The Practice of Happiness: Exercises and Techniques for Developing Mindfulness, Wisdom and Joy

Here is an extraordinarily lucid and intelligent self-help book, inspired by the Abhidhamma, an ancient Buddhist teaching in training the mind and living a liberating, happiness-promoting way of life. Mirko Frýba has designed a complete workbook based on this training, with detailed exercise designed to help us feel at home in our bodies, protect well-being through mindfulness, and perceive reality with clarity and wisdom. These exercises show how to deal skillfully with painful events and negative emotions and also offer direct ways of promoting positive emotions such as cheerfulness, self-confidence, joy, and compassion. By relating these experiences to specific situations encountered in his work with friends, students, psychotherapy clients, and workshop participants, the author makes these traditional techniques applicable to familiar contemporary settings, whether in everyday life meditation practice, or psychotherapy.

Mirko Frýba, Ph.D., is a Czechoslovakian psychotherapist based in Switzerland.

About Mirko Fryba