The simplest, easiest beginning meditation guide you’ll ever see!
Whitney Stewart has had her fair share of experiences worth meditating on. In 2005, she was trapped in downtown New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and helicoptered from the roof of a building with her young son and elderly mother-in-law. For the next five months, she lived in Nantucket and researched her book Marshall: A Nantucket Sea Rescue–she escaped one natural disaster and wrote about another. When she returned home to New Orleans, Ms. Stewart volunteered as a creative writing teacher in the public schools. She discovered that her students suffered from post-Katrina stress. Knowing this, Ms. Stewart began using beginning meditation techniques to teach her students to write about their lives, reduce stress, and relieve anxiety.
A Level III Reiki practitioner then studying Classical Tibetan, she began meditating after she met and interviewed the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet (the subject of her biography, The 14th Dalai Lama) and lived with a Tibetan refugee family in India. She’s trekked with Sir Edmund Hillary in Nepal, interviewed Burma’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in her Rangoon home, and climbed along China’s Great Wall to research the lives of Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong.
Stewart’s straightforward guide to stress relief, anxiety management, and mindfulness makes meditation simple. It covers the basics in a concise thirty-three pages: Why meditation is good for you, how to sit, how to let your mind rest, even what to do if you feel weird or uncomfortable during meditation. Most importantly, it provides sixteen accessible, useful meditations you can easily learn at home.
For ages ten to adult. Note: This is a very short book.
“Give Me A Break has the potential to serve as an invaluable tool, opening doors of no cost, egalitarian recovery to many–far and wide.” – Jan Gilbert, cancer survivor, community activist, and co-founder of HOME, New Orleans
“Whitney Stewart has developed a quiet and unique window into the minds of our adolescents. Her direct method of inviting them into this gentle meditative space allows them to have respite and freedom from the constant pressures that surround them.” – Marcia G. Beard, Ph.D.,Clinical Psychologist
The Dalai Lama says…
“Whitney Stewart’s picture book on Buddhism [Becoming Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha] about the life of the Buddha is timely because even today the story of the Buddha has a lot to tell us” -Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.
Excerpt:
Why Meditate?
Let’s face it. Life knocks you around. One minute you’re happy. The next you want to scream. You don’t get everything you want, and you don’t want everything you get. You need a break. Meditation could be the answer.
Meditation calms you down. It helps you find your own wisdom. It settles your nerves and fills your mind with space.
Lots of people meditate——athletes, actors, dog trainers, writers, and people like you. They do it wherever they find a quiet spot——in the living room, in the back yard, under a tree, in an empty classroom, in the library, in a tent, on a mountaintop. You don’t have to join a religious group to meditate. And you don’t have to change anything about yourself. Meditation is about accepting yourself with all the bumps and bruises.
