The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardship into Joy [Paperback]

We all encounter obstacles on a daily basis—from small inconveniences and nuisances to the really big hardships wreaking havoc with our lives. Sometimes just the small things are enough to set us reeling. Andrew Holecek offers us a progressive path beginning with common, easily understood hardships and moving on to more subtle and challenging ones that commonly arise on our spiritual journeys. From Andrew Holecek's first words, you know you can trust him. He writes from deeply felt experience as well as a masterful grasp of the vast dharma. His essential point is riveting: the path leading to the cessation of suffering necessarily includes suffering. This book is the essence of good meditation instruction. —Irini Rockwell, author ofThe Five Wisdom Energies

With brilliance and kindness, Andrew Holecek brings the shadow side of the spiritual path into the light helping the practitioner navigate the hardships he or she will inevitably discover. Holecek shows them for what they are—necessary obstacles on all levels of the path that can either hinder or strengthen our practice, and we can indeed be grateful to him for so clearly and completely elucidating this profound and necessary but rarely mentioned side of the spiritual path. —Dr. Jeremy Hayward, author ofWarrior-King of Shambhala: Remembering Chögyam Trungpa

The spiritual hardships that each of us face along the way can be literally hard to bear whether these are purely psychological pressures or events that impact us on a physical level as well. Yet they can be ameliorated when we see their connection to our path as a whole. That is the distinctive gift ofThe Power and the Painfor contemporary Buddhist practitioners. It helps us make sense of our individual experiences which, as unique as they are, have been challenging practitioners in different ways since the time of the Buddha. . . . When we move beyond our theories about the spiritual path into lƒ6