Deep Listening: A Healing Practice to Calm Your Body, Clear Your Mind, and Open Your Heart

by Jillian Pransky, Jessica Wolf

Overview

Take your mindfulness practice to a new healing level with guided meditations, journaling prompts, and restorative yoga poses.

World-renowned restorative yoga teacher Jillian Pransky came to the practice of yoga to heal herself. For much of her life, she subscribed to a relentless work hard/play hard mentality, burying parts of herself beneath the pursuit of busy-ness and accomplishment. It wasn’t until a devastating personal loss and health crisis thrust her into suffocating anxiety that she stopped racing around. As she began to pause and examine her actions and emotions, she found herself able to unlock deeply seated tension in her mind and body. Since then, Pransky has been devoted to studying and teaching mindfulness practices, deep relaxation, and compassionate listening.

In Deep Listening, Pransky presents her signature Calm Body, Clear Mind, Open Heart program—a 10-step journey of self-exploration that she’s taught around the world. Derived from the techniques that healed her, the practice of Deep Listening invites you to pay close attention to your body, mind, and heart. You’re taught how to tune inward and relax into a state of openness, ease, and clarity. This is the new frontier in integrative wellness—mindfulness designed for healing.

Pransky doesn’t ask you to “be your best self,” or “do more!” She asks you to “be here” and “do less.” She guides you gently through the stages of Deep Listening, from being present and noticing your tension to welcoming what you discover with softness and compassion. She integrates tools like guided meditations, journaling prompts, and restorative yoga poses to help you regard yourself with kindness and curiosity. Immersing yourself in the practice of Deep Listening will allow you to nurture your own well-being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623368562
Publisher:	Harmony/Rodale
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jillian Pransky has taught mindfulness, yoga, and meditation for over 20 years. She serves as the Director of the Restorative Therapeutic Yoga Teacher Training for YogaWorks, and a guest teacher at many renowned holistic learning centers including Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health and the Omega Institute, Mohonk Mountain House, and Blue Spirit Retreat Center. Pransky lives in New Jersey with her husband, son, and their beloved Muppet-like dog, Sunday.

Jessica Wolf is a writer and editor of creative nonfiction. She writes humor and essays on health, wellness, and parenting. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Huffington Post, and various blogs and literary magazines. She is also the editor of the cooking memoir Sweet Survival: Tales of Cooking and Coping by Laura Zinn Fromm.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Deep Listening"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jillian Pransky.
Excerpted by permission of Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Welcome 10

Chapter 2 Let Yourself Land 27

Chapter 3 Being Here 49

Chapter 4 How We Hold 75

Chapter 5 Making Space 102

Chapter 6 Listening Softly 128

Chapter 7 Listening Deeply 152

Chapter 8 Listening Bravely 180

Chapter 9 Listening Again and Again and Again 208

Chapter 10 A Deep Listening Practice: Putting It All Together 232

How to Prepare for Your Practice 263

Acknowledgments 268

Index 274

Editorial Reviews

Accessible, profound, and clear, the wisdom of Deep Listening grants us a chance to greet our habitual stress with new eyes of kindness and compassion. Through concise, consistent, and cumulative practices, Jillian provides us with the context to live more openheartedly and transform our ways of seeing and being.”
—Elena Brower, author of Art of Attention and Practice You

“Jillian has a way of being with you through the pages of this book so that you immediately trust her as if she were a tried and true friend. She wants you to reap the benefits of an art form that she is passionate about. Her detail to setting up yoga poses creates a depth of relaxation that few have touched, and her honesty will open up your own heart. Her intention is to get us to listen deeply, which is exactly what the world needs now. She is successful in that goal.”
—Colleen Saidman Yee, author of Yoga for Life

“Deep Listening by Jillian Pransky is the fruit of her own deep inner listening and is her gift to those who have ears to hear. Literally, each page is filled with practical, sage advice gleaned from many years of practice, many years of deep listening, and the wisdom accrued from a life well-lived.”
—Erich Schiffmann, author of Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness

“Deep Listening blends essential aspects of the vast wisdom traditions of yoga and Buddhism that will benefit yoga enthusiasts and meditators alike. Step by step, Jillian offers a powerful and wonderfully crafted program that brings us deeply into our own sense of wholeness and helps us inhabit an integrated and heart-centered practice.”
—Ethan Nichtern, author of Dharma of the Princess Bride and The Road Home

“Deep Listening inspires mindfulness even when it’s hard to sit still. It teaches how to be alone without zoning out and without seeking to escape. With the same loving, down-to-earth wisdom she brings to her classes, Jillian Pransky helps you access a sense of well-being. This book is a delight to work with, essential reading and practice for everyone who needs to slow down and relax—that is, for pretty much everyone in our hectic world.”
—Emily Barton, author of The Book of Esther and Brookland

“With Deep Listening, Jillian Pransky invites us to join her in letting go of tightly held beliefs, identities, and muscles so that we might discover how it feels to be comfortable in our own skin, grounded, and content with ourselves.”
—Kaitlin Quistgaard, editor at large for Mindful and former editor-in-chief of Yoga Journal

“In her book, Deep Listening, Jillian Pransky teaches us how to inhabit our bodily experience rather than be mere spectators to it. She invites readers to attend to patterns of thinking, moving, feeling and even breathing as pathways to change the possibilities the world holds for us by changing our potentialities. Her book opens the door for us to begin to grow and change.”
—Ruella Frank, Ph.D., founder and director of the Center for Somatic Studies, and author of Body of Awareness: A Somatic and Developmental Approach to Psychotherapy

“This sweet book is the reminder, and nudge, we all need in these anxious times. It is at once a sweet, intimate memoir, a testimony to the potency of softness rather than the knee-jerk tendency to push-through everything, and a how to of meditations, intentions and restorative Yoga. Take your time with this one. There's no need to read it cover to cover: just open it up when you feel exhausted or lost—you’ll be glad you did.” — Annie Carpenter, International Yoga Teachers, creator of SmartFLOW Yoga.

From the Publisher