Mindfulness and Intimacy
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Go beyond mere mindfulness—and deepen your connection to your self, the people in your life, and the world around you.
Mindfulness is an ancient and powerful practice of awareness and nonjudgmental discernment that can help us ground ourselves in the present moment, with the world and our lives just as they are.
But there’s a risk: by focusing our attention on something (or someone), we might always see it as something other, as separate from ourselves. To close up this distance, mindfulness has traditionally been paired with a focus on intimacy, community, and interdependence. In this book, Ben Connelly shows us how to bring these two practices together—bringing warm hearts to our clear seeing.
Helpful meditations and exercises show how mindfulness and intimacy can together enrich our empathetic engagement with ourselves and the word around us—with our values, with the environment, and with the people in our lives, in all their distinct manifestations of race and religion, sexuality and gender, culture and class—and lead to a truly engaged, compassionate, and joy-filled life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Connelly (Inside the Grass Hut) uses his experiences as a Zen practitioner and as a secular meditation teacher to tour the possibilities of Buddhist mindfulness training in this rewarding introduction to meditation and Zen Buddhism. He explains how the practice of meditation and mindfulness is designed to help individuals bring compassionate, careful attention to their lives. While the practice itself can be either religious or secular, he notes, it always begins with close attention to breathing. Connelly recommends mindfulness practices directed at certain areas of one's life (such as possessions or values) and provides meditation instructions for readers to try, including "mindfulness of breath" and "mindful listening." Beginners or those curious about the practice will find this an invaluable volume that presents the basics of meditation in open, unhurried fashion. Connelly's explanations are simple, without being oversimplified. This work will speak mostly to novice meditators or those interested in starting, though even readers with an established practice may enjoy revisiting the foundations of mindfulness.
