Tag: self compassion

Never Whistle At Night

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As always when I read any collection of short stories there are particular ones which catch my attention, but I really can’t stress how much I enjoyed ‘Never Whistle at Night’. The collection is extremely well put together, spanning a variety of topics impacting indigenous communities, whether that be indigenous folk lore inspired, inspired by racism, classism, internalized trauma, religious trauma, or all of the above and of course more. The cultural weight of each story has its place in the anthology.

The editors deserve all the credit in the world, it’s a wonderful collection. Please support them.

Review: Bringing Home the Dharma

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Jack Kornfield is someone I’ve known about for over a decade, which is a sentence that makes me feel very old. Mindfulness is something I’ve studied a lot, academically and personally, and I think Bringing Home the Dharma is possibly the most comprehensive collection of answered questions for western Buddhism that I’ve come across. I listened to it as an audiobook and took my time to chew through it, and I truly think it was remarkable.


It may be a bit of an undertaking for someone casually trying to learn about Buddhism because the book is very detailed but for a beginner or someone like me who phases in and out of the scene, it is an excellent resource. Kornfield is, as always, a very gentle but assertive teacher.

I’d definitely prefer having a written copy to the audiobook I listened to because it’s such a great resource; it’s definitely something to reference back to and to cherry pick which areas resonate most.

Week 2, Self Compassion, Kristin Neff; Be Calm, Jill Weber

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Psychology month!

Week 2, Self Compassion, Kristin Neff; Be Calm, Jill Weber

Self Compassion: The Proven Power of being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff is a straightforward argument for why being kind to yourself helps you best to be kind to others and to improve how you view and move through life. It highlights the importance of putting the brakes on catastrophic thinking and reactive behaviors. There’s going to be a theme, if you read all of these reviews on Psychology books, of curbing reactive, adaptive behaviors that may have been advantageous to you at one time in your life but aren’t any longer. It’s incredibly hard to unlearn maladaptive behaviors and Neff puts forward the importance of self compassion toward reaching that goal for yourself. Self compassion is touted and supported as being integral to adapting and learning new behavior and Neff is one of the biggest names in general audiences learning to that end.

Be Calm by Jill Weber is, like so many of these, sort of a hybrid between a work book and a psychology book, focused on anxiety. I decided to pair it with the book on self compassion because…..well, duh. You need self compassion to work through anxiety, the good news being that anxiety is extremely responsive to treatment.

This book is a compassionate description of anxiety symptoms, how they impact functioning and relationships, broken down into sections on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It offers practical guidance on how to curb anxiety stemming from each of these and how they relate to one another.