Waking Up Together
Intimate Partnership on the Spiritual Path
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Descripción editorial
Waking Up Together is written for those who want to journey to new depths of intimacy, both spiritually and in their love relationship. The book shows how a committed, long-term relationship can enhance spiritual development and how relationships can be transformed by spiritual practice. Written by two Zen teachers married for thirty-seven years, it shows that relationships and all that arise from them can be a help--not a hindrance!--as we seek greater freedom and joy. It is possible to wake up together!
Going far beyond merely recommending skills and strategies to improve relationships, Waking Up Together serves as a guide in our ongoing process of spiritual discovery and intimacy. Throughout the book the authors intermingle stories and poems along with anecdotes from their married life, empowering couples to awaken to an ever-expanding experience of relationship that is full of spontaneity, mystery, awe, love, and unlimited possibility. Waking Up Together will be useful for couples of all persuasions. It affirms and encourages couples to cultivate the richness of their own relationship, and open to the unbounded potential of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"How can... Zen meditation... help couples be partners in both life and... wisdom?" ask Ellen and Charles Birx, a husband-and-wife writing team and co-founders of New River Zen Community in Virginia. They set about exploring that question by drawing extensively on their own Zen practice and by sharing stories drawn from 37 years of marriage. In brief chapters, they address a variety of topics of interest to readers in committed, long-term relationships, from the ordinary (the importance of communicating spiritual values during financial planning, for example) to the esoteric ("the love you manifest in your relationship" has the power "to extend to the ends of the universe"). Indeed, the text walks a fine line between the accessible and the arcane. At times, the value of meditation is clear (on ending a relationship: "meditation practice helps you slow down and work through your pain and fear of being alone"), and the Birxes' frequent anecdotes of married life often helpfully illustrate a point. But at other times they merely assert, without real explanation, the value of advanced Buddhist insights, and their use of koans as teaching points in such brief discussions sometimes confuse, instead of illuminate, the topic. The result is an easygoing book that will appeal primarily to those already familiar with the techniques and benefits of Buddhist meditation.
