Blessed Relief: What Christians Can Learn from Buddhists about Suffering

A thoughtful, down-to-earth look at helpful ways to lessen human suffering.

This book takes you on a lively, sometimes light-hearted, journey through nine Buddhist practices that can bring "blessed relief" to a wide range of human suffering--and teaches you skills to reduce suffering in the long term for yourself and others.

The practices help you:

• Loosen the grip of suffering
• Engage and question limiting views, thoughts and opinions
• Deconstruct ten common assumptions
• Be present in each moment
• Survive emotional storms
• Develop peaceful communication skills
• Deepen communication with your partner
• Appreciate mortality and the preciousness of life
• Cultivate compassion

As you read the chapters and engage in each practice, you will work with your own stories of suffering--stories in which you have felt abandoned, deprived, subjugated, defective, excluded or vulnerable--and you will learn how to release yourself from suffering by investigating it with curiosity and kindness.