Finding the still point : a beginner's guide to Zen meditation - John Loori Daido

Finding the still point : a beginner's guide to Zen meditation - Daido, John Loori

Summary: Provides information on the practice of Zen meditation, covering such topics as body positions, hara focus, breathing, relaxation exercise, and walking meditation. - (Baker & Taylor)


Publishers Weekly Reviews
Loori, the revered and celebrated founder and abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in New York, has authored numerous books on Zen Buddhist practice (The Eight Gates of Zen ). In this ultraslim illustrated primer, Loori distills that experience and wisdom into a resolute and economical guide for beginners. It will likely become a classic. Part One addresses the Zen basics such as meditation positions, hara focus, breathing, walking meditation and home practice. This section is particularly friendly for beginners with its concise instructional essays, most under 1,000 words. Loori's deceptively simple prose, arising from decades of practice and teaching, hits its mark as an arrow hits center target: the means and results are evident, but the flight is elegantly invisible. Part Two, a dharma talk on "The Great Way," effectively imparts "a direct expression of the spirit of Zen by the teacher to his… students." Tools such as an appropriately short glossary and suggested reading list are complemented by a 70-minute CD (not heard by PW ). The CD offers timed zazen sessions of 10 and 30 minutes, plus a brief talk by Loori on the benefits of meditation. This book-and-CD package promises to be a graceful gem in the legendary cosmic Diamond Net. (Sept.)

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The year of magical thinking - Joan Didion

The year of magical thinking - Didion, Joan

Summary: An autobiographical portrait of marriage and motherhood by the acclaimed author details her struggle to come to terms with life and death, illness, sanity, personal upheaval, and grief. - (Baker & Taylor)




Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Didion--a master essayist, great American novelist, and astute political observer--uses autobiography as a vehicle for tonic inquiries into both the self and society. In Where I Was From (2003), she meshed family history with an examination of America's romance with the West. Here, in her most personal and generous book to date, she chronicles a year of grief with her signature blend of intellectual rigor and deep feeling. The ordeal began on Christmas 2003 when Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, learn that their daughter, Quintana Roo, is in intensive care with severe pneumonia and septic shock. Five grim days later, Dunne and Didion come home from the hospital, sit down to dinner, and Dunne suffers "a sudden massive coronary event" and dies. Married for 40 years and sharing a passion for literature, they were inordinately close. But Didion could not give herself over to grief: Quintana's health went from bad to worse as she developed a life-threatening hematoma on her brain. She survived, and Didion had the wherewithal to cope: "In times of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go the literature. Information was control." So she researches grief, schools herself in her daughter's medical conditions, and monitors the flux of flashbacks and fears that strobe through her mind. Didion describes with compelling precision exactly how grief feels, and how it impairs rational thought and triggers "magical thinking." The result is a remarkably lucid and ennobling anatomy of grief, matched by a penetrating tribute to marriage, motherhood, and love. ((Reviewed August 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.

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If God is love: rediscovering grace in an ungracious world - Philip Gulley

If God is love: rediscovering grace in an ungracious world - Gulley, Philip

Summary: Argues that one's beliefs play a key role in how one lives and interacts in the world, inviting readers to envision a world where everyone shares a belief that God loves every person and proposing world transformation through spiritual change.



Booklist Reviews
Gulley, a minister, and Mulholland, a theologian, turn the popular slogan "God is love" into a question that opens a Pandora's box of unanswered queries that some prefer remain unanswerable. If God is love, how are those who profess belief in God to act? If God is love, how does Christianity explain the vastly accepted dualistic theology of heaven and hell? If God is love, how can Christians live in God's grace? How can we continue to hate, slander, murder, and condemn our neighbors? If God is love, and God commands us to love our enemies, how can we justify war? Gently taking organized religion to task for perpetuating its power to control people, and only slightly lacing their discussion with their personal political opinions, the two Quakers propose ways to live, work, play, and be in a state of grace. Many may fault their approach for seeming overly simple at times. Yet anyone searching for a "graciousness primer" might look on this book as a commonsense example of such a manual. ((Reviewed October 1, 2004)) Copyright 2004 Booklist Reviews.


