Tim Ryan: A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit

Excerpt

Congressman Tim Ryan, the author of A mindful nation: How a simple practice can help us reduce stress, improve performance and recapture the American spirit represents Ohio’s 17th Congressional District and is serving his fifth term as an elected representative to the United States House of Representative. He is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, a member of the House Budget Committee, and Co-Chairman of the Congressional Manufacturing Caucus. As active as he is in Congress, he has taken on the task of putting a national face to mindfulness practice through various direct and indirect activities. For example, he is said to have helped establish mindfulness and social and emotional learning programs in several schools in his district, led a conference at a medical school on mindfulness-based stress reduction, and secured an $982,000 budget earmarked to fund the implementation of the “Skills For Life” social and emotional learning program in the Youngstown and Warren city schools, in Ohio. Now he has written this book as another vehicle to achieve his goal. In the Congressman’s words, he wrote this book, “to promote the values of slowing down, taking care of ourselves, being kind and helping each other. It seems to me if we embrace these values individually, it will benefit us collectively. And, our Country will be a little bit better off as a result.” …