I borrowed a book by David Brazier recently. It’s called simply “Zen Therapy.” I greatly admire it. It really highlights, for me, the vitality of the Endless Knot: the union of discerning wisdom and warm, unclinging compassion in helping patients recover from mental illness. Here are some passages that I felt were particularly inspiring and insightful.
“Shunyata is innocent. A child picks up an unfamiliar object and turns it over in his hand. He looks from this side and from that. We can do the same. Pick up a stone. Turn it over in your hand. Become familiar with it. Notice its colour, its contours, its crevices. As you do so, the stone becomes real for you. It becomes something… Thus tenderness grows. We start to care about the stone. Just like a child, we invest caring in the object. From a materialistic viewpoint this is absurd. The rock has no monetary value and minimal utility. But is this not precisely the nature of caring? We do not care in order to get something back… We simply appreciate the thing itself. In some ways a stone is particularly easy to care for since it asks nothing in return.” pg. 206
“Allison told the therapist, at the end of a session, that she was going to commit suicide. The therapist was immediately filled with strong feelings and said that he would not allow her to do any such thing: that, if necessary, he would not let her leave his office. She protested that it was none of his business whether she killed herself or not. He retorted that it now felt like it was very much his business – how could he live with himself if he let her go and she were dead the next day? Eventually she promised not to kill herself before seeing him again and left. Later she told him that this encounter had made a great impression on her because she realized that her being alive made a difference to someone else. She stayed alive that week because she did not want to inflict hurt upon him. In due course she found more reasons.” pg. 198
I am still in the middle of reading it. Possibly, more will come later.
Sounds like a great book. The passages that you shared are very powerful. I will add this to my reading list. Thank-you for sharing.
Thanks for saying nice things about my book. In case you are interested, I have a new one out in August called Love and Its Disappointment: The meaning of life, therapy and art. Here’s some of the stuff bout it….
“Love and Its Disappointment: The meaning of life, therapy and art” has been found to be lucid and helpful and has excellent endorsements: “compelling…, power house…, brilliant…, convincing…, nourishing…, enlightening…, wise…, insightful…, compassionate…
For flyer, please scroll down.
ENDORSEMENTS AND REVIEWS:
Julia Samuel, Metanoia Institute Tutor, Honorary Fellow of Imperial College:
A compelling book, like a power house of thought that has been building up over a long time and successfully found its voice, as it pulled me the reader along. The clarity of the author’s thought is rare indeed. His overall thesis that as loving beings we are inevitably thwarted, and how art and therapy can inform, help and occasionally heal us finds a way of saying what I have felt for a long time. His skill at drawing on other theorists, writers, philosophers, and his own thinking and integrating it into one clear treatise is brilliant. The risk he takes in standing up and banging the drum for love as the main motivation in man is convincing and lays bare our defences against it, and of course its frustration.
Robert Wicks, Author of Riding the Dragon (Sorin Books) and The Resilient Clinician (Oxford University Press). Catholic. Professor, Loyola University Maryland:
In Love and Disappointment David Brazier calls us to see what is at the core of life in refreshing, vitalizing ways. He offers new insights that seminal thinker Carl Rogers might have offered himself if he were alive today. It is thought provoking, nourishing of the inner life, and ideal reflective material for both professionals and searchers seeking to live “the honourable life”. This book is about the possibility of love in a world that fails to really recognize the true import of its motivating force. Brazier’s approach not only educates and helps us think differently but also, in Iris Murdoch’s words, it ” inspires love in the part of us that is most worthy.” What more can you ask of a book than this?
Nathan Katz, Jewish, Professor of Religious Studies, Florida International University:
This is just what we need: a psychology based not on raw sex, or power, or fear, or mystical obscurantism, but on love and beauty. Here a skilled psychologist, artist and priest opens us to hopeful, enlightening and heretofore unanticipated possibilities. It is a book for all of us, professional and lay, western and eastern, sceptical and credulous.
Gregg Krech, Buddhist, author of Naikan: Gratitude, Grace and the Japanese Art of Self-reflection; and of other books on Naikan and Constructive Living:
Wise, insightful, compassionate observations that teach us that we find love not in ourselves but in that which we are devoted to. Brazier has created a thought-provoking paradigm in which love, art, spirituality and psychotherapy attempt to dance together to the symphony of life’s meaning, conducted passionately within the corridor of the human heart.
http://www.o-books.com {} Review copies: office1@o-books.net
Author interviews: david@amidatrust.com
Pre-release orders at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Love-Its-Disappointment-Meaning-Therapy/dp/1846942098/
Facebook Promotion:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/LOVE-AND-ITS-DISAPPOINTMENT-The-meaning-of-life-therapy-and-art/86982269590
Conscious TV Interview: http://www.conscious.tv/psychology.html?bcpid=1417325930&bclid=18465828001&bctid=18874696001