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That's funny you don't look Buddhist - Sylvia Boorstein

That's funny you don't look Buddhist - Boorstein, Sylvia

Summary: Explores the intriguing relationship between Jewish and Buddhist traditions and discusses the reasons why so many Jews are drawn to Buddhism and become practicing Buddhists. 50,000 first printing. $40,000 ad/promo. Tour. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
Boorstein, author of It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness (1995), is a wonderfully commonsensical Buddhist teacher and an observant Jew. This combination of faiths is not uncommon; in fact, so many Jews are drawn to Buddhism, it is becoming a genuine spiritual movement. Rodger Kamenetz examined this phenomena in The Jew and the Lotus (1994), and now Boorstein devotes her newest book to answering the question, "How is it possible to be both a Jew and a Buddhist?" Warm and direct, she expresses her gratitude for knowing "two vocabularies" of faith: Buddhism is her "voice of understanding," and Judaism is the voice of her heart. Uneasy, at first, about this unsought "dual citizenship," Boorstein slowly realized that she became a more observant Jew because she has a meditation practice, that meditation brought her closer to her spiritual essence, which is, by birth, Jewish. Boorstein's mindful elucidation of her balance of faiths is inspiring and enriching. When it comes to spirituality, more is more. ((Reviewed February 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

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Sing them home - Stephanie Kallos

Sing them home - Kallos, Stephanie

Summary: Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician's wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope's three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother's spitfire best friend, is no match for Hope's absence. Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable; and the youngest, Bonnie, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs roadsides for clues to her mother's legacy, and permission to move on. When they're summoned home after their father's death, each sibling is forced to revisit the childhood tragedy that has defined their lives.

Booklist Reviews
Things are swept away by tornados in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska: pianos, houses, and a young girl and her mother. Although the young girl, Bonnie Jones, is eventually recovered, her mother, Aneira Hope Jones, never resurfaces. The painful circumstances surrounding their mother s death leave the Jones children, Larken, Gaelen, and Bonnie (henceforth christened Flying Girl), emotionally stunted and struggling to learn how to love. Years later, when another natural disaster draws them together, the three are confronted by the clouded past that has haunted them since childhood. In multiple ways, it is the community members of Emlyn Springs who teach these motherless children how to love again. Sing Them Home ushers us into small-town life, with all its distinctive cultural nuances, eccentric personalities, and homegrown secrets. With the same beauty and lyricism of her first novel, Broken for You (2004), Kallos stitches together a colorful patchwork of memories and images, creating a rich narrative fabric that develops and changes as it passes through each character s hands. Copyright Booklist Reviews 2008.

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The biology of belief: unleashing the power of consciousness, matter, and miracles - Bruce H. Lipton

The biology of belief: unleashing the power of consciousness, matter, and miracles - Lipton, Bruce H.

Summary: Author Lipton is a former medical school professor and research scientist. His experiments, and those of other leading-edge scientists, have examined in great detail the processes by which cells receive information. The implications of this research radically change our understanding of life. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Dr. Lipton's profoundly hopeful synthesis of the latest and best research in cell biology and quantum physics is being hailed as a breakthrough, showing that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking.--From publisher description. - (Baker & Taylor)

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When the past is present: healing the emotional wounds that sabotage our relationships - David Richo

When the past is present: healing the emotional wounds that sabotage our relationships - Richo, David

Summary: In this book, psychotherapist David Richo explores how we replay the past in our present-day relationships—and how we can free ourselves from this destructive pattern. We all have a tendency to transfer potent feelings, needs, expectations, and beliefs from childhood or from former relationships onto the people in our daily lives, whether they are our intimate partners, friends, or acquaintances. When the Past Is Present helps us to become more aware of the ways we slip into the past so that we can identify our emotional baggage and take steps to heal it.

Drawing on decades of experience as a psychotherapist, Richo helps readers to: Understand how the wounds of childhood become exposed in adult relationships—and why this is a gift; Identify and heal the emotional wounds we carry over from the past so that they won't sabotage present-day relationships; Recognize how strong attractions and aversions to people in the present can be signals of our own unfinished business; Use mindfulness to stay in the present moment and cultivate authentic intimacy - (Random House, Inc.)

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Everyday Commitments - David Richo

Everyday Commitments - Richo, David

Summary: A guide for inspiration and contemplation containing fifty-two promises, such as "Cultivating Loving-Kindness" and "Being Authentic," to develop compassion, honesty, and integrity, and promote healthy relationships. - (Baker & Taylor)

Library Journal Reviews
In an effort to help individuals bring proper spiritual etiquette into a world full of greed, hate, and delusion, psychotherapist and author Richo (How To Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving) offers 52 ways to express kindness and compassion in everyday life. Daily readings open with a single commitment followed by a short commentary containing a practical exercise. For example, the commitment to avoid gossip includes an explanation of why the practice is tempting as well as an exercise for speaking directly to people whose behavior has been unwelcome. The page-long chapters are easy to digest and will undoubtedly assist in achieving positive change. Recommended for most libraries.
[Page 70]. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

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