A Fearless Heart — by Thupten Jinpa

The Buddhist practice of mindfulness caught on in the west when we began to understand the everyday, personal benefits it brought us. Now, in this extraordinary book, the highly acclaimed thought leader and longtime English translator of His Holiness the Dalai Lama shows us that compassion can bring us even more.

Based on the landmark course in compassion training Jinpa helped create at Stanford Medical School, this book shows us that we actually fear compassion. We worry that if we are too compassionate with others we will be taken advantage of, and if we are too compassionate with ourselves we will turn into slackers. Using science, insights from both classical Buddhist and western psychology, and stories both from others and from his own extraordinary life, Jinpa shows us how to train our compassion muscle to relieve stress, fight depression, improve our health, achieve our goals, and change our world.

A former monk, Thupten Jinpa holds a PhD from Cambridge University and has been the principal English translator to the Dalai Lama for nearly thirty years. He is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University and chairman of the Mind and Life Institute, which is dedicated to promoting dialogues and collaborations between the sciences and contemplative knowledge, especially Buddhism. He lives in Montreal with his wife and daughters. Author of such books as: The Art of Happiness  and Wherever You Go, There You Are.
 

Note: Below are two editions of this book - one by Penguin, and the other by Piatkus (both published in the same year).