Blessed Relief: What Christians Can Learn from Buddhists about Suffering

A thoughtful, down-to-earth look at helpful ways to lessen human suffering.

This book takes you on a lively, sometimes light-hearted, journey through nine Buddhist practices that can bring "blessed relief" to a wide range of human suffering―and teaches you skills to reduce suffering in the long term for yourself and others.

The practices help you:

• Loosen the grip of suffering
• Engage and question limiting views, thoughts and opinions
• Deconstruct ten common assumptions
• Be present in each moment
• Survive emotional storms
• Develop peaceful communication skills
• Deepen communication with your partner
• Appreciate mortality and the preciousness of life
• Cultivate compassion

As you read the chapters and engage in each practice, you will work with your own stories of suffering―stories in which you have felt abandoned, deprived, subjugated, defective, excluded or vulnerable―and you will learn how to release yourself from suffering by investigating it with curiosity and kindness.

Gordon Peerman is an Episcopal priest and psychotherapist in private practice, and an adjunct faculty member at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he teaches seminars in Buddhist-Christian Dialogue. He also teaches Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative Health, as well as mindfulness practices to Vanderbilt Law School and Vanderbilt Medical School students. He and his wife, Kathy Woods, lead a weekly meditation with the Nashville Mindfulness Meditation Group.