How Love Wins: The Power of Mindful Kindness

Doug Carnine’s career as a professor of education spanned over 40 years, and the lessons he learned in front of the classroom are a gift to readers of his book How Love Wins: The Power of Mindful Kindness. Written in a completely relatable style and very thorough format, the book walks through 12 steps to living a more loving and kind life.

Carnine comes across as a thoughtful and enthusiastic teacher who wants readers to gain the knowledge of mindful kindness for themselves because doing so could create a better world for all of us. The book feels like a manual for how to live your best life, as it sets up not only how to practice mindful kindness but why. Releasing our own feelings of inadequacy, says Carnine, can lead us to being more loving with ourselves. And, when we can do that, we can be more “kindful” to others.

The book features not only an introduction explaining the process, as any good textbook should, but, after the formal 12 steps are outlined and explained—complete with exercises for practice and illustrations—Carnine has included a glossary of terms and an appendix of resources for those who want to continue their study beyond his book. Carnine has amassed a great deal of knowledge through his work as “a lay minister in the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives” and with inmates at Arkansas’s Tucker Maximum Security Prison. He practices what he preaches and helps others to develop skills necessary to improve their lives through breathing, meditation, forgiveness, and practice. The most useful step in the book is probably Step 8: Mindful Micropractices in Daily Life, as it reminds us there is always time, even on our most hectic days, to “break our unkind habits [which] is how love wins.”