Inviting A Monkey To Tea: Befriending Your Mind and Discovering Lasting Contentment - Softcover

Colier, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935387286 ISBN 13: 9781935387282

Publisher: Hohm Press, 2012

Synopsis

To "invite a monkey to tea" is to befriend your own mind -- which is often compared to a drunken monkey for all its mad twists and turns. A wild monkey is full of irrepressible desires, and thus chases its own tail in its search for happiness! This book is about learning to welcome the mind as an ally without fear or resistance, thus relaxing that frantic search, discovering genuine contentment an...

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Colier is a psychotherapist, interfaith minister, author and public speaker. A long time student of eastern spirituality, Nancy also spent 20 years as a nationally recognized, top-level equestrian, and has vast training in performance psychology and flow states. Her writing has been featured in numerous publications. She writes a regular blog for The Huffington Post and offers talks and workshops regularly. Nancy lives in Manhattan with her husband, two daughters, and a dog and cat.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I offer this book as a road map of sorts, from chasing happiness to discovering lasting contentment. My hope is that the experience of reading the book will serve as a microcosm of the larger change process I describe, that is-from believing your mind and what it tells you, to loving your mind even if you don't believe it, to being well regardless of whatever mischief your mind is up to. My wish is that your sense of who you actually are will shift and open as the pages turn, and that you will come to know yourself, not just as the mind's contents, but as infinite and loving awareness itself.

We spend our lives trying to get to some imaginary there, where happiness awaits. What we don't know how to do is to get to here, where we are and where well-being and contentment live. We discover well-being when we shift the direction of our glance toward this moment and what is actually here. The secret to well-being is counter-intuitive: allow whatever is happening inside you to happen. Don't do anything with it. Feel what you are feeling, hear what you are thinking, experience what you are experiencing. Let what is moving though you move through without changing it, judging it, or identifying with its contents. Make no links, create no narrative between what you are experiencing. When you let go of achieving a particular outcome with your experience and meet your experience, as it is, you will be well. You will uncover the place that relies on nothing and no one and is inherently ours and always available.

In truth, we have been chasing raindrops oblivious to the fact that we are already swimming in an ocean of well-being. Well-being is here, awaiting our presence. It is we who turn away from it, believing that the raindrops are our best hope. This book is about learning to shift the direction of our journey, from out and away from to into and toward ourselves, into what is actually happening here, now, our true nature. Well-being can only flourish within our own presence in what is. Throughout these pages, I invite you into a state of being that is deeper than happiness, one that can support us and keep us eternally okay.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hohm Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1935387286
• ISBN 13: 9781935387282
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176