Gordan Peerman

Blessed Relief (eBook, ePUB)

What Christians Can Learn from Buddhists about Suffering

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A thoughtful, down-to-earth look at helpful ways to lessen human suffering.

This book takes you on a lively, sometimes light-hearted, journey through nine Buddhist practices that can bring "blessed relief" to a wide range of human suffering-and teaches you skills to reduce suffering in the long term for yourself and others.

• The practices help you: Loosen the grip of suffering
• Engage and question limiting views, thoughts and opinions
• Deconstruct ten common assumptions
• Be present in each moment
• Survive emotional storms
• Develop peaceful communication skills
• Deepen communication with your partner
• Appreciate mortality and the preciousness of life
• Cultivate compassion

As you read the chapters and engage in each practice, you will work with your own stories of suffering-stories in which you have felt abandoned, deprived, subjugated, defective, excluded or vulnerable-and you will learn how to release yourself from suffering by investigating it with curiosity and kindness.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Turner Publishing Company
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. März 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781594734199
• Artikelnr.: 50002137

Autorenporträt

Gordon Peerman is an Episcopal priest and psychotherapist in private practice, and an adjunct faculty member at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he teaches seminars in Buddhist-Christian Dialogue. He also teaches Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative Health, as well as mindfulness practices to Vanderbilt Law School and Vanderbilt Medical School students. He and his wife, Kathy Woods, lead a weekly meditation with the Nashville Mindfulness Meditation Group.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction ix
The Buddha Way and the Christian Way ix
What Helps and What Doesn't xi
Dropping Your Story Line xii
Finding Freedom xiii
1. Big Mind, Big Medicine 1
Everything Changes 1
The Heart of Mindfulness 5
The Weakest Link 7
Small Mind, Big Mind 10
Renunciation Practice 13
A Refuge from Words 16
Dropping into Freedom 19
Blessed Relief: The Three-Minute Breathing Space 24
2. The Cry for Help 27
The Why and the What of Suffering 27
An Exit from Hell 29
Bearing Suffering 32
The Work 36
Clearing the Lens 38
The Judging Mind Goes on Retreat 41
Blessed Relief: The Work 45
3. Beyond Belief 49
A Happy Accident 49
Spacious Awareness 52
Incline Your Mind 55
Who's Talking? 57
The Cloud of Unknowing 60
Blessed Relief: The Practice of Inquiry 63
4. Quiet Ambition 65
Not Enough 65
Kind Attention 69
Spontaneous Joy 72
The Hungry Ghost 74
Blessed Relief: The Sacred Breath 77
5. An Instrument of Peace 79
Angr-r-r-y 79
Self-Soothing: Bringing Attentiveness to Anger 81
Self-Defining: Being Willing to Speak Your Truth 85
Self-Transcending: Bringing RAIN to Blame 91
Blessed Relief: Working with RAIN 98
6. Meeting Our Edges 101
"You All Belong" 101
The Failed Buddhist Bypass 104
Nonviolent Communication 110
May the Circle Be Unbroken 114
Blessed Relief: Nonviolent Communication (NVC) 117
7. Beginning Anew 121
Unwrapping the Experience 121
A Place to Begin 123
True Intimacy 125
Zazen in the Devil's Cauldron 129
Blessed Relief: The Practice of Beginning Anew 134
8. The Dharma of Dying 137
Remembrances 137
The Great Way 140
Bowing to the Moment 143
Old Wounds 147
Blessed Relief: The Five Remembrances 150
9. Mobile Loaves and Fishes 153
Compassion Rising 153
Beyond Us and Them 157
A Retreat on the Streets 159
Softening the Heart 161
Blessed Relief: Compassion Practice 166
Afterword 168
Glossary 173
Suggested Resources 175
Acknowledgments 179
Credits 182