Unfortunately, I had to read this book in Danish translation, since the library wouldn't get it for me in English (I can't buy all the books I read). The English version is a translation from the Vietnamese, the author Thich Nhat Hanh being a Buddhist monk who wrote the book in 1974 as a letter to a teacher at a social school in South Vietnam from his exile in France.
The book exhorts the reader to mindfulness, i.e. to live in the "now", as Echart Tolle directs us to do, and explains how to do so. When you do the dishes, you don't do so to get them clean, but just for the sake of doing them. You do them with mindfulness and love for the process.
The author's words (even in translation) are imbued with peace and calm, and I found myself reading the book more slowly than I otherwise might have done.
Thich Nhat Hanh's text is inspiring and useful. Its essence is his advocacy of the importance of breathing exercises in order to obtain mindfulness, and innumerable of these are found in a subsequent section on mindfulness exercises as a whole.
A chapter enlightens us about the author Nhat Hanh who at the time of writing what turned into the book was committed to explaining to the Americans the necessity of stopping the bombings and killings in his country. He is a poet and Zen Master.
The final sections of the book are devoted to a selection of buddhist Sutras, which I couldn't really make head or tail of.
But all in all, an admirable book - a good introduction to mindfulness meditation.
I will now be trying to obtain other works of this author, preferably some that have not been translated into Danish, so I have a better chance of getting hold of them in English, for instance, "The long road turns to joy".
Get more detail about
The Miracle of Mindfulness.
