A Fool's Guide To Actual Happiness
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
If this guy can find actual happiness, so can you—and you’ll have fun along the way. A refreshing new voice—without pretense, and with a real gift for clear expression.
Let's face it: we all have a motivating drive to become "better." what we have and who we are never seem to be good enough. This feeling that something is wrong or needs to be fixed causes us to continuously run around, chasing after what we feel will finally fulfill us. But what if these very conditions that we are constantly trying to escape from could be used as a way to awaken ourselves—to connect with the peace already within us?
A Fool’s Guide to Actual Happiness offers a realistic roadmap for working toward inner peace without needing to be someone you’re not. With humor and refreshing simplicity, Van Buren shows how everything life throws at you, good and bad, can be used as a means to cultivate compassion, wisdom, and loving-kindness. This book allows you to explore who you are—warts and all—and gives you tools to love and accept what you find.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Van Buren (Your Life Is Meditation) lays out a concise but informative crash course on finding happiness through Buddhist concepts and practices in this powerful book. In the first section, he takes up Buddhist teachings such as the three marks of existence (impermanence, suffering, and non-self) to call into question the belief that happiness comes through spiritual or material self-improvement. He then guides readers into an investigation of the conditionality of happiness and suffering, writing that actual happiness is contentment. The second section presents various kinds of practices to help readers settle into and accept the present moment: mindfulness, sitting meditation, tonglen and metta meditations, shenpa practice, cultivation of compassion, and more. The final section contains advice to support practice, including how to find inspiration, discover one's sense of humor, and handle a formal meditation retreat. Throughout the book, Van Buren regularly reminds readers that it is acceptable to be a foolish person so long as one is cultivating awareness, taking steps to avoid hurting oneself and others, and being exactly oneself to the fullest extent. Although he treads familiar ground, Van Buren proves himself to be a shrewd synthesizer of Buddhist principles for newcomers and novices on the path toward mindful living.
