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With war and violence flaring all over the world, from Iraq to Darfur to London, most of us are left feeling utterly helpless. In this book Pema Chödrön insists that our world will begin to change when each of us, one by one, begins to work for peace at the level of our own behavior, our own habits of thought and action. It’s never too late, she tells us, to look within and discover a new way of living.
Practicing Peace in Times of War is a short, pithy, and profound book that includes practical strategies for cultivating the seeds of peace and compassion amid life’s upsets and challenges.
War and peace start in the hearts of individuals. Strangely enough, even though all beings would like to live in peace, our method for obtaining peace over the generations seems not to be very effective: we seek peace and happiness by going to war. This can occur at the level of our domestic situation, in our relationships with those close to us. Maybe we come home from work and we’re tired and we just want some peace; but at home all hell is breaking loose for one reason or another, and so we start yelling at people. What is our motivation? We want some happiness and ease and peace, but what we do is we get even more worked up and we get everyone else worked up too. This is a familiar scenario in our homes, in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods, when we’re driving our cars. We’re just driving along and someone cuts in front of us and what happens? Well, we don’t like it. Sometimes we roll down the window and scream at them.
Someone once gave me a poem that has a line in it that offers a good definition of peace: "Softening what is rigid in our hearts." We can talk about ending war and we can march for ending war, we can do everything in our power, but war is never going to end as long as people’s hearts are hardened against each other.
If you have a bird’s-eye perspective on the Earth and you look down at all the conflicts that are happening, all you see are two sides of a story where both people think they’re right. So the solutions have to come from a change of heart, from softening what is rigid within us.
Overview
"War and peace begin in the hearts of individuals," declares Pema Chödrön at the opening of her inspiring and accessible new book. In Practicing Peace in Times of War she draws on Buddhist teachings to explore the origins of aggression and war, explaining that they lie nowhere but within our own hearts and minds. She goes on to explain that, remarkably, the way in which we as individuals respond to challenges in our everyday lives can mean the difference between perpetuating a culture of violence or creating a new culture of compassion.With war and violence flaring all over the world, from Iraq to Darfur to London, most of us are left feeling utterly helpless. In this book Pema Chödrön ...