Through time-tested teachings and exercises, The Meditator's Dilemma shows you how to deepen your meditation practice while cultivating ease and delight for both beginners and longtime practitioners.

When practiced regularly, meditation naturally deepens self-awareness and leads to spiritual transformation. In our hyper, instant-gratification culture, however, most people miss out on those powerful outcomes because it's hard to commit to a longterm practice. Despite the increasing popularity of mindfulness and its documented mental health benefits, the silent majority of meditators struggle to maintain a regular practice. In fact, research indicates that more than fifty percent of meditators give up on the practice. This is the elephant in the meditation room.

The Meditator's Dilemma, written by a psychologist with forty years' experience practicing and teaching meditation, confronts this problem and its causes and provides specific, accessible techniques and exercises that greatly enhance everyday meditation practice. Bill Morgan's teachings and guided meditation exercises are designed to generate the all-too-missing delight and enjoyment in meditation.

The concept of the "holding environment," central to positive outcome in psychotherapy, is the raison d'etre for these techniques. In psychotherapy, the holding environment comprises the trusting, secure, empathic milieu created by the caring therapist. An indirect benefit of these techniques is the capacity to create a nurturing safe space in any relational context: with a mentor, in a conversation with a dear friend, or in a beautiful natural setting. When we are in a holding environment, we feel alive, connected, and relaxed. The Meditator's Dilemma teaches Western meditators to cultivate an internal holding environment that results in an attitude of relaxed curiosity and exploration toward their meditation practice, leading to greater success and staying power.

The Jewish practice of bar mitzvah dates back to the twelfth century, but this ancient cultural ritual has changed radically since then, evolving with the times and adapting to local conditions. For many Jewish-American families, a child's bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah is both a major social event and a symbolic means of asserting the family's ongoing connection to the core values of Judaism. Coming of Age in Jewish America takes an inside look at bar and bat mitzvahs in the twenty-first century, examining how the practices have continued to morph and exploring how they serve as a sometimes shaky bridge between the values of contemporary American culture and Judaic tradition. Interviewing over 200 individuals involved in bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, from family members to religious educators to rabbis, Patricia Keer Munro presents a candid portrait of the conflicts that often emerge and the negotiations that ensue. In the course of her study, she charts how this ritual is rife with contradictions; it is a private family event and a public community activity, and for the child, it is both an educational process and a high-stakes performance. Through detailed observations of Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, and independent congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Munro draws intriguing, broad-reaching conclusions about both the current state and likely future of American Judaism. In the process, she shows not only how American Jews have forged a unique set of bar and bat mitzvah practices, but also how these rituals continue to shape a distinctive Jewish-American identity.

Prayer: Christian and Muslim Perspectives is a rich collection of essays, scriptural texts, and personal reflections featuring leading scholars analyzing the meaning and function of prayer within their traditions. Drawn from the 2011 Building Bridges seminar in Doha, Qatar, the essays in this volume explore the devotional practices of each tradition and how these practices are taught and learned. Relevant texts are included, with commentary, as are personal reflections on prayer by each of the seminar participants. The volume also contains a Christian reflection on Islamic prayer and a Muslim reflection on Christian prayer. An extensive account of the informal conversations at the seminar conveys a vivid sense of the lively, penetrating, but respectful dialogue that took place.

An accessible and engaging treatment of the experience of Jewish summer camps. This book tells the story of how Jewish camps have emerged as creators of positive spiritual experiences for Jewish youth in North America. When Jewish camps began at the dawn of the twentieth century, their leaders had little interest in creating Jewish spiritual experiences for their campers. Yet over the course of the past century, Jewish camps have gradually moved into providing primal Jewish experiences that diverse campers can enjoy, parents appreciate, and alumni fondly recall. Making Shabbat Real explores how Shabbat at camp became the focal point for these primal Jewish experiences, providing an interesting perspective on changing approaches to Jewish education and identity in North America.

Funerals are among the most important life events in Western society, and fashioning a personalized ceremony for yourself or for a loved one is often the most meaningful way to celebrate the life of the deceased. For those wanting non-religious or secular funeral ceremonies, this step-by-step guide begins by identifying what you want from the funeral and showing how you can make it happen. With sections on society's views of mortality, our need for rituals and crafting the actual ceremony, this guide provides the tools and philosophy to understand, plan and tailor a funeral for individuals. Includes all the tools necessary for the creation of a ceremony, such as a Ritual Profiles, checklists, and many other handy resources.

Battling the Buddha of Love is a work of advocacy anthropology that explores the controversial plans and practices of the Maitreya Project, a transnational Buddhist organization, as it sought to build the "world's tallest statue" as a multi-million-dollar "gift" to India. Hoping to forcibly acquire 750 acres of occupied land for the statue park in the Kushinagar area of Uttar Pradesh, the Buddhist statue planners ran into obstacle after obstacle, including a full-scale grassroots resistance movement of Indian farmers working to "Save the Land." Falcone sheds light on the aspirations, values, and practices of both the Buddhists who worked to construct the statue, as well as the Indian farmer-activists who tirelessly protested against the Maitreya Project. Because the majority of the supporters of the Maitreya Project statue are converts to Tibetan Buddhism, individuals Falcone terms "non-heritage" practitioners, she focuses on the spectacular collision of cultural values between small agriculturalists in rural India and transnational Buddhists hailing from Portland to Pretoria. She asks how could a transnational Buddhist organization committed to compassionate practice blithely create so much suffering for impoverished rural Indians. Falcone depicts the cultural logics at work on both sides of the controversy, and through her examination of these logics she reveals the divergent, competing visions of Kushinagar's potential futures. Battling the Buddha of Love traces power, faith, and hope through the axes of globalization, transnational religion, and rural grassroots activism in South Asia, showing the unintended local consequences of an international spiritual development project.

In this volume, Bible Studies scholar Yitzhak (Itzik) Peleg offers an educational, values-based approach to the cycle of Jewish holidays-festivals and holy days-as found in the Jewish calendar. These special days play a dual role: they reflect a sense of identity with, and belonging to, the Jewish people, while simultaneously shaping that identity and sense of belonging. The biblical command "And you shall tell your son" (Exodus 13:8) is meant to ensure that children will become familiar with the history of their people via the experience of celebrating the holidays. It is the author's claim, however, that this command must be preceded by another educational command: "And you shall listen to your son and your daughter." The book examines the various Jewish holidays and ways in which they are celebrated, while focusing on three general topics: identity, belonging, memory. Throughout the generations, observance of the holidays has developed and changed, from time to time and place to place. These changes have enabled generations of Jews, in their various communities, to define their own Jewish identity and sense of belonging.

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self- expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

The Sa'dan Toraja are an ethnic group who live primarily on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. This rigorous academic study by noted expert Michaela Budiman examines the deep cultural shifts among the Toraja during the last century through the lens of their most important ritual-- funerals. This book specifically addresses the conversion of the Toraja from their indigenous religion, Aluk Todolo, to Christianity and how this shift is reflected in their contemporary funeral practices and understanding of both death and grief.

[from Chief Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks] Rabbi Cohen writes within a great tradition, bringing together Torah and chokmah, Jewish wisdom and the broad panoply of human knowledge, and finding in their interplay a never-ending source of deepened understanding. He is both sage and man of faith, a lucid teacher and a source of inspiration, and no one will read this work without discovering that the festival they thought they knew so well has a depth and history that are enthralling. --- [from The Jewish Week] .encyclopedic in breadth, features queries that lead the reader through preparation for the holiday, its historical background, symbolism of the seder ritual, commentary on the Haggadah, special festival services in synagogue, and Pesach customs from around the world. As Rabbi Cohen, the author of several books who leads the largest Orthodox congregation in Great Britain believes , ""Questions are of the very essence of the spirit of this festival.

In the first part of the twentieth century, Korean Buddhists, despite living under colonial rule, reconfigured sacred objects, festivals, urban temples, propagation-and even their own identities-to modernize and elevate Korean Buddhism. By focusing on six case studies, this book highlights the centrality of transnational relationships in the transformation of colonial Korean Buddhism. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim examines how Korean, Japanese, and other Buddhists operating in colonial Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Manchuria, and beyond participated in and were significantly influenced by transnational forces, even as Buddhists of Korea and other parts of Asia were motivated by nationalist and sectarian interests. More broadly, the cases explored in the The Korean Buddhist Empire reveal that, while Japanese Buddhism exerted the most influence, Korean Buddhism was (as Japanese Buddhism was itself) deeply influenced by developments in China, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Europe, and the United States, as well as by Christianity.

At once historically and theoretically informed, these essays invite the reader to think of religion dynamically, reconsidering American religious history in terms of practices that are linked to specific social contexts. The point of departure is the concept of "lived religion." Discussing such topics as gift exchange, cremation, hymn-singing, and women's spirituality, a group of leading sociologists and historians of religion explore the many facets of how people carry out their religious beliefs on a daily basis. As David Hall notes in his introduction, a history of practices "encompasses the tensions, the ongoing struggle of definition, that are constituted within every religious tradition and that are always present in how people choose to act. Practice thus suggests that any synthesis is provisional."

The volume opens with two essays by Robert Orsi and Daniele Hervieu-Leger that offer an overview of the rapidly growing study of lived religion, with Hervieu-Leger using the Catholic charismatic renewal movement in France as a window through which to explore the coexistence of regulation and spontaneity within religious practice. Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall examine family strategies and church membership in early New England. Leigh Eric Schmidt looks at the complex meanings of gift-giving in America. Stephen Prothero writes about the cremation movement in the late nineteenth century. In an essay on the narrative structure of Mrs. Cowman's "Streams in the Desert," Cheryl Forbes considers the devotional lives of everyday women. Michael McNally uses the practice of hymn-singing among the Ojibwa to reexamine the categories of native and Christian religion. In essays centering on domestic life, Rebecca Kneale Gould investigates modern homesteading as lived religion while R. Marie Griffith treats home-oriented spirituality in the Women's Aglow Fellowship. In "Golden- Rule Christianity," Nancy Ammerman talks about lived religion in the American mainstream."