The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Morita Therapy and the True Nature of Anxiety-based Disorders by Shoma Morita

Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection by Gregg Krech

The Five Wisdom Energies by Irini Rockwell

The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard

Moon in a dewdrop, Dogen (partial) edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi

Start Where You Are (A guide to compassionate living) by Pema Chodron

Where is Your Buddha Nature? by Venerable Master Hsing Yun (translated by Tom Graham)

Teachings on Love by Thich Nhat Hanh

Old Path White Clouds by Thich Nhat Hanh

Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung? by Ajahn Brahm

Mindfulness, Bliss, And Beyond by Ajahn Brahm

Food For The Heart by Ajahn Chah

everything arises, everything falls away by Ajahn Chah

The Life of The Buddha by Bhikkhu Nanamoli

The Buddha's Ancient Path by Piyadassi Thera

The Great Discourse on Not-self by Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw

The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering by Bhikkhu Bodhi

In the Buddha's Words by Bhikkhu Bodhi 

Great Disciples of the Buddha by Nyanaponika Thera, Hellmuth Hecker (edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi)

The Buddha In The Jungle by Kamala Tiyavanich

Forest Recollections Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand by Kamala Tiyavanich

Being Nobody, Going Nowhere by Ayya Khema

The Sound of Silence by Ajahn Sumedho

Joyful Wisdom by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Eric Swanson

Smile at Fear by Chogyam Trungpa (edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian)

The Myth of Freedom by Chogyam Trungpa (edited by John Baker and Marvin Casper)

At Home In The Muddy Water by Ezra Bayda

Programming Google App Engine by Dan Sanderson

Expert Python Programming (partial) by Tarek Ziade

Crictor by Tomi Ungerer

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Illustrated Dharma Sutra by 蔡志忠

Full Metal Alchemist by Arakawa Hiromu

The compound - part boot camp, part rehab center - resembles programs around the world for troubled youths.

Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors lead group sessions, and there are even therapeutic workshops on pottery and drumming.

South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the "PC bang," dim Internet parlors that sit on virtually every street corner.

But such ready access to the Web has come at a price, as legions of obsessed users find that they cannot tear themselves away from their computers.

It has become a national issue here in recent years as users started dropping dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end. A growing number of students have skipped school to stay online, shockingly self-destructive behavior in this intensely competitive society.

Up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people, are at risk of Internet addiction, said Ahn Dong Hyun, a child psychiatrist at Hanyang University who just completed a three-year government-financed survey of the problem.

They spend at least two hours a day online, usually playing games or chatting. Of those, up to a quarter million probably show signs of actual addiction, like an inability to stop themselves from using computers, rising levels of tolerance that drive them to seek ever longer sessions online, and withdrawal symptoms like anger and craving when prevented from logging on.

To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which started this summer. Researchers have developed a checklist for diagnosing the addiction and determining its severity, the K-Scale. (The K is for Korea.)

The rescue camp, in a forested area about an hour south of Seoul, was created to treat the most severe cases. The camp is entirely paid for by the government, making it tuition-free.

During a session, participants live at the camp, where they are denied computer use and allowed only one hour of cellphone calls a day, to prevent them from playing online games via the phone. They also follow a rigorous regimen of physical exercise and group activities, like horseback riding, aimed at building emotional connections to the real world and weakening those with the virtual one. "It is most important to provide them experience of a lifestyle without the Internet," said Lee Yun Hee, a counselor. "Young Koreans don't know what this is like."

South Korea's gaming addicts. (BBC News)

Experts say the definition of an addict is less to do with the number of hours spent online, but more about the central role computers and the internet can play in someone's life.

Symptoms include:

• Preoccupation with the internet
• The inability to perform normal tasks in everyday life
• Losing control over yourself
• The disruption of daily routines and lifestyles
• Feeling nervous and anxious when not online

Visualising their dreams can help addicts wake up to reality and reduce time spent at the computer, counsellors believe.

Dr. Judith Beck is the Director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond.

Her most recent book is The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person.

Cognitive therapy, as developed by my father Aaron Beck, is a comprehensive system of psychotherapy, based on the idea that the way people perceive their experience influences their emotional, behavioral, and physiological responses. Part of what we do is to help people solve the problems they are facing today. We also teach them cognitive and behavioral skills to modify their dysfunctional thinking and actions.

I became particularly interested in the problem of overweight and was able to identify specific mindsets or cognitions about food, eating, hunger, craving, perfectionism, helplessness, self-image, unfairness, deprivation, and others, that needed to be targeted to help them reach their goal.

A unique feature is that the book doesn’t offer a diet but does provide tools to develop the mindset that is required for sustainable success, for modifying sabotaging thoughts and behaviors that typically follow people’s initial good intentions. I help dieters acquire new skills. Problems simply reflect lack of skills--skills that can be acquired and mastered through practice.

Some of the key critical skills are:

• How to motivate oneself. The first task that dieters do is to write a list of the 15 of 20 reasons why they want to lose weight and read that list every single day.
• Plan in advance and self-monitor behavior. A typical reason for diet failure is a strong preference for spontaneity. I ask people to prepare a plan and then I teach them the skills to stick to it.
• Overcome sabotaging thoughts. Dieters have hundreds and hundreds of thoughts that lead them to engage in unhelpful eating behavior.
• Tolerate hunger and craving. Overweight people often confuse the two.

