Quiet practices for noisy lives.
“The smallest possible practice, repeated. That's almost the entire method.”
Amy White has been writing about contemplative practice since long before mindfulness became a wellness category. Her first book, *Mindfulness for Beginners*, came out in 2019 and has since been read by more than two million people in seventeen languages.
What pulled her into the work was an embarrassingly ordinary kind of suffering — a demanding career, a quiet anxiety she could not name, a gradually accumulating sense that something was off. She began sitting Zen-style at a small zendo in Park Slope and kept showing up for twenty years. She is suspicious of any practice that promises more than it asks.
For The Art of Mastery she writes the *Master the Quiet* column — short, practical essays for people who want a contemplative practice without the incense, the dogma, or the time commitment. Her sources are equal parts Zen, cognitive science, and twenty years of cushion time.
