The Kindness Handbook

A friend criticises you. You grow impatient with someone you re trying to help. A cell phone user annoys you on a train. Would your first response to these situations be kindness?

In The Kindness Handbook, Sharon Salzberg explores with insight and clarity how kindness for ourselves and others can be the quality we choose to steer our lives by. From the foundation of this transformative practice and its entry point through you, to its daily expression in your life, this book features a thoughtful collection of anecdotes, stories, and practical tools to inspire kindness for any life situation.

The Kindness Handbook is your personal companion to explore the rich landscape of kindness and help you see just how it might shift and open up your life to greater joy, meaning, and compassion. For kindness to be more fully realised, it needs to be distinguished from being ineffectual or meek. It also needs to be infused with wisdom, supported by courage, and threaded with balance.

About the Author

Sharon Salzberg, a student of Buddhism since 1971, has been leading meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. Influenced by her more than twenty-five years of study with Burmese, Indian, and Tibetan teachers, she teaches intensive awareness practice ("vipassana" or insight meditation) and the profound cultivation of lovingkindness and compassion (the Brahma Viharas). She is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society and The Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, both in Massachusetts. Salzberg is the author of several books including The Kindness Handbook, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, A Heart as Wide as the World, and the New York Times bestseller Real Happiness.