Book

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The Beginner's Guide to Insight Meditation
The Beginner’s Guide to Insight Meditation

Arinna Weisman and Jean Smith combine clear explanations of the Buddha’s teachings on freedom and happiness with their personal stories highlighting some of the challenges and insights of practice. THE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO INSIGHT MEDITATION offers advice about going on retreat and help in choosing a teacher and a sangha (practice community), as well as suggestions for further reading and information on various Insight Meditation or Vipassana centers and resources. Here is an enormously practical book that covers every aspect of the teachings a beginner needs in order to get started.”

“A clear and simple book for beginning Buddhist practice”
Jack Konfield, author of A Path With Heart

“How wonderful to have such a warm and encouraging tone wrapped around so much helpful, straightforward information. This is the concise version of Everything You Wanted to Know…..(at least to begin) without ever being pedantic or boring. It simplifies and demystifies meditation but never trivializes it.”
Sylvia Boorstein, author of Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There.

“The Beginner’s Guide to Insight Meditation moves rhythmically through the terrain of Theravada Buddhism with clear topical teaching, good practice guidance and historical perspective.”

“Concise, digestible chapters rest on an elegantly expressed architecture of the essential teachings of the Buddha, creating an invitation, not just a “view” of his teaching prescription for liberation.”

With graceful clarity Weisman and Smith describe practice models both within an intensive retreat container as well as in the householder’s setting. They also offer the reader inclusive, creative adaptations of Dharma to ethnic, gender and sexual diversity, bridging relevant contemporary concerns with the Buddha’s classical blueprint for freedom.”

“An inspiring homily begins each chapter drawing the reader into the fluid teachings that follow. The book is a beautiful mosaic of the Buddha’s good Dharma.”
Steven Smith is a Guiding Teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the Kyaswa Valley Retreat Center in Burma and Vipassana Hawai’i. He is a founder of the MettaDana Project, a health and education project in Sagaing Hills, Upper Burma.