Forward to Emotional Healing through Mindfulness Meditation

It's easy to become discouraged when we consider the state of the world, in which violence, injustice, terrorism, and national myopia seem more than ever in ascendance.  Yet I find myself strangely optimistic about our global prospects.  Below the present surface turbulence, I detect a deep and unprecedented historical movement as yet largely unheralded in the mainstream media.  The two most powerful discoveries of all time--the scientific method of the West and the meditative technology of the East--have finally met and are beginning to interact vigorously.  It is my belief that they will mate, giving birth to a generation of strange and powerful tools for the benefaction (and perhaps even salvation) of this world.

The book you have before you has arisen from the initial courtship of these two forces.  It tells the stories of eight women who overcame enormous challenges.  Although the nature of their challenges differed, the basic procedure that allowed them to transmute emotional pain into life energy was the same--a hybrid of Western psychotherapy potentiated with Buddhist mindfulness exercises.  By reading their stories you will get a tangible sense of what it means to literally escape into pain, as opposed to escaping from it--a truly remarkable notion.

Dr. Barbara Fishman, the author of this book, has been studying Mindfulness Meditation with me for more than fifteen years.  Her practice is rigorous and deep.  She is part of a growing cadre of psychotherapists who are experimenting with bringing Buddhist mindfulness techniques into the practice of psychotherapy.  This work, I believe, represents the first eddy of a tide that will mold the twenty-first century.

-- Shinzen Young