean Zen Master Seung Sanh, Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, insight meditation or vipassana, as well as the Hindu yogic tradition. An easy, doable program of learning to practice the Buddhist art of mindfulness, Beginning Mindfulness is, as one psychologist who uses the manual with her groups put it, “a simple manual that really works.”
About the Author Meditation teacher Andrew Weiss has studied Buddhist meditation for many years in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He studied with Zen Master Seung Sahn, the founder of the Kawn Um School of Zen and teacher to American Buddhist teachers Larry Rosenberg and Jon Kabbat-Zinn. In 1989 he met Thich Nhat Hanh and in 1991 was ordained a brother in the Vietnamese teacher’s Order of Interbeing. Andrew was also ordained in 1999 into the White Plum Zen Lineage, by monk Claude AnShin Thomas. The White Plum Lineage was founded by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Weiss is a founder of the Community of Interbeing in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the founder and practice coordinator for the Clock Tower Sangha in Maynard, Massachusetts He has taught mindfulness meditation at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and at the New England School of Whole Health Education, where he also served as Dean of Students.
BEGINNING MINDFULNESS: Learning the Way of Awareness By: Andrew Weiss
Publication Date: March 12, 2004
ISBN: 1-57731-441-7
Price: $14.95, Trade Paper
Pages: 256, 5 x 7"
Published by New World Library
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