Sitting in stillness, the practice of meditation, and the cultivation of awareness are commonly thought to be the preserves of Hindus and Buddhists. Martin Laird shows that the Christian tradition of contemplation has its own refined teachings on using a prayer word to focus the mind, working with the breath to cultivate stillness, and the practice of inner vigilance or awareness. But this book is not a mere historical survey of these teachings. In Into the Silent Land, we see the ancient wisdom of both the Christian East and West brought sharply to bear on the modern-day longing for radical openness to God in the depths of the heart.

Laird's book is not like the many presentations for beginners. While useful for those just starting out, this book serves especially as a guide for those who desire to journey yet deeper into the silence of God. The heart of the book focuses on negotiating key moments of struggle on the contemplative path, when the whirlwind of distractions or the brick wall of boredom makes it difficult to continue. Laird shows that these inner struggles, even wounds, that any person of prayer must face, are like riddles, trying to draw out of us our own inner silence. Ultimately Laird shows how the wounds we loathe become vehicles of the healing silence we seek, beyond technique and achievement.
Throughout the language is fresh, direct, and focused on real-life examples of people whose lives are incomparably enriched by the practice of contemplation.

Este libro de devocionales ayudará y motivará al lector a enfocar su lectura diaria en Dios y Su Palabra.

Un año con Dios presenta un devocional para cada día del año. Cada uno de estos devocionales busca que el lector profundice en su relación con Dios y aplique el conocimiento, los valores y la sabiduría que se encuentran en la Biblia a la vida diaria.
Cuenta con muchas ilustraciones, gran colorido con toque femenino y contenido inspiracional en cada uno de los 365 devocionales diarios y lecturas bíblicas.

A Year With God

This book of devotions will help and motivate readers to focus their devotional time on God and His Word.

One Year With God, presents a devotion for each day of the year, and each one seeks to deepen the reader's relationship with God by applying the knowledge, values, and wisdom found in the Bible to daily life.
Highly illustrated, colorful cover with feminine appeal, and inspirational devotional content in 365 daily devotionals and scripture readings.

Speaking thoughtfully to those recovering from substance abuse and addiction, God Grant Me offers a daily dose of strength and wisdom with each of its meditations. The journey of recovery is inspired by insight, prayer, and continuous renewal.

After years of reflection on the themes they presented in their first collection of readings, with this follow-up the authors of the bestselling meditation book Keep It Simple build upon incorporating Twelve Step practices into their daily lives. These readings present the recovery wisdom of Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and other Twelve Step programs, supporting readers in the process of developing a regular therapeutic practice of mindfulness, community, and inspiration. Overcoming addiction requires connecting with the things that define a life of health and wellness--introspection, spirituality, daily support, and fellowship. God Grant Me is a dependable companion that gives guidance and inspiration for new beginnings and a sustained sober life.

Written by addiction treatment center staff members from across the country, these daily meditations encourage, comfort, and challenge helpers to understand others and themselves.

Written by counselors for counselors, Help for Helpers is the only meditation book of its kind. As relevant and popular today as it was when it was first published more than 25 years ago, this book offers personal reflections and guidance to those who help addicts recover. Nearly 200 topics cover the gamut of challenges counselors commonly face, from ways to avoid burnout and fatigue to how to achieve balance and serenity in one's life.

As poet, prophet, and priest, Thurman builds upon a powerful legacy of ancestral hope: belief in a liberating God who can always be found 'in and among the struggling.'
--Yolanda Pierce

A universal beacon of hope and endurance for people of all faiths seeking to meet the challenges, uncertainties, and joys of life

Howard Thurman's Meditations of the Heart is a beautiful collection of over 150 prayers, poems, and meditations on prayer, community, and the joys and rituals of life by one of our greatest spiritual leaders. Thurman, a spiritualist and mystic, was renowned for the quiet beauty of his reflections on humanity and our relationship with God.

In a new foreword, Yolanda Pierce, dean of Howard University's School of Divinity, calls attention to the justice-centered theological framework of Thurman's words. Pierce notes how Thurman brings to light an image of God who can always be found in and among the struggling, both in times of weariness and in strength.

First written for and shared with his congregation of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, California, these meditations sustain, elevate, and inspire. They are a universal beacon of hope and endurance for people of all faiths seeking to meet the challenges, uncertainties, and joys of everyday life with a renewed and liberating faith.

This translation, with its commentary, is a manual for making, directing, or studying the Spiritual Exercises. It is the first English version of the Exercises to include both the traditional section numbers and the new, internationally agreed upon verse numbers.

In this book Paramahansa Yogananda offers prayers and affirmations that beginners and experienced meditators alike can use to awaken the boundless joy, peace, and inner freedom of the soul.

Includes introductory instructions on how to meditate. An encouraging guide that teaches us through our own experience how to spiritually enrich our everyday life.

The most powerful spiritual healer, fixer, teacher on the planet. --Oprah Winfrey

In an updated and expanded 25th anniversary edition, the beloved purple book Acts of Faith guides people of color with daily encouragement, comfort, and enlightenment.

For over a quarter of a century, millions have turned to bestselling author Iyanla Vanzant's Acts of Faith for insightful and deeply sensitive inspiration that recognizes and explores the unique pressures on people of color today. Each day of the year carries a unique motivational quote or message along with it, as well as a short essay to assist in reflection and wisdom. These messages are pulled from a great variety of spiritual practices and teachings, to appeal to a wide range of faiths and disciplines. Acts of Faith is an invaluable and enduring resource for people of color in search of support as they journey on their unique paths.

This collection of daily contemplative devotions inspires and lifts the spirit -- a brief daily encounter walking and resting in the arms of the Father.
A calming tranquil gem, this small book offers a single Scripture upon which to meditate each day, and words of infinite wisdom and love that seem to flow from the Father's heart.

