Building on mindfulness and self-compassion practices, this step-by-step guide to secular insight meditation shows the way to freedom from deeply rooted thought patterns.

This book shows how we can move beyond secular mindfulness and compassion techniques to the cultivation of insight–seeing into and thereby becoming free of the repetitive thinking that keeps us trapped in cycles of suffering. Most books in the secular mindfulness tradition stop with mindfulness and self-compassion but do little to uncover the root causes of our suffering. Drawing on both Buddhist analyses of mind and current findings in psychology and neuroscience, the book explains how our thinking becomes fixed and routinized through our engaging with unconscious preferences and reactions. Through the cultivation of insight, we can disentangle ourselves from these patterns, which leads to greater equanimity, freedom, and compassion.