When mindfulness meditation was introduced as an aid for patients suffering from chronic pain, physicians were skeptical. Today, mindfulness meditation is used in hundreds of hospitals and clinics across the country. On Break Through Difficult Emotions, meditation mentor Shinzen Young adapts the core principles of mindfulness training to the treatment of emotional suffering.

Reverse Meditation is for anyone who wants to bring the challenges of life onto the path of awakening. When things get hard, it’s time to turn your practice on its head—and throw out any assumption that meditation exists to insulate you from the confusion, difficulties, and uncertainty of life. “By putting your meditation into reverse,” Holecek teaches, “you’ll actually find yourself going forward. Step into your pain and you can step up your evolution.”

The jhānas are eight progressive altered states of consciousness that can be identified with the aspect of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path called Right Concentration. Training in concentration leads to these states, each of which yields a deeper and subtler state of awareness than the previous one. The jhānas are not in themselves awakening, but they are a skillful means for stilling the mind in a way that leads in that direction, and they are attainable by anyone who devotes the time and sincerity of practice necessary to realize them.

The thinking mind is a powerful ally, but it also creates emotional drama, confusion, and limiting beliefs about who we are. Here, Shinzen Young beings his special expertise in vipassana (insight meditation) to help you learn one of its most subtle yet rewarding skills: the ability to observe in "real time" the thoughts that shape your deepest perceptions, feelings, memories, and beliefs.

For decades, one of the most engaging teachers of our time has illuminated the many dimensions of awakening - but solely at his live retreats and on audio recordings. Now, with The Science of Enlightenment, Shinzen Young brings to listeners an uncommonly lucid guide to mindfulness meditation for the first time: how it works and how to use it to enhance your cognitive capacities, your kindness and connection with the world, and the richness of all your experiences. As thousands of his students and listeners will confirm, Shinzen is like no other teacher you’ve ever encountered.