Talking and listening. Speaking and hearing. These are the fundamental prerequisites for conversation.
Yet with most of us, our relation with our heavenly Father consists mostly of our speaking.
Our oldest traditions, however, tell us that we are invited to hear as well as to speak.
If any one hears my voice, and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me...
He who has an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. (Revelation 3:20b, 22) From the Introduction, Echoes of Eternity: Listening to the Father Volume 1
In Echoes of Eternity Volume I, Chaplain Hal Helms provides a maturity in his words as he offers perspective on each daily Bible Verse. These brief meditations were gathered by his wife from his faithful daily devotional practice. They have the power to fuel your own quiet moments. Helms has a tender manner of redirecting us back to our path of following Jesus.

Meditations by Howard Thurman on timeless religious themes: A Sense of History, A Sense of Self, A Sense of Presence, and For the Quiet.Originally written for the bulletin at the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco.

A repackaged edition of Lewis's classic reading collection--reminiscent of the bestselling A Year with C. S. Lewis--featuring 365 selections from his writings that explore our connection to God.

C. S. Lewis, author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics, considers humankind's spiritual journey in this collection of wise, meditative excerpts and writings.

In these daily reflections, the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, and Christian apologist, explores a range of connected themes, including the serious business of heaven, Nearness to God, Heaven and Sexuality, and Two Kinds of Good and Bad.

God's purpose for you is to experience His presence.

A deep connection with God is not only possible, but vital, to a vibrant life. And this powerful, 40-day devotional will help you enjoy the deeper life with God that you long for.

Through the pages of Closer to God, written by Bible teacher Jeannie Cunnion, you will be equipped to:

- remove the barriers to experiencing God in your daily life
- enjoy the life-altering benefits of His tangible presence, or withness
- live Spirit-strong in a profoundly new way

If you desire to feel God's soul-refreshing presence and hear Him speaking in your everyday life, this book is for you.

Join Jeannie in discovering the profound difference God's empowering presence makes, and how we can enjoy more of it, starting today.

One of the world's great meditation teachers offers thirty-four guided exercises that will bring both beginning and experienced practitioners into closer touch with their bodies, their inner selves, their families, and the world. Compassionate and wise, Thich Nhat Hanh's healing words help us acknowledge and dissolve anger and separation by illuminating the way toward the miracle of mindfulness.

Why is so much of our existence so ordinary? Why this immense tract of stuff in our lives that seems to have no lofty purpose? In ninety short devotional chapters, Mike Mason meditates on this question, concluding that in fact everydayness, to the extent we embrace it, is a source of deep consolation. Far from being meaningless, the humdrum and the commonplace may actually hold the secret of life. Same Old, Same New-beautifully and provocatively written and full of arresting insights-will take your old tired world, stand it on end, and spin it like a top.

Mike Mason straddles two worlds, the quotidian and the eternal. Of course those two worlds aren't separate worlds at all-and the reality of that intermingling, that co-existence of the mundane and the mystical, is perhaps the recurrent theme of Mason's writing. Ron Reed, Founding Artistic Director of Pacific Theatre

Daily meditations taken from the works of an acclaimed novelist, essayist, and preacher who has articulated what he sees with a freshness and clarity and energy that hails our stultified imaginations.

This is the 20th anniversary edition of Continuum's best-selling spiritual classic, which has sold over half a million in the English language and has appeared in 10 foreign-language editions (Croatian, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesia, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Portuguese). The new edition consists of a substantial new preface, an expanded glossary, some changes in terminology, and a reordering of several chapters.

The practice of contemplation is one of the great spiritual arts, writes Martin Laird in A Sunlit Absence. Not a technique but a skill, it harnesses the winds of grace that lead us out into the liberating sea of silence.
In this companion volume to his bestselling Into the Silent Land, Laird focuses on a quality often overlooked by books on Christian meditation: a vast and flowing spaciousness that embraces both silence and sound, and transcends all subject/object dualisms. Drawing on the wisdom of great contemplatives from St. Augustine and St. Teresa of Avila to St. Hesychios, Simone Weil, and many others, Laird shows how we can uncover the deeper levels of awareness that rest within us like buried treasure waiting to be found. The key insight of the book is that as our practice matures, so will our experience of life's ordeals, sorrows, and joys expand into generous, receptive maturity. We learn to see whatever difficulties we experience in meditation--boredom, lethargy, arrogance, depression, grief, anxiety--not as obstacles to be overcome but as opportunities to practice surrender to what is. With clarity and grace Laird shows how we can move away from identifying with our turbulent, ever-changing thoughts and emotions to the cultivation of a sunlit absence--the luminous awareness in which God's presence can most profoundly be felt.
Addressed to both beginners and intermediates on the pathless path of still prayer, A Sunlit Absence offers wise guidance on the specifics of contemplative practice as well as an inspiring vision of the purpose of such practice and the central role it can play in our spiritual lives.

Classic teachings on the art of living by the great Roman emperor, statesman, and general.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius originally wrote the meditations collected here in the form of a personal journal during his military campaigns in the second century. In them, he reflects with great beauty and simplicity upon the Stoic virtues that lead to a happy life: self-mastery, moral strength, duty to oneself and others, detachment, and acceptance of the divine order and the way of Nature. His words of wisdom and courage continue to inspire all who struggle to live a meaningful and productive life in a troubled age.

This book is part of the Shambhala Pocket Library series.

The Shambhala Pocket Library is a collection of short, portable teachings from notable figures across religious traditions and classic texts. The covers in this series are rendered by Colorado artist Robert Spellman. The books in this collection distill the wisdom and heart of the work Shambhala Publications has published over 50 years into a compact format that is collectible, reader-friendly, and applicable to everyday life.