These insights from many years of Zen meditation practice appeal to a wide range of spiritual traditions and explore topics such as the difference between process and content, notions of right and wrong, ending self-punishment, and taking responsibility for one's experiences. Perfect for beginning Zen students and for those interested in Buddhism in general or eastern religion, it features deep spiritual insights and playful illustrations that add warmth and approachability to the topic.

Suffering Is Optional: Three Keys to Freedom and Joy centers around three basic aspects of Zen practice: pay attention, believe nothing, and don t take anything personally. As ending suffering requires that one sees how suffering happens, the book urges readers to be willing to be quiet and pay attention to the process of suffering in effort to see each moment as an opportunity to step beyond illusion into freedom. It also argues that examining beliefs, abandoning them, and returning attention to the present is essential to ending suffering, as is living in the awareness that nothing...

Employing the tenets of Zen Buddhist awareness practice, the book provides numerous exercises and self-help tools for working through problems with resistance, revealing how resistance operates in everyday life and guiding readers to consider how they can be free of it. The teachings in this book show how to recognize resistance in its many forms, not take it personally, and be free of its control. The platform is that the voice of resistance thoughts such as I'll do it later is not personal; everyone has it. Instead, it is the voice of a survival system that can take people from...