The way you think about food, eating, and dieting affects your behavior and how you feel emotionally. Certain ways of thinking make it difficult to follow a diet and to maintain weight loss. The Beck Diet Solution takes you through a six-week process to change sabotaging thoughts (that cause you to stray from your diet) to helpful thinking (that will lead to success).

Related: Thinking thin can help you be thin. ‘The Beck Diet Solution’ says your mind is the key to weight loss.

In CT, therapeutic change is the result of clients confronting faulty beliefs with contradictory evidence that they have gathered and evaluated.

by Mark Unno, Editor is published by Wisdom Publications (a nonprofit charitable organization).

As Buddhism and psychotherapy have grown and diversified in Asia and the West, so too has the literature dealing with their intersection. In this collection of essays, leading voices explore many surprising connections between psychotherapy and Buddhism.

Table of Contents

Part I.

Promises and Pitfalls: Dialogue at the Crossroads

1. Promises and Perils of the Spiritual Path
2. Individuation and Awakening: Romantic Narrative and the Psychological Interpretation of Buddhism
3. Cross-Cultural Dialogue and the Resonance of Narrative Strands
4. Buddhist Practice in Relation to Self-Representation: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue
5. On Selves and Selfless Discourse
6. Transcendence and Immanence: Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Japan

Part II.

Creative Possibilities: Psychotherapy and Buddhism in Mutual Encounter

7. Psychotherapy and Buddhism: Attending to Sand
8. The Borderline Between Buddhism and Psychotherapy
9. Naikan Therapy and Shin Buddhism
10. Psychology, the Sacred, and Energetic Sensing

Part III.

Death and Dying in Pure Land Buddhism

11. Shandao's Verses on Guiding Others and Healing the Heart
12. Shin Buddhist Ministry: Working with Issues of Death and Dying
13. A Buddhist Perspective on Death and Compassion: End-of-Life Care in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism

Appendices

I. Illusions of the Self in Buddhism and Winnicott

II. Shinran's Thought Regarding Birth in the Pure Land

III. Key Terms: Shin Buddhism

Analyzing Enlightenment - A Review by Mark Epstein, MD.

View at Google book.

Related:

Buddha's Compassion And The Story of Kisa Gotami and The Mustard Seed.

A Humorous Milton Erickson Therapy Case.

A Mother's Wishes of Her Children - Satisfaction.

The following is the case of a young woman, severely depressed and with no social life, who threatened suicide unless Erickson was able to help her within three months. She was attracted to a young man at work, and he seemed to show some interest in her, but she was unable to act on her impulses in any way. Her parents were dead, she was alone, and she felt completely isolated:

The young woman was pretty, but she managed to make herself unattractive [with her unkempt hair and unflattering outfits] ... Her main physical defect, according to her, was a gap between her front teeth. [Yet] the gap was only about one-eighth of an inch... Generally, this was a girl going downhill, heading for suicide, ... and resisting any acts that would help her achieve her [stated] goal of getting married and having children.

Erickson approached this problem with two major interventions. He proposed to the girl that she have one last fling [spending her savings on herself, at the clothing store and the beauty salon].... The woman was willing to accept the idea, since it was not a way of improving herself but part of going downhill and merely having a last fling.

Then Erickson gave her a [second] task. She was to go home and in the privacy of her bathroom practice squirting water through the gap between her front teeth until she could achieve a distance of six feet with accuracy. She thought this was silly, but it was partly the absurdity of it that made her go home and practice...

When the girl was dressed properly, looking attractive, and skillful at squirting water through the gap in her teeth, Erickson made a suggestion to her ... [to play] a practical joke. When that young man appeared at the water fountain at the same time she did, she was to take a mouthful of water and squirt it at him. Then she was to turn and run, but not merely run; she was to start to run toward the young man and then turn and "run like hell down the corridor."

The girl rejected this idea as impossible. Then she thought of it as a somewhat amusing but crude fantasy... She was in a mood for a last fling anyhow.

On Monday, ... [meeting the young man at the water fountain,] she filled her mouth with water and squirted it on him. The young man said something like "You damn bitch." This made her laugh as she ran, and the young man took after her and caught her. To her consternation, he grabbed her and kissed her.

The next day the young lady approached the water fountain with some trepidation, and the young man sprang out from behind a telephone booth and sprayed her with a water pistol. The next day they went out to dinner together... Within a few months she sent Erickson a newspaper clipping reporting her marriage to the young man, and a year later a picture of her new baby.

Although the account is somewhat humorous, the young woman's inner condition was quite serious, serious enough that no amount of direct counseling would have worked. While there are major differences between the case of Kisa Gotami and this young woman, in both cases the teacher/therapist meets the supplicant/client at her point of greatest need in the here and now and turns what had seemed to be a great negative into the very thing that becomes the positive force for religious/therapeutic transformation.

From: Buddhism And Psychotherapy Across Cultures: Essays on Theories and Practices by Mark Unno