cover image Meditation Secrets for Women: Discovering Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace

Meditation Secrets for Women: Discovering Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace

Camille Maurine, Lