New meditation book
My spouse Charlie Awbery has just published Opening Awareness: A guide to finding vividness in spacious clarity.
I’ll lead with the book’s description on Amazon:
Opening Awareness is a practical manual for a method of accurate perception, leading to passionate engagement and productive action. Opening awareness, the method, provides panoramic vision and connection with whatever is happening.
Spacious clarity, the result, reveals dynamic creative space around thinking, making previously inhibited choices available. It empowers creative, effective individuals to live and lead with courage, kindness, and grace.
As opening awareness pervades your experience, you may find:
Confidence in meaning and purpose
Courage to stay present and engaged in any situation, however unexpected or challenging
Heightened awareness of sounds, sights, sensations—your world becomes colorful, vibrant, and clear
New spontaneity and responsible autonomy in relationships: family, work, projects, and society
General contentedness punctuated by moments of irrationally exuberant joy
You may be familiar with some form of meditation, such as vipassana. This guide is for you! The book explains why the method, goals, and effects of opening awareness are different.
You may be coming to opening awareness without having meditated before. This guide is also for you! It is a detailed, practical manual with no prerequisites. It is written in plain language with no jargon.
The Amazon page has a “Read sample” button that shows enough of the beginning of the book to get a good sense of what it’s like and whether you’d want to read the rest.
I did the typesetting. Charlie said “make it look like a Shambhala book”—a publisher of conspicuously beautiful ones about Buddhism. I got it pretty close, I think. I used LaTeX, a demonic typesetting program from the dungeon dimensions. It afflicts mainly academics who are writing journal articles. LaTeX was an eccentric and probably stupid choice for producing a non-academic book—but it does produce better-looking output than anything else.
I also copyedited it. The book is Charlie’s, and almost all the writing is Charlie’s, but I tightened up the structure; and you may recognize a few of my characteristically bizarre turns of phrase.
Anyway, in the course of that, I read it approximately 716 times, and I think it’s great. Check it out!