In the rush of modern life, we tend to lose touch with the peace that is available in each moment. World-renowned Zen master, spiritual leader, and author Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to make positive use of the situations that usually pressure and antagonize us. A ringing telephone can be a signal to call us back to our true selves. Dirty dishes, red lights, and traffic jams are spiritual friends on the path to “mindfulness”—the process of keeping our consciousness alive to our present experience and reality. The most profound satisfactions, the deepest feelings of joy and completeness lie as close at hand as our next aware breath and the smile we can form right now.
Lucidly and beautifully written, Peace Is Every Step contains commentaries, meditations, personal anecdotes, and stories from Nhat Hanh’s experiences as a peace activist, teacher, and community leader. It begins where the listener already is—in the kitchen, office, driving a car, walking—and shows how deep meditative presence is available now. Nhat Hanh provides exercises to increase our awareness of our own body and mind through conscious breathing, which can bring immediate joy and peace. Nhat Hanh also shows how to be aware of relationships with others and of the world around us, its beauty, and also its pollution and injustices. The deceptively simple practices of Peace Is Every Step encourage listeners to work for peace in the world as they continue to work on sustaining inner peace by turning the “mindless” into the mindful.
Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen master in the Vietnamese tradition, scholar, poet, and peace activist. He is the founder of the Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon and has taught at Columbia University and the Sorbonne. Thich Nhat Hanh is the author of the national bestseller Living Buddha, Living Christ and over 60 other books. He was nominated for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr.
His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was born in 1935 in Taktser in the northeastern part of Tibet. After the occupation of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China in 1959, he fled to India, from where he has since worked for a mutually acceptable solution for genuine autonomy of his homeland. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Edoardo ballerini was nominated for a 2012 Audie Award for his recording of The Land of Laughs. He has also received four Earphones Awards from AudioFile Magazine. On screen, Edoardo is best known for his work in the television series The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, and 24, as well as the films Dinner Rush and Romeo Must Die.