The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness
By Diana Winston
Sounds True 2019; 180 pp., $16.95 (paper)
At age fourteen, Diana Winston spent a summer babysitting at the beach. It was tough keeping up with the two kids, so she didn’t get much R&R. But one night she slipped outside and—gazing at the night sky—she felt a calm come over her. Suddenly she experienced awe, love, and a feeling of being fully in her body yet as spacious as the sky. Many of us have had such spontaneous experiences of natural awareness, but we might not know how to cultivate them. In The Little Book of Being, Winston—using straightforward, secular language—explains how. A long-time practitioner of meditation, she’s the director of mindfulness education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. She spent a year living as a Buddhist nun at a monastery in Burma and trained as a meditation teacher with Jack Kornfield. These days, she says, her mindfulness practice includes parenting her eight-year-old.
