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by AMBER TUCKER, AVA WHITNEY-COULTER, BARRY BOYCE, KYLEE ROSS, and OYINDA LAGUNJU

EXPANSIVE LEADERSHIP Cultivating Mindfulness to Lead Self and Others in a Changing World

Latha Poonamallee, PhD • Routledge

We live in a world that’s diverse, complex, and constantly changing, and with all those changes comes a call to shift our leadership styles. Expansive leadership, as Dr. Latha Poonamallee explains, “is an invitation to explore how to be a leader in an expansive, inclusive, robust, and resilient way.” As Chair of Faculty of Management and University Fellow at the New School in New York City, Poonamallee can help leaders usher in this new era of change with kindness, self-reflection, curiosity, and mindfulness.

While there are a lot of leadership books out today, Poonamallee successfully uses various guides and exercises to differentiate hers from the rest. This 28-day journey, filled with daily journal prompts, meditations, and a reminder to “be kind and cultivate a curious mind,” allows you to create space for deep reflection and gives you the tools to enact change in yourself and your teams.

Think mindfulness could benefit your organization, but you’re not sure where to start? Poonamallee demystifies the role of mindfulness in leadership and provides a layered approach to how you can become an effective leader and build inclusive organizations. An expansive approach to mindfulness, she says, guides us toward treating those around us with kindness and respect.

So whether you already see yourself as a leader in an organization or your personal life, or are looking to become one, you will find ways here to embrace change and transformation. While Poonamallee jokes that the book wrote itself, it’s clear that her honesty, diligent research, and thoughtful prompts make this book a great addition to any bookshelf. – OL

FIVE GOOD MINUTES OF MINDFULNESS Reduce Stress, Reset, and Find Peace Right Now

Jeffrey Brantley • New Harbinger

In five minutes you can brew a cup of tea, solve a Wordle (on good days), or do one of the 100 practices from Five Good Minutes of Mindfulness. Whether you choose tea, Wordle, or a mindfulness practice, there’s no right way to spend five minutes. But thinking about what you can do in that time puts this collection of practices into perspective. It’s accessible no matter the level of your mindfulness practice. All you need is a few minutes to establish presence through mindful breathing, set your intention, and do the exercise you’ve chosen from the book. From slowing down to gratitude to connection, there’s a fiveminute practice for every day, mood, or situation. – KR

PEACE IS A PRACTICE An Invitation to Breathe Deep and Find a New Rhythm for Life

Morgan Harper Nichols • Zondervan Books

Even if all around us seems to be falling apart, says Harper Nichols—an artist, musician, and author of four books—we have the power to dip into peace. Because, she writes, “Peace is the river in the desert, not on the other side of it.” She relates her own struggles, including her autism diagnosis at 31, from a worldview rooted in both her Christian perspective and in simply being human, with the countless joys and challenges we share. This compassionate, refreshing, and down-to-earth book guides us through myriad practices to cultivate peace amid challenges. A few examples: Work with your light and shadows; awaken empathy; allow yourself to rest, and to trust; share your story; and “let go into love.” – AT

The Modern Loss Handbook

An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience

Rebecca Soffer • Running Press

Rebecca Soffer wants you to think like a crab (OK, hear her out.) “They don’t try to follow any particular trajectory. They change course when something isn’t working for them—and decide pretty quickly when it isn’t,” Soffer writes. She proposes that the same applies to grief. Being able to adapt and weave your grief into your life takes time and some discomfort. That’s where The Modern Loss Handbook comes in. It’s a journal, task manager, and memorial rolled into one delightfully illustrated space to honor your grief. You’re guided through prompts, mindfulness practices, and tips to help you stay connected to yourself, connected to the world, and connected to the person who died (referred to as “your person”). How you use the handbook is up to you. You can follow the exercises, remember, feel, mess up, try again, or as Soffer writes, you can toss the book across the room if you so choose. – KR

GUTSY Mindfulness Practices for Everyday Bravery

Dr. Leah Katz • Broadleaf Books

While many of us might not be quick to label ourselves as brave, in this book, Dr. Leah Katz lets us know that under all of the societal expectations, self-doubt, and fear lies an endless capacity to be brave. Filled with self-affirming reminders, humor, and honesty, Gutsy reads like a conversation with an old friend. Throughout various chapters, Katz touches on real-life issues such as relationships, pain, and body image to remind us of the moments of bravery we show in our personal, everyday battles.

Dr. Katz draws on her Jewish faith and culture, as well as her expertise as a psychologist, and shares her own fears to help us acknowledge that there is bravery in honesty, self-care, gratitude. And if you’re looking for a reminder of your inner strength and worthiness, there is also bravery in simply picking up this book. – OL

WHAT HAPPENS IN MINDFULNESS Inner Awakening and Embodied Cognition

John Teasdale • Guilford

In the early ’90s, John Teasdale, a groundbreaking psychology researcher at Oxford University, along with Zindel Seigel, of the University of Toronto, and Mark Williams, also of Oxford, developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. MBCT has proved to be not simply a complement to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but a beneficial program in its own right, widely practiced and subjected to ongoing research. Teasdale, now retired, has produced his magnum opus in What Happens in Mindfulness, an ambitious book that makes an important contribution to the scientific understanding undergirding the mindfulness movement.

Teasdale notes that as mindfulness practices expand their reach, it becomes increasingly valuable to understand the efficacy of mindfulness through secular views and models, not to replace religious ideologies, but rather to use within contexts such as psychologists’ study of the mind and clinicians’ concerns with healing patients.

The model he relies on was employed in the development of MBCT: Interactive Cognitive Subsystems (ICS), a framework for understanding mental activity “firmly rooted in cognitive science and in what we currently know about how our minds work.” ICS departs sharply from earlier approaches that treated the mind as a kind of disembodied “symbol-processing computer.” ICS emphasizes embodiment.

The interplay between two kinds of knowing—conceptual and holistic-intuitive—is the book’s driving force. “We try to achieve happiness,” Teasdale writes, “using the problemsolving strategies of conceptual knowing, rather than experience the happiness of wholeness linked to holistic-intuitive knowing.” Part one examines the pursuit of happiness through these two ways of knowing, illustrating the value of enhancing the oft-ignored holistic way of knowing. Part two investigates mindfulness practice to try to understand how and why it works. Part three explores how far the practice can go, helping us transcend duality and separateness, discover intrinsic joy, and unlock compassion and our capacity to live in a state of flow. – BB