Untrain Your Parrot
And Other No-nonsense Instructions on the Path of Zen
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
This book offers exercises, instructions, jokes, stories, pithy quotes, and—most of all—encouragement to anyone interested in exploring Zen but who may find traditional presentations severe or intimidating. Hamilton writes with an easygoing, friendly style that invites readers of all backgrounds to sit down and give meditation a try. But don’t be fooled by her puns and checklists—this is serious Zen.
Drawing on three decades of experience as a Zen practitioner and teacher, Hamilton explains how to meditate and how to maintain an ongoing practice. From there, in her clear, lighthearted, and humorous style, she moves right to the heart of Zen, showing us how we could move beyond our concepts, expectations, and emotional reactivity to touch the reality of our lived experience with openness and simplicity, thereby finding freedom.
Untrain Your Parrot includes simple instructions to clarify and elucidate the basics:
• how to establish a beginning meditation practice
• how to develop physical, mental, and emotional awareness
• how to experience "open" awareness—observing one's practice while allowing for a sense of spaciousness with whatever occurs
For more information on the author, Elizabeth Hamilton, go to www.zencentersandiego.org.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This debut book by San Diego Zen teacher Hamilton boasts a quirky, appropriately Zen-ish title and a foreword from, surprisingly, the late civil rights activist Rosa Parks, with whom the author worked during Parks's later life. It offers plenty of meditation exercises with easy-to-follow directions. It thoroughly translates what can be the culturally foreign characteristics of Japanese Zen into contemporary American parlance and life situations. All these things commend the book to a beginner, but it's too often unclear and could have used more work. The diction is occasionally foggy ("both tinged with some degree of narcissistic attachment to a truncated self"). Attempts to simplify aspire to easy-to-remember lists, but these come out idiosyncratically obscure ("BBSTSBB is a palindrome composed of the first letters of seven words that beckon our awareness"). It is interesting that the center of a person's chest includes the acupuncture point Conception Vessel 17, but there is such a thing as too much information, particularly for beginners. Hamilton is very likely a good Zen teacher, funny and imaginative, but that doesn't automatically translate onto the page.
