Giving Up Without Giving Up

Drawing on his extensive experience of meditation within both the Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions, as well as his own times of personal loss and bewilderment, Jim Green offers us a moving account of just how this wisdom practice can accompany each of us as we make 'the gentle pilgrimage of recovery'. He guides us through 'the invention of depression' in the mid-twentieth century, questioning the increasing tendency to medicalize human suffering. Based on the insight that 'Life is the Treatment', he offers a thorough and practical approach to our times of personal desolation, showing how we can learn to treat ourselves and each other with care and compassion. At the heart of this approach is the practice of meditation, learned from the Buddha, The Desert Fathers and Mothers and from Jesus himself. It's a practice which, this heartfelt book insists, can help you 'to be depressed—which might mean in mourning—for exactly as long as you need to be, no longer and no shorter. Then, changed, you are brought back to life, which is change itself.'