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Unshakeable: Trauma-Informed Mindfulness for Collective Awakening - Softcover

Rosen, Jo-ann

 
9781952692574: Unshakeable: Trauma-Informed Mindfulness for Collective Awakening
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1952692571 ISBN 13: 9781952692574
Verlag: Parallax Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A holistic system for gaining and maintaining the stability of mind needed for personal and social transformation, even in the midst of trauma—with simple, body-based exercises grounded in neuroscience and mindfulness, inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh

With three decades working in marginalized communities in the US, Israel, and the West Bank, mindfulness teacher and psychotherapist Jo-ann Rosen offers a wealth of wisdom and gentle humor in supporting people to access their inner strength and stability—even amidst outer chaos and catastrophe. Rosen draws on the example and practices of her teacher, the peace activist and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who founded Plum Village mindfulness practice centers worldwide as places of healing and restoration, to show how meditation can aid collective awakening.
    Time and time again, even in places where trauma is commonplace, Rosen has seen that a regulated nervous system allows an individual to move from overwhelm and despair to stability and engagement. The Plum Village approach to well-being cultivates resilience while recognizing the unique social and ecological challenges of our times. 
    In Unshakeable, Rosen shares the methods by which we can broaden our resiliency, calm our nerves, and positively impact the collective consciousness. By following the practices in this book, we can find an unshakeable source of strength within, not only as individuals, but also as members of strong communities for positive change.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jo-ann Rosen, LMFT, is an educator, licensed psychotherapist, and lay Dharma teacher in Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism. Her work focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, mindfulness, and social change. She is one of the guiding teachers of EMBRACE (Embodying Mindfulness-Based Resilience to Awaken Community Empowerment), a new resource for transforming trauma. She received her professional and clinical training at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco. A member of Thich Nhat Hanh's core Tiep Hien Order of Interbeing community since 1996, she received the Lamp of Wisdom and authorization to teach from Thich Nhat Hanh in 2012. She lives with her partner of forty years in rural Northern California.

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Introduction

We’re all moving on a journey to nowhere,
taking it easy
taking it slow.…

So goes an endearing song commonly heard in the Plum Village Buddhist community, the Zen tradition in which I practice. Are you kidding? Looking around me, I don’t see very many folks taking it easy or taking it slow! For most of us, the following Zen story might sound more familiar: A horse came running swiftly down a road, carrying a rider on its back. A passer-by hailed the rider, shouting, “Hey, where are you going?” As they whizzed past, the rider retorted, “I don’t know, ask the horse!”

Where are we going in this whirlwind of a life? Sometimes it seems like we forget to ask this fundamental question before we find ourselves already embarked toward our next destination, at breakneck speed, only to find out that our path is being chosen for us. For a more satisfying ride, wouldn’t it be better to make friends with the horse, to get to know its nature, and to do what we can to provide guidance? Along the way, things may spook the horse, uneven ground may cause it to stumble, or it might get frustratingly stuck in muddy patches. Instead of simply hanging onto the reins obliviously, we need to learn to anticipate obstacles, to adjust the way we ride to avoid ditches, and to hang on for dear life when we need to.

That’s the individual picture. Pulling back a bit, we can see that the path we’re riding down is part of a complex network of roads, all of them affected by common issues: if it rains, we all have to navigate mud puddles; if nobody maintains the roads, we all get stuck in ruts. There is no need to enumerate the collective problems facing every world citizen today; this book is meant to inspire, and a litany of downers won’t do that. But if we as a species are to survive, we need to be able to work collaboratively. We need to find both individual and collective balance in order to become calm enough to hear a variety of views, to broaden our perspectives, and to find the creativity needed to solve problems—big ones.

Today, our inner lives are chaotic. We’re letting the horses we’re riding get out of control, and we’re not making good decisions—individually, in our communities, in our governments, and in our collective psyche. To find our way down the road more effectively, we need to learn how to create an inner life of wisdom and compassion, to stay regulated in difficult situations, and to function collaboratively without our individual nervous systems derailing us. We need to learn how to find inner stability amid the outer chaos; in short, we need to become unshakeable.As a tree standing in the forest may encounter strong winds that blow its branches around wildly, to survive, it must have a strong trunk and be held in the ground by formidable roots. It knows how to take in nourishment from above and below. This tree is also supported by the root systems of all the other trees in the forest. Together they produce the oxygen that supports all of life; that is their calling. So, too, may our journey to wholeness lead us to participate in the collective awakening that is needed for a future of complex life to be possible.

Some 2,600 years ago, the Buddha, troubled by our human predicament, set out to find a way to transform the immense human suffering that he saw around him. This was also the situation that led the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh to explore this path for himself in the 1940s and 50s, vowing to renew a Buddhism that had lost track of its mission in a century—and in a country—that urgently needed its teachings and practices. In this new millennium, this is again where we are, needing to readapt this journey to our own times and incorporate the knowledge that science and spirit have been gathering together for many years.

This book is about how Buddhist practice, understood through the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village tradition, offers us a firm foundation to meet the challenges of our times—individually, in our communities, and in the world. (After all, Buddhists have spent more than 2,600 years crafting very skillful means of encountering and overcoming adversity!) It is about understanding our inner life and learning how to take good care of it so that it can bring us into the only destination there is, this very moment, clear and bright and wondrous. This journey along the Way of Understanding and Love—another title for the Buddhist path—offers many doors into the goodness of life.

There is the door of mind training, of actually sculpting the physiology of the brain that shapes our experience. Through diligent practice, mind training can alter our default demeanors, balance the dark and light in our lives, and help us endure the inevitable slings and arrows of life whizzing by and through us. Developing a clear mind affects the way we see, feel, hear, and taste our lives.

There is the door of community, discovering a sense of belonging in a world that appears lonely. We learn how to truly connect to the outside world when we are deeply connected to our inner selves. Our individual relationships become more satisfying. Belonging to a diverse community gives us entry into a larger sense of belonging—where we fit into the web of life, and where the web faithfully lives inside us.

There is the door of purpose. In Zen, the highest purpose of life is called the Bodhisattva Vow: to live our lives for the benefit of all sentient beings, to help others live lives of safety, happiness, and liberation. It is about cultivating altruism and maintaining the intention to make our lives about something much larger than self-improvement and self-satisfaction. Having such purpose in life can buoy us through fear and darkness, helping us get it together to be unshakeable in our vision.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But let’s get real right from the start so you can relax and know that you’re not alone if you have doubts about your ability to follow this path.

I, myself, have felt like an impostor as a Buddhist practitioner because the chattering monkey mind is incessantly alive in the jungle of my head. When I first began to explore Buddhism, I was deeply unfamiliar with Eastern culture, and at times I felt like I had an allergy to anything spiritual! In fact, it was only after I had finished college, in the late 1960s, that I discovered that I had an inner life at all. This strikes me, now, as almost unthinkable—how could someone live over twenty years without ever noticing something going on inside that could come into conscious awareness, something that could be an object of curiosity and deep satisfaction? Why had I not run into this concept before?Perhaps it was because I was born when the chill of World War II was still fresh in the air. In our anxiety-driven Jewish home, there was never any talk of inner territory. My father was busy running collections for my uncle the bookie, and later, selling used cars on commission. He was too proud to “let” my mother work, and the end of each month was tension-packed to see if we could make ends meet.

The story I was told, which I unquestioningly adopted as my own, was that the war “didn’t affect our family.” Perhaps that was because my grandparents had emigrated to the US at the turn of the twentieth century, escaping the pogroms of Bessarabia in Eastern Europe; most of their relatives who remained there had already perished before the Holocaust began. In any case, my family—like the families of most of my peers—insisted on not looking back and thought that bringing up the past was uncomfortable and unnecessary. But later, I understood how the past lived on in our nervous...

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Verlag
Parallax Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1952692571
ISBN 13 
9781952692574
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
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