A wonderful idea arose during a conversation with a client (as they always do). That idea is to have an online book club for just one transformative book, Jack Kornfield’s “The Wise Heart.” The book beautifully steps through the major concepts of Buddhist Psychology, that can be helpful to virtually everyone no matter what your religion. I’ve read the book a couple of times and also used it to inspire and guide my meditation classes.
Since my main work is in health and nutrition, you might be surprised that I’d choose to focus on this book instead of something about diet. Most of our health issues stem either directly from the corrosive effect of chronic stress and/or from the behaviors caused by stress – like emotional eating, binge drinking, or numbing out in other ways.
As Carl Jung said, “Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will run your life and you will call it fate.” This book guides us to understand the inner workings of our minds, cultivate peace and acceptance, and overcome even life-long issues that have been hurting us mentally and physically. It can be liberating, to put it mildly. When we have that inner peace, the constant desire to munch something, drink something, or distract ourselves dissolves and the unhealthy behaviors along with it.
So often we read something amazing, but then forget about it as soon as we put the book back on the shelf. We can better understand and integrate the knowledge when we have someone to talk it over with. My hope is that this one-time book club will inspire many people to not only read “The Wise Heart” but also digest, apply, and truly benefit from it.
The book club will begin the Sunday February 9th – so we can start getting our hearts wiser before Valentine’s Day. Zoom meetings will be Sundays 7:30-8:30pm. We’ll plan to go over one chapter per week so it’s not stressful and totally do-able. There are 24 chapters, so this will take about 6 months. If I need to cancel a meeting, we’ll just review two chapters the following week, unless someone else is able to moderate the discussion that week. There’s no obligation to come to all of the meetings, but we hope you’ll come to as many as you can. And also, participation in this is free. You just need to buy your own book.
I’ve never done anything like this before and am excited to see how it goes!
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