The Monkey Is the Messenger
Meditation and What Your Busy Mind Is Trying to Tell You
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
An engaging, funny, and introductory guide for anyone whose overactive mind gets in the way of starting a regular meditation practice
“My mind is so busy, I really need to meditate.”
“My mind is so busy, there’s no way I can meditate.”
Familiar dilemma? These days just about all of us know we should be meditating, but that doesn’t make it any easier to sit down and face the repetitive thoughts careening around our brains—seemingly pointless, sometimes hurtful, nearly always hard to control. Rather than quitting meditation or trying to wall off the monkey mind, Ralph De La Rosa suggests asking yourself a question: If you were to stop demonizing your monkey mind, would it have anything to teach you? In a roundabout way, could repetitive thoughts be pointing us in the direction of personal—and even societal—transformation?
Poignant and entertaining, The Monkey Is the Messenger offers a range of evidence-based, somatic, and trauma-informed insights and practices drawn from De La Rosa’s study of neuroscience and psychology and his long practice of meditation and yoga. Here at last—a remedy for all those who want to meditate but suppose they can’t because they think too much.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his perceptive debut, therapist and meditation instructor De La Rosa argues that, though the "monkey mind" has a bad reputation in Buddhist thought, it is not the enemy, but rather a natural physiopsychological adaptation for navigating trauma and everyday experience. De La Rosa draws heavily from his training in trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy, internal family systems therapy, and traditional psychotherapy to provide an effective reorientation to thoughts and feelings that can race with wild abandon. The distracted, repetitive, excessive thinking of the monkey mind is an opportunity to explore and resolve trauma from the past, he writes. His core guiding principle is that of "radical nonpathology" that there is nothing wrong with the body-mind, and that one must practice multiple types of meditation practice to slowly uncover the basic goodness inherent to every human being. "It's time you healed your life," he writes. For De La Rosa, healing means skillfully activating emotions and then lovingly confronting relationships with those emotions through meditation practice. Newcomers and readers familiar with meditation alike will enjoy De La Rosa's compassionate perspective on the intersection of Buddhist practice and psychotherapy.
