Giving Up Without Giving Up: Meditation and Depressions

by Jim Green

Overview

A simple, intelligent guide to meditation and contemplation for those dealing with depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

Drawing on his experience of meditation within both the Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions, as well as his own times of personal loss and bewilderment, Jim Green offers us a moving account of just how this wisdom practice can accompany each of us as we make 'the gentle pilgrimage of recovery'. He offers a thorough and practical approach to our times of personal desolation, centered on the practice of meditation, showing how we can learn to treat ourselves and each other with care and compassion.

Giving Up Without Giving Up explores the possibility that we have much to learn from the desert times in our lives, when it feels as though we are losing everything, most of all any sense of who we are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472957450
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	05/07/2019
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,167,212
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jim Green has worked for many years in the field of mental health with both local and national organisations, the Open University and the BBC. He describes his decades of meditation practice as 'always learning to be a beginner'.

Table of Contents

In the dark 1

Welcome 3

Learning to begin 12

Beginning again 22

How to meditate 26

Meditation and depressions 32

Meditation: Nothing to be done 48

By any other name 53

Meditation: I will give you rest 67

Loss, grief, mourning and birdwings 73

Meditation: 'A Moment in each Day' 88

No self/no shortcuts 95

Meditation: With the leper and the wolf 110

Life is the treatment! 115

Meditation: A perpetual surprise 141

Into the desert 146

Meditation: We do not know how to pray 164

Before you die 171

Community 175

Another beginning 194

Meditation: The general dance 196

Postscript 200

Notes 205

Select bibliography 213

Recommended reading 215

Organizations and resources 217

Acknowledgements 219

Permissions 221

Editorial Reviews

Jim Green has described a new approach to the corrosive suffering of depression … His special gift is shown in connecting to the sources of healing found in literature, faith and contemplative practice. Anyone suffering from depression who reads this book will feel both understood and gently guided forward.” —Laurence Freeman, Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation

“Might “depression” be, not a cold, deterministic diagnosis, but a call to spiritual awakening, to a graced construction of self? Jim Green says it may, and presents his case persuasively.” —Erik Varden, author of The Shattering of Loneliness

“If it is true that all human griefs have their roots in our inability to sit quietly in our own company for five minutes, this spare, candid and calm introduction to meditative practice will be a life-saving gift for many living in or on the edge of the darkness that regularly overtakes us in this uncontrollable world.” —Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

From the Publisher