Books › The wise heart
The wise heart
454 pages
An illuminating and compassionate guide to awakening the mind and healing the heart through Buddhist psychology.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting with a wise, compassionate teacher who sees your inherent dignity. The pace is steady and reflective, allowing the reader to absorb profound psychological insights and practical techniques for transforming the mind. The mood is deeply healing and radiant, grounded in the belief that every person has an unlimited capacity for joy and freedom. The prose weaves together accessible teachings, moving accounts of trauma recovery, and stories from psychotherapy practice, creating a texture that is both deeply personal and universally applicable. It will delight meditators, mental health professionals, and anyone seeking a gentle, illuminating path away from the clinical focus of Western psychiatry toward a sacred, heart-centered approach to human possibility.
- Mood
- contemplative
- radiant
- healing
- uplifting
- Tone
- compassionate
- earnest
- illuminating
- reflective
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- spiritual awakening · healing from trauma · human dignity · transformational psychology
- The writing
- Accessible and illuminating, weaving practical teachings with moving personal and professional anecdotes.
- The arc
- Moves from the acknowledgment of deep psychological wounds to a radiant realization of unshakable freedom and human dignity.
- Who it's for
- Meditators, mental health professionals, and anyone seeking a compassionate, practical path to psychological healing.
Content notes
- childhood violence
- trauma recovery
About the book
You have within you unlimited capacities for love, for joy, for communion with life, and for unshakable freedom--and here is how to awaken them. In The Wise Heart, one of the leading spiritual teachers of our time offers the most accessible and illuminating guide to Buddhism's transformational psychology ever published in the West.Trained as a monk in Thailand, Burma, and India, Jack Kornfield experienced at first hand the life-changing power of Buddhist teachings: the emphasis on the nobility and sacredness of the human spirit, the fine-grained analysis of emotion and thought, the precise techniques for healing, training, and transforming the mind and heart. In contrast to the medical orientation of most Western psychology and psychiatry, here is a vision of radiant human dignity, and a practical path for realizing it in our own lives.The Wise Heart is the fruit of a life's work that includes such classics as A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. Filled with stories from Kornfield's Buddhist psychotherapy practice and portraits of remarkable teachers, it also includes a moving account of his own recovery from a violence-filled childhood. For meditators and mental health professionals, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, The Wise Heart offers an extraordinary journey from the roots of consciousness to the highest expression of human possibility.From the Hardcover edition.
Description from Open Library.
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