Meditation Secrets for Women: Discovering Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace (Paperback)

~ (Author), (Author) "Although meditating is often thought of as going beyond sensory experience, it is really a journey through the full range of the senses..." (more)
Key Phrases: skill circle, inner theater, loving consciousness, Great Mother, New Age, Floating Hands (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"The field of meditation has been not just a man's world but a monk's world," write Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche, Ph.D., who assert that the techniques that worked for "reclusive and celibate males" need updating for contemporary women. In Meditation Secrets for Women, they introduce a refreshingly modern, female-oriented approach to meditation that encourages "luxuriating in the sensory world, resting in the simplicity of your own being, enjoying yourself shamelessly."

Meditation fills a need that women crave: to carve out time for themselves "to rest, to restore, to settle in." Rather than impose rules and strict discipline, however, the authors encourage women to rejuvenate themselves, open up, and affirm their "womanness" through meditation.

Meditation Secrets for Women presents 12 "secrets" in 12 chapters. Each secret is a theme, such as "celebrate your senses," "claim your inner authority," "ride your rhythms," or "love your body." Each chapter starts with a poem and includes explorations (questions for you to ponder), skill circle (practical tips for skill building), meditations, and reflections. This is a nurturing book, filled with acceptance, warmth, and encouragement. If you've tried to meditate but found it too restrictive, dull, or difficult, this book will give you a different, distinctly womanly, approach.

The authors are a married couple who have been teaching meditation to women for 50 combined years. Maurine is also a dancer and healing practitioner. Roche is the author of Meditation Made Easy. --Joan Price

From Publishers Weekly

In this powerful book, the husband-wife team of Maurine and Roche explore the particular needs women have in meditation. They point out that most ancient meditation texts were meant for cloistered male monks living a celibate life, with meditation techniques used to "eradicate passion, emotion, and sexuality." Maurine and Roche find that women require precisely the opposite approach: an ability to use meditation to embrace their psyches including passion, emotion and sexuality. Maurine (who comes from an eclectic background of Transcendental Meditation, Zen, esoteric yoga, dance and Tibetan Buddhism) and Roche (who teaches Himalayan meditation and is the author of Meditation Made Easy) employ the various components of their backgrounds to argue that women should custom-tailor their meditation practice to suit their individual needs and circumstances. With tips, exercises, meditations, reflections and other women's stories, Maurine and Roche share enthusiastically and thoroughly what they have found works for women, leaving the dry legalisms behind. If one's mind rambles, they say, that's all right flow with it and turn it into meditation. If one is nursing a baby, she should become a nursing meditator. The book conveys a strong sense that both Maurine and Roche delight in women and their gifts. This is an excellent, empowering resource for novices, as well as for those who have spent a lifetime meditating. (Feb.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (January 23, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062516973
• ISBN-13: 978-0062516978
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #98,655 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

85 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BEAUTIFUL AND UNIQUE, February 20, 2001

By	Andy Todes (Haddonfield, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

Some books are so brilliant you could easily give 100 reasons why you love them, and how they've improved, enriched, and deepened your life. So here, then, without much headscratching are my top 10 reasons for loving "Meditation Secrets for Women" with all my heart:

1. "Meditation Secrets for Women" is supremely easy reading. Its 292 pages (much meatier - and juicier! - than most meditation books) fly. Now this may not be important to some people, but, heck, who wants to battle through a dry, arid wasteland of intellectual ramblings? Fortunately, you'll find no such thing here. The writing is by turns funny, serious, sensuous, electrifying, and poetic, but never less than wise.

2. "Meditation Secrets for Women" is carefully broken down into 12 easily digestible chapters, with each chapter covering exactly one secret.

3. Secret. That's the key word. "Are they really `secrets'," you may wonder, "or is this just some hokey scam to get me to fork over my hard-earned dough?" No, they're secrets, all right. Not the kind of hush-hush secrets that have been passed down from master to pupil for thousands of years (far from it, in fact, as you will soon see), but the kinds of secrets that have been denied women too long.

4. You see the sad fact is that many contemporary women (and men!) have been taught meditation techniques designed for monks over a thousand years ago. And as the authors quite rightly point out, these techniques aren't just plain irrelevant to life in the 21st century, they're highly dangerous as well. If you've ever tried meditating to "kill your ego," "block your desires," "blunt your instincts," or "purge your mind of all thoughts," (to name just a few toxic objectives) you know how devitalizing and dehumanizing this type of meditation can be.

5. I'm delighted to say the authors Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche espouse a completely different kind of meditation. At last, here is approach full of love, joy, spontaneity, movement, sensuality, sexuality, daring, honesty, tenderness, instinct, passion, pleasure, adventure, and - last but certainly not least - FUN! I know this for a fact because I have been meditating under Lorin's tutelage for over a year, ever since reading his truly wonderful, "Meditation Made Easy," a beautiful and indispensible companion to "Secrets."

6. "Meditation Secrets for Women" provides not just one or two or even three meditations, but quite literally dozens, so you can pick and choose what suits your mood or temperament at any given time. I happen to stick to my favorite "Do Nothing" meditation, but occasionally switch to some other technique (or make up my own, which the authors heartily encourage) if the mood calls for it. And naturally all the meditations in the book are based on the same simple premise: meditation is fun and natural.

7. Also provided is a superb reference list (organized by chapter) for those who wish to delve even deeper into special areas of interest. Plus there's an invaluable listing of musical recommendations.

8. "Meditation Secrets for Women" is IDEAL for women AND men, beginners AND advanced meditators. There really is something here for everyone. And like all classic books (and this book will become a classic) it grows with you. Meaning, the more you explore your meditation, the more jewels the book reveals. A small aside: As a teenager I was poisoned by a couple of meditation books still available on the shelves today. Among many of their deflating techniques was this godawful drudgery: staring at an object for long periods of time while trying to banish all thoughts from your head. Try it. I guarantee you'll make yourself miserable!

9. So if you get just one thing out of this book it's that thoughts are good! Your brain, your body, your desires, your instincts, your universe, and yes, even your fears are good. "Meditation Secrets for Women" will give you the tools to observe these things from a position of great safety and serenity so that you can learn from them and experience more joy and peace and beauty and insight than you imagined possible. So that life itself can become your greatest teacher, and that you yourself can become the blazer of your own wonderful trails.

10. If you read this book today, chances are you'll be happily meditating a year from now and loving it. What else can you ask for?

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An encyclopedia for a woman's sovereignty, April 16, 2001

By	Pamela Preston "lacalmette" (France) - See all my reviews

'Meditation Secrets for Women' transcends the popular genre of self-help and how-to books to an unprecedented approach of wisdom applicable to the woman of the 21st century. This book is an encyclopedia of solutions that a woman can refer to. Here she will find her own passion, pleasure, and inner peace. This is a revolutionary concept in an age of quickly accelerating technology that pulls the woman away from her source of being - namely the body. Camille guides us to our inner sanctuaries through her lifetime experience of bodywork, indepth psychology, and the dance. Through her gentle voice, she assures us we shall find our sacred gifts. Through meditation and movement techniques, to the identifiable stories of other women, to her own personal meditations and prayers; not to say a distilled overview of spiritual teaching from East to West and back again, this most wonderful book points the way for a woman to 'claim her inner authority.' This is precisely what the woman of today needs to do. This book is a first and a last resource of meditation for the woman of the 21st century. In Camille's words: 'Amazing. The power floods back into my body. Like a transfusion of my own blood. This is my body. This is my life. Oh. I see....No one else can give me power. And no one can take it away. Nobody else knows what I should do or be. Someday I will simply rest in this truth. Someday all women will remember their sovereignty... Now there's a prayer.'

And there's a book.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Female Voice Proclaims her Presence, February 13, 2001

By A Customer

Finally, a thoughtful and illuminating look at the female psyche and her need to use meditation as a tool to explore our sensitivities, creativity and sensuality. Meditation has been taught for centuries as an ascetic, rigorous discipline by a spiritual patriarchy uninformed about and often alienated from female passions. This book expands the horizons of meditation to allow women to adapt it to their contemporary needs, emotions and lifestyles. It is a well researched and poetic guide that revels in the female spirit and soul. Women will use these secrets to find sustenance instead of denial in the practice of meditation.