Living with Your Heart Wide Open · How Mindfulness and Compassion Can Free You from Unworthiness, Inadequacy, and Shame

To live with shame and feelings of inadequacy is to live with guilt, self-loathing, and a constant sense of isolation propelled by the belief that you are deficient as a human being. These beliefs are hard-wired and painful to face, but those who are eventually able to overcome them reap many rewards: compassion for others, love for themselves, and the ability to live freely, openly, and fearlessly. Living with Your Heart Wide Open presents a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) path to moving past feelings of shame and unworthiness and toward a new perspective based in compassion and acceptance. MBSR has been proven to relieve symptoms of depression and anxiety and improve well-being.

The exercises in this guide help readers process the painful feelings of shame, instead of avoiding them, and move past the beliefs and self-concepts that keep them from reaching their full potential. Through the healing power of mindfulness and acceptance, readers come to terms with their thoughts of shame and unworthiness and grow to fully understand them, yet develop a shield of compassion to protect them against the temptation to absorb or believe these thoughts.