Customer Reviews

Chasing Elephants : Healing Psychologically With Buddhist Wisdom

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Diane Shainberg draws upon her experiences as a practicing psychotherapist and a Zen Buddhist priest-teacher to integrate the practice of western psychological healing with Buddhist spiritual precepts in Chasing Elephants: Healing Psychologically With Buddhist Wisdom. Shainberg aptly demonstrates that rather than searching for health through external solutions, we can look to our own internal potentials for healing and transformation. A very welcome and highly recommended addition to both Buddhist studies and psychology oriented self-help reading lists for the non-specialist general reader, Chasing Elephants offers a series of specific practices for psychological healing to initiate and be maintained.

Written with grace and wisdom, this book points the way to a new, more powerfully liberating form of psychotherapy. Many people who enter therapy reach a limit beyond which the insights gained from talking do not substantively transform their lives. Many people who practice a spiritual discipline find that interpersonal problems can be as difficult for them as for anyone else. This book provides concrete hope for all of them, and everyone else.

The book describes the root of human suffering and provides a remedy for suffering. By rigidly acting according to our ideas of who we are, and how the world should be, we cut ourselves off from our lived experience. Our lives pass us by without our noticing what is actually going on, moment to moment. Dr. Shainberg believes the way back to our lives is through our bodily sensations. Through personal stories, case histories and detailed instruction she provides an eloquent message of hope: all that you need to heal lies within and can be accessed with the proper help.

The structure of the book is like a symphony. Early themes, some borrowed from other sources and some original to the atuhor, are repeated throughout, and each time their motifs appear we hear them differently, and more profoundly.

I recommend it to anyone interested in learning how to live with less suffering.

This book is part poetry, part case studies, part how-to. Everybody tells you to accept your feelings, but almost nobody tells you how. This book tells you how and gives you the experience of healing when you do. Then it helps you to help others do the same in a healer/client situation.

I have just completed four years of healing school and have recommended this book as required reading to the school and anyone who intends to have anything to do with clients. Whether you are simply massaging someone or talking to them, the minute you agree to be in relationship, there is a psychotherapeutic aspect, and I think it is crucial that all healers be educated. This book has educated me. Doing Dr. Shainberg's exercises on myself, I have experienced the melting and shifting that takes place when I fully allow feelings, and I have begun helping others to have this experience as well.