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The Little Book of Zen Healing

Japanese Rituals for Beauty, Harmony, and Love

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
Accessible and adaptable Japanese Buddhist rituals to infuse your life with purpose, healing, and gratitude when you need it most.
How do we make and sustain meaning amidst the messy conditions of daily life? Personalized rituals can help us blossom like lotuses right in the mud of the present. On a pilgrimage she began after her mother’s death, author Paula Arai encountered numerous Japanese Buddhists who taught her the remarkable power of ritual to heal—practices you can adapt to your own cultural and personal circumstances. Applying principles of Zen practice, she offers stories and insights that illuminate how to nourish and reap a healing bounty of connection, joy, and compassion. Examples include how to:  
  • Relate to a late loved one as a “personal Buddha” who supports you  
  • Create a home altar to serve as a safe space to be vulnerable, face intense emotions, and experience a depth of warm gratitude that melts fear and anger  
  • Engage in daily tasks with attentiveness, intention, and creativity such that they become opportunities for body-mind integration  
  • Develop family rituals to celebrate relationship and mark transition  
  • Approach illness and grief with a purposeful sense of connection to life-and-death in its wholeness  

  • Like Marie Kondo's Shinto principles for decluttering, Paula Arai uses rituals influenced by Japanese Zen for personal and relational nourishment and spiritual healing.
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      • Library Journal

        June 10, 2024

        Building upon the experience of living and training in nunneries in Japan, Arai (women's and Buddhist studies, Inst. of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley, CA; Bringing Zen Home) introduces simple tips and rituals to bring more Zen and cultivate more peace. Through questions at the start of each chapter, followed by anecdotes and teachings, readers are guided along a journey toward bringing more Zen rituals into their life. While some strategies require a bit more preparation--making your home a refuge by creating an altar that honors your ancestors and invites them into your everyday life, for example--most draw upon daily activities readers are likely already doing, for instance, connecting with one's environment through mindful cleaning, or using cooking as vehicle for compassion, by recognizing the hands that touched the food before you. There are rituals for seemingly mundane tasks (which are actually opportunities), as well as for the complicated and challenging aspects of life such as aging and caretaking, grieving, and accepting reality in painful circumstances. VERDICT Opportunities for ritual are plentiful. Arai's encouragement to make these rituals a part of everyday life opens the way for mindfulness and true healing.--Whitney Bates-Gomez

        Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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    • English

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