Ordinary Freedom

by Jon Bernie, Adyashanti (Foreword by)

Overview

This book is about Freedom. It’s not about a special state or condition called “Freedom,” some idea or concept to be believed in; rather, it is about the recognition and realization of our essential nature.

When we arrive in this moment and awaken to the truth of our existence, we discover that Freedom is completely ordinary—ordinary, yet awesome. The recognition and realization of our essential nature is for many a gradual transition. The challenge of our generation is to find out how to support this transformation in the midst of our everyday lives.

Adyashanti writes, “This wonderful collection of Jon’s teachings really captures his ability to point us back to our own innate freedom. What makes Jon’s teachings so powerful and relevant, though, is that no part of the human experience is denied. Indeed, there is an open encouragement for all of our human experience to be included and embraced as a means of discovering the infinite ground of being, within which all of our experience unfolds. This in itself is a great gift to any spiritual seeker looking to find out what freedom is really all about.”

Reading Ordinary Freedom is like having a wise and loving but uncompromising friend on the path to discovering our true nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626257573
Publisher:	New Harbinger Publications
Publication date:	07/30/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	148
File size:	516 KB

About the Author

Jon Bernie is a lifelong resident of the San Francisco Bay Area and a contemporary spiritual teacher in the lineage of Adyashanti. He leads regular classes, retreats, and intensives in the Bay Area and beyond. As a counselor in private practice, Bernie also works with individuals directly to facilitate consciousness development and deep emotional healing.
Jon Bernie is a contemporary spiritual teacher whose teaching focuses on returning attention to the already enlightened state that lies at the core of our human experience. He has four decades of experience in the Zen, Theravada Buddhist, and Advaita traditions, and was formally asked to teach by Adyashanti in 2002. Bernie is also an experienced healer and teacher of somatic embodiment, with training in the Alexander Technique, Zero Balancing, and Qigong. He leads classes and retreats in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, and does intensive, one-on-one work with individuals to facilitate consciousness development and deep emotional healing.
Adyashanti is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence. Adyashanti is author of The Way of Liberation, Falling into Grace, Emptiness Dancing, True Meditation, and The End of Your World.

Interviews

Bernie resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Editorial Reviews

To find an accomplished spiritual teacher is a rare gift. To find a book that puts you in a most lively way in the presence of such a teacher is even more rare. But here it is! Jon Bernie’s Ordinary Freedom has all the power of the spoken word and vibrates with the overtones of that teacher’s caring, compassionate nearness. Deep, yet always simple; simple, yet never simplistic; clear, eloquent, and always to the point, Ordinary Freedom is not an ordinary book. It springs from freedom and breathes freedom. Caution: This book may be hazardous to your current level of consciousness! ”
—Brother David Steindl-Rast, OSB, author, lecturer, co-founder of www.gratefulness.org


“What a beautiful, simple, heartfelt message! The end of seeking is not something to be found in the future — it is right here, present at the very heart of experience, just waiting to be discovered by those who are ready and willing to come face-to-face with life. Jon Bernie expresses the timeless truth of non-duality (non-separation) in such a warm, authentically human voice. He meets you as a wise, loving friend — rather than as spiritual master or guru — and gently points out the various ways in which you are currently at war with your own experience. His message is rare and precious in that it does not attempt to deny or transcend our humanity, or dismiss it as an aberration, but rather embraces it fully as part of an infinitely bigger picture. Jon honours your embodied experience, whilst at the same time clearly and directly pointing you far beyond the personal, to a wordless freedom that belongs to no-one, and therefore is available to everyone. Read Ordinary Freedom and rediscover something that you have always known — that this seemingly ordinary life is already the miracle you’ve been seeking, and that here and now is forever saturated with wonder. This is mature, grounded spirituality for grown-ups, and I thoroughly recommend it.
—Jeff Foster, author of The Wonder of Being and An Extraordinary Absence.


“This wonderful collection of Jon's teachings really captures his ability to point us back to our own innate freedom.”
—From the foreword by Adyashanti

From the Publisher