Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart

Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart

Buddhist teachings and heart-centered practices from the “feminine paradigm” to embrace receptivity and bring more balance to your life, relationships, and the world. With deeply thoughtful, lyrical prose, this book invites readers to engage with the world from a unique perspective that encourages feeling, intuitive understanding, embodiment, interdependence, and sacredness. Weaving together classical Theravada Buddhist teachings and mindfulness practices, the book teaches us when and how to channel our receptive and active orientations—sometimes called the feminine and masculine paradigms—to feel more at home in ourselves and the world and drop more deeply into the Buddhist teachings on suffering and happiness. Rebecca Bradshaw, a respected Buddhist teacher in the Insight Meditation community, offers teachings that are simple yet require us to explore aspects of ourselves that go against much of our social conditioning that values goal-oriented busyness, productivity, independence, outgoing energy, and other “active” qualities. When overemphasized, this orientation can cause destructive emotions and behaviors, but we can counter them by embracing more receptive qualities. The receptive or feminine paradigm takes us deeper into the heart of the classical Buddhist teachings, leading to openness and freedom of the heart-mind. Bradshaw illustrates her own resistance to letting go of her strong active orientation with relatable stories, like her efforts to be a perfect meditator. Drawing on our connectedness to nature, she offers guidance for grounded practices, including: useless gazing, - getting lost, - sense-based reality, - practicing in the wildness, - accepting uncertainty, and more. These Buddhist teachings are as comforting as they are thought-provoking. Bradshaw’s debut book helps us let go and nurture our ability to receive, listen, embrace vulnerability, and just be. Through this process, we heal the imbalances within ourselves and in our relationships to all beings and the natural world. “ Down to Earth Dharma is an awakening journey into the reclamation of the eclipsed feminine within Buddhism. Rebecca’s gentle, incisive approach, drawing from decades of deep meditation practice, is refreshing, healing, and engaging. Throughout there is a beautifully crafted weaving of a Buddhist worldview and its essential meditative practices with a receptive, intimate approach to life. In a world relentlessly driven by ‘getting to the next thing,’ this book invites us to take our foot off the accelerator and attune to the simple joy of listening more carefully to the heart. It is a vital contribution to rebalancing the ways patriarchal Buddhism tends to prefer transcendence over being rooted and truly ‘Down to Earth.’” — Thanissara , author of Time to Stand Up “With beautiful prose and an open heart, Rebecca Bradshaw guides us on a timeless and timely journey into the heart of what really matters in Buddhist practice. Her message—that we are made real through love and that we find wisdom through nature, the body, and relationship—is a necessary inspiration for those interested in the deep well-being that comes from waking up here and now.” — Devon Hase , coauthor of How Not to Be a Hot Mess “ Down to Earth Dharma is a wonderful and engaging exploration of how the feminine archetype can greatly enrich and transform our dharma practice. Rebecca Bradshaw shows with exceptional clarity and warmth how receptivity, intuition, embodiment and relaxation open us more deeply to the classical teachings of the Buddha. She draws on a wealth of experience as a longtime meditator, teacher, therapist, world traveler, and lover of nature as she shares the many stories of her struggles and insights, always highlighting a feminine perspective that has sometimes been lost in the often hard-driving energy here in the West. These are lessons that will be invaluable for us all in these challenging times. Highly recommended.” — Joseph Goldstein , cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and author of Insight Meditation “A much-needed antidote to traditional, patriarchal Buddhist teachings, Down to Earth Dharma is written for us all, whatever our gender. Weaving traditional dharma teachings with personal life stories, a profound relationship with the natural world, over thirty years of teaching experience, and gorgeous nature metaphor, Bradshaw elucidates an embodied feminine paradigm of the dharma—receptive, relaxed, heart-embracing, and relational. Most remarkably, Bradshaw never sacrifices her respect and allegiance to the traditional Buddhist lineage and teachings. Down to Earth Dharma takes us on a much-needed journey into the heart of a feminine spirituality that so many of us—and our Earth—are aching for in these tumultuous times. A spectacular accomplishment!” — Diana Winston , director of mindfulness education at UCLA and author of The Little Book of Being “Bradshaw’s emphasis on engagement and our in