Main description:

What is the place of discontent and unhappiness in human experience and how best can we be with it?

There is something about everything that makes it not quite satisfactory. Even things we really love are spoilt by not being quite enough or by going on too long. People entering psychotherapy want to feel better - more authoritative, less anxious or depressed, more whole - and although it can help, an enormous amount of difficult and painful emotions continue to arise. Even after years and years of therapy many of us feel that there is no 'happy ever after'. Bearing this reality in mind and drawing upon both psychotherapeutic and Buddhist sources, Present with Suffering, explores bereavement and our pervasive experience of emptiness.

With a foreword from Henry Shukman, the authors show how through being mindfully present, kind and accepting, we may enfold what hurts us in a more spacious and meaningful way.

Contents:

1. Introduction, by Nigel Wellings and Elizabeth Wilde McCormick

2. Suffering in loss and bereavement, by Elizabeth Wilde McCormick
- Attachment and impermanence
- Living in a human body
- The heart
- Mind the gap

3. Emptiness, by Nigel Wellings
- A meditation on the pain of emptiness
- A meditation on the delight of emptiness
- Working with emptiness