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(More customer reviews)"It takes courage to look deeply into oneself," Cheri Huber writes in the Introduction to this book. She has been practicing Zen meditation for nearly thirty years. This book is the insightful culmination of both her own experience on the cushion, and the results of a 12-week course she taught on suffering. As children we experienced life by living in each moment. As adults we have been conditioned to suffer: "we want what we don't get, aren't satisfied with what we do get, are separated from those or that which we love, and are forced to endure those and that which we do not love," Huber writes. "We suffer when we resist life. We suffer when we believe life should be different. We suffer when we think there is something wrong with life that needs to be changed or fixed." The "clamor of modern life and the endless chatter in our heads" (p. 83) restrict our ability to see beyond our conditioned suffering and return to our childlike sense of wonder in everything we experience.
"It took us a while to get trained in these faulty belief systems," Huber writes, "and it will take us a while to unhook ourselves. We sit still, we see the conditioning and the sabotage for what it is, and we find the courage not to go back to old, familiar, hurtful ways" (p. 16). These "automatic, conditioned, karmic patterns" steal our time, our joy, our good feeling toward ourselves. They steal our life (p. 21). The "three keys" to ending our suffering involve paying attention to everything (pp. 3-54), believing nothing (pp. 57-92), and not taking anything personally (pp. 95-131).
For anyone interested in looking deeply into the nature of suffering and learning how to return to the present moment, Huber's recommended book offers "helpful awareness, helpful insight, helpful friend" (p. 101).
G. Merritt
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Suffering Is Optional: Three Keys to Freedom and Joy centers around three basic aspects of Zen practice: pay attention, believe nothing, and don’t take anything personally.As ending suffering requires that one sees how suffering happens, the book urges readers to be willing to be quiet and pay attention to the process of suffering in effort to see each moment as an opportunity to step beyond illusion into freedom. It also argues that examining beliefs, abandoning them, and returning attention to the present is essential to ending suffering, as is living in the awareness that nothing in the universe is personal.
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