The Wisdom of a Meaningful Life

Book excerpt: A rich and multilayered guide that offers readers accessible wisdom and practical methods to cultivate deeper satisfaction in everyday experiences. In contrast to stimulus-driven pleasure, contentment comes from living a life of meaning that aligns with one's values. The author identifies the common traps people fall into looking for happiness that actually create stress, worries, and fears, and offers authentic mindfulness-based solutions to counteract them. The increasing popularity of secular mindfulness in the United States mainstream has unfortunately produced a variety of teachings that water down and misunderstand this important philosophy and approach to living. Mindfulness is often reduced to concentration exercises and a simplistic definition of being aware of the present moment. In nearly all secular presentations of mindfulness, it is taken out of the rich context of the Three Higher Trainings (ethics, concentration, and wisdom) of Buddhism in which it was originally taught. The unique feature of this book is that it maintains the substance of the entire teaching as a program that is accessible to people of all spiritual traditions or no spiritual tradition. John Bruna is a counselor, mindfulness and spiritual teacher, and Certified Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC) in California. In 2005, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition through the Gaden Shartse Monastery in India. In 2012, he became a Certified Cultivating Emotional Balance Mindfulness Teacher via the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. Currently, John is the director of the Way of Compassion Foundation and cofounder of the Mindful Life Program.