Present with Suffering: Being with the Things that Hurt

Description

What is the place of discontent and unhappiness in human experience and how best can we be with it? There is something about everything that makes it not quite satisfactory. Even things we really love are spoilt by not being quite enough or by going on too long. People entering psychotherapy want to feel better - more authoritative, less anxious or depressed, more whole - and although it can help, an enormous amount of difficult and painful emotions continue to arise. Even after years and years of therapy many of us feel that there is no 'happy ever after'. Bearing this reality in mind and drawing upon both psychotherapeutic and Buddhist sources, Present with Suffering, explores bereavement and our pervasive experience of emptiness. With a foreword from Henry Shukman, the authors show how through being mindfully present, kind and accepting, we may enfold what hurts us in a more spacious and meaningful way.

Nigel Wellings is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author who works within a broadly contemplative perspective. He has been engaged with the relationship between psychotherapy and Buddhism for the last forty years. He lives in Devon and is a teacher on the Bath and Bristol Mindfulness Courses and the Sharpham Barn Retreats. His previous books include Nothing To Lose: Psychotherapy, Buddhism and Living Life (with Elizabeth Wilde McCormick), Why Can't I Meditate? How To Get Your Mindfulness Practice On Track, and more recently a Buddhist handbook, Dzogchen, Who's Who & What's What in the Great Perfection. Elizabeth Wilde McCormick has worked as a psychotherapist for over forty years in both private and national health settings. She is also a teacher, trainer and writer. Her professional background is in social psychiatry, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, sensorimotor psychotherapy and cognitive analytic therapy. She has had an interest for many years in the interface between psychotherapy and mindfulness. She was, with Nigel Wellings, a director of training at The Centre for Transpersonal Psychology. She is a founder member of the Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy and currently a trustee.

"The meditations spoke to me, the authors' personal experiences moved me, and I was left in no doubt of the value of 'finding a safe way to access a helpful reflective pause'." -- Sussex Counselling and Psychotherapy News