Opening to Insight – exercises to free your mind

Awareness exercises and reflections for meditators to gain Awakening insights.

ISBN 978-1-326-06683-3 Spirituality / Mindfulness/ Buddhism

Opening to Insight – exercises to free the mind consists of seven chapters on essential steps to gaining insight, each followed by a chapter of related exercises. There’s an introductory chapter, appendices, references, and a glossary. The style is succinct rather than narrative, and the text is interspersed with pithy quotes.

It’s a handbook for any meditator or mindfulness practitioner seeking not merely a daily coping dose of mental peace but wanting to use their practice to approach spiritual Awakening. I speak from the radical vision of Mahamudra with its questioning of our concepts of self and even of time and space. Readers with a general interest in philosophy may also be attracted to its personal reflective method.

Meditation does not automatically “unstick” people, many meditators reach a plateau where daily meditation is a chore, mere pointless drudgery. My book is targeted at shaking these walls, rattling the cage, opening readers to the realisations which literally “free the mind”.

My approach is not psychology, not New Age mysticism, not academic, not even religious. It is direct and practical. There are myriad books telling you what the results of your insights ought to be, rather than saying how to find these insights in your own experience.

My invitation aims to spark readers’ enthusiasm to investigate the key aspects I’ve highlighted, so they discover meditation as a path, not an end in itself. Not so much ‘Read-me’, as ‘Try-this’. My message is that real insight is not something intellectual and unattainable, I want to inspire people that new ways of seeing are possible and the journey fascinating

The book has endorsements from a Dzogchen Lama, a Mahamudra Lama, and a Chan master. It is around a hundred pages in length. It’s available from the online bookshop at http://www.lulu.com/shop as well as Amazon (search five cram) and can be ordered from most bookshops.