Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn
There’s a reason my reading blog has been so thin lately: school. In January I started a part-time Massage Therapy program. It’s twelve hours of class a week plus practice (called logs), other homework, and studying. So I’m reading. I’m just not reading for fun. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not enjoying what I’m reading. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, one of the manuals for our Personal Potential class, is the sort of book I’d read anyway.
The school’s nickname for Personal Potential is PERP, but I like to call it Breathing 101. It’s a class designed to help us handle the challenges of balancing work and school now and the challenges of being a massage therapist later. It covers things like meditation, mindfulness, health, stress reduction, boundaries, transference, self-esteem, emotional intelligence and, yes, breathing. Most of us who took the class agree that it should be a required course for admission into the human race.
Full Catastrophe Living is based on a stress reduction clinic the author teaches at a hospital. The clinic sounds a lot like PERP. It’s a several month-long program that teaches mindfulness and meditation to help people cope with pain, anxiety and stress. It’s a great program but a very thick book. I don’t know if it’s possible to get as much out of the book as you’d get from a clinic like the author’s or a class like PERP, but this is a book I’ll happily lend out to anyone who doesn’t have the opportunity I had to learn how to breathe in a group.