Darlene Cohen: Books & Tapes

BOOKS & TAPES

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NEW BOOK: The One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting to Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way.

Do you:

·Ever feel like you consistently take on more that you have time to do?

·Ever wish you could not only get things done, but also enjoy doing
them?

·Feel like you're barely making it through one ragged week to the next?

·Live only for weekends and a chance to put your feet up and close your
eyes?

"Busyness" is the problem. Knowing how to manage it is the solution.

The intense pressure of daily life gets to everyone eventually-we are all just too stressed out. The demands of modern lives-job, relationships, children, housework, exercise, meals, even spiritual fulfillment-combine to overwhelm and weigh us down. We seem to get through this struggle day by day, week by week, praying that we have the fortitude to survive until the next weekend, the next vacation, when we can totally crash. Along with the daily stress comes the edgy realization that despite all the effort we've made, we still don't have what we want. Even when everything seems caught up, contentment still eludes us.

Author Darlene Cohen seeks to rejuvenate the weary professional, busy parent, and harried student by offering a path on which to walk away from exhausted frustration toward a holistic approach to time management. The One Who Is Not Busy introduces two fundamental and specific skills to make this happen:

·The ability to narrow or widen the mind's focus at will

·The mental flexibility to shift the mind's focus at will from one thing to
another: to go from "narrow" to "narrow" to "narrow"

Sound impossible? This is the notion of simultaneous inclusion. In The One Who Is Not Busy, Cohen illustrates that a person could be both busy and not busy at the same time by following six busy professionals through this unique process. Cohen affirms that it is learning to be simultaneously "busy" and "not busy" by living the principles of simultaneous inclusion that will allow us to experience work-and the rest of our lives-in a deeply meaningful way.

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BOOK: Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach to Living with Physical and Emotional Pain

Darlene Cohen proposes a radically liberating alternative to the usual desperate search for pain relief: paradoxically, release from suffering lies in paying closer attention to it. When we keep our pain at bay, we keep pleasure at bay too. The two are interdependent, and our ability to experience each is totally dependent on our understanding of the other. Enrich your life exponentially. If your pain is one of ten things you are aware of, then it constitutes a tenth of your total awareness. Expand your awareness to a hundred things, however, and your pain is only a hundredth of your awareness. With stories, exercises and meditations, this book instructs the reader how to tap into that enrichment -- how we can lead a satisfying and even joyful life in the very midst of pain.

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BOOK:"The Only Way I Know of to Alleviate Suffering"
An essay by Darlene Cohen on living with chronic pain, appears in Being Bodies, edited by Susan Moon and Lenore Friedman, Shambhala

Excerpt: "People sometimes ask me where my own healing energy comes from. How in the midst of this pain, this implacable slow crippling, can I encourage myself and other people? My answer is that my healing comes from my bitterness itself, my despair, my terror. It comes from the shadow. I dip down into that muck again and again and then am flooded with its healing energy. Despite the renewal and vitality it gives me to face my deepest fears, I don't go willingly when they call. I've been around that wheel a million times: first I feel the despair, but I deny it for a few days; then its tugs become more insistent in proportion to my resistance; finally it overwhelms me and pulls me down, kicking and screaming all the way. It's clear I am caught, so at last I give up to this reunion with the dark aspect of my adjustment to pain and loss. Immediately the release begins: first peace and then the flood of vitality and healing energy. I can never just give up to it when I first feel it stir. You'd think after a million times with a happy ending, I could give up right away and just say, "Take me, I'm yours," but I never can. I always resist. I guess that's why it's called despair. If you went willingly, it would be called something else, like purification or renewal or something hopeful. It's staring defeat and annihilation in the face that's so terrifying; I must resist until it overwhelms me. But I've come to trust it deeply. It's enriched my life, informed my work, and taught me not to fear the dark." -- Darlene Cohen

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BOOK: Arthritis: Stop Suffering, Start Moving:
Everyday Exercises for Body and Mind

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AUDIO TAPE or CD: Meditation on Movement,
Two Meditations, 25 minutes per side

Side 1: Body Awareness

The movements on this side are intended to be meditations on movement, that is, they are done to emphasize sensation and the awareness of the body's moving parts. Many of these movements are intended to bring physical and psychological comfort. They are rhythmic, with great awareness of breath, and they have the feeling-tone of a baby being rocked. The movements also promote body awareness, that is, they are done slowly and precisely enough that your attention can stay on your sensations and your feelings as they are evoked by the small movements that you do. The sequence of movements helps you notice very small differences in the feelings of adjacent muscle groups. Doing these movements, you are thoroughly engaged with bodily sensation, which is a strong antidote to discursive thought.

Side 2: Relational Movements

These movements involve using one part of the body to support and ease another part of the body. Passive movement has been shown to be an effective and reliable tool for pain reduction. By using one part of the body to passively move a more painful part of the body, the tightly held painful area releases and learns that movement is not so dangerous. For instance, if you are immobilized by a back spasm, lying on your back and moving the legs very gently in the specific way the tape instructs, you will be able to ease and loosen the painful muscles of the lower back. If you are not in pain but feel the need to relax certain chronically tight areas of your body, you can use other parts of your body to alleviate stress in that particular area. It's almost like having a masseuse move your body without much effort on your part.

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AUDIOTAPE or CD: Meditation on Body and Breath, Meditation on Release of Pain
Two Meditations, 25 minutes per side

Side 1: Meditation on Body and Breath

Guides your attention through your body from your foot to the top of your head, using your inhalations and exhalations to expand and relax each part of your body. Deeply relaxing and restful, this guided meditation affords an opportunity to leave the world of tension and stress and drop into a timeless, boundless dimension.

Side 2: Meditation on Release of Pain

Guides you in the practice of identifying a specific area of pain or tension in your body and then releasing it with your breath and your voice, expressed in moans and sighs. This includes instruction in respectfully approaching and retreating from an area in which tension is particularly entrenched as often as necessary to soften the knot of pain or tension.

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AUDIOTAPE or CD: SELF-HELP FOR ATHRITIS
A talk given at the San Francisco Health Expo

Darlene Cohen tells her own story of how she has alleviated the symptoms of her painful, crippling rheumatoid arthritis through gentle movement, meditation and celebrating the pleasure in her life. Called "the ultimate self-care, drug-free arthritis treatment," by a reviewer, she guides listeners through a treatment plan which shows how to harness the healing power of the brain including ways to release hormones and neuropeptides that reduce pain. She emphasizes turning one's everyday life movements into healing exercises.

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