This all-levels meditation guide presents a simple 10-minute practice to reduce anxiety and promote well-being. Drawing on his 20 years as a clinical therapist, author Owen O'Kane offers a unique combination of therapeutic and mindfulness techniques for managing stress, improving mental clarity, and putting an end to unhelpful thought patterns. With step-by-step instructions for each minute of the practice and easy-to-follow exercises for developing a daily meditation routine, Ten to Zen is an empowering handbook for finding peace, clarity, and joy—anytime and anywhere. All it takes is 10 minutes.

Ten to Zen is a simple, effective and fuss-free guide to help you start your day in the right headspace to prepare for the challenges it may bring. Each morning most of us will spend about ten minutes in the shower, ten minutes making and eating breakfast but no time at all clearing our minds. Ten to Zen uses a combination of four therapeutic models – Mindfulness, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Psychotherapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy – in a simple, easy-to-follow programme. You will learn: - How to settle your mind quickly - How to focus and retrain your brain on dealing with stress - How to restructure unhelpful patterns of thinking - How to develop ways of communicating that are more effective Ten to Zen was developed by Owen O'Kane to encourage new principles for living based on his experience as a psychotherapist and his many years of caring for the dying in the field of palliative care, which has hugely influenced how he works and how he views life. 'This book offers you the perfect mind workout in just ten minutes a day – it’s an essential!' - Dame Kelly Holmes

‘A brilliant book of intelligent advice and detailed case studies that encourages reflection and positive change.’ Fearne Cotton ‘A refreshingly practical guide to finding joy every day.’ Susanna Reid

Blending Eastern principles of breath awareness and mindfulness with Western principles of positive psychology, these powerful but easy to learn meditative incantations offer an antidote to stress, procrastination, and anxiety.

Literary ombudsman John Crace never met an important book he didn't like to deconstruct. From Salman Rushdie to John Grisham, Crace retells the big books in just 500 bitingly satirical words, pointing his pen at the clunky plots, stylistic tics and pretensions of Big Ideas, as he turns publishers' golden dream books into dross.

Using Zen meditation to unravel the mysteries of consciousness. The calming and de-stressing benefits of Zen meditation have long been known, but scientists are now considering its huge potential to influence our ability to understand and experience consciousness – though few will say it! Susan Blackmore is about to change all that: she’s a world expert in brain science who has also been practising Zen meditation for over twenty-five years. In this revolutionary book, she doesn’t push any religious or spiritual agenda but simply presents the methods used in Zen as an aid to help us understand consciousness and identity – concepts which have stumped scientists and philosophers – in an exciting new way. Each chapter takes as its starting point one of Zen’s - and science's - most intriguing questions such as, "Am I conscious now?" and "How does thought arise?"

Zen is famous for koans (called kong-ans in Korean, and in this book), those bizarre and seemingly unanswerable questions Zen masters pose to their students to check their realization (such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”). Fear of koans keeps some people from ever giving Zen practice a try. But here, through the experience of seeing a modern Zen master work with his students, you can see what koan training is really like: It’s a skillful, lively practice for attaining wisdom. This book presents the system of ten koans that Zen Master Seung Sahn came to call the “Ten Gates.” These koans represent the basic types one will encounter in any course of study. Each of the ten gates, or koans, is illuminated by actual interchanges between Zen Master Seung Sahn and his students that show what the practice is all about: it is above all a process of coming to trust one’s own wisdom, and of manifesting that wisdom in every koan-like situation life presents us with. For more information on the author, Zen Master Seung Sahn, visit his website at www.kwanumzen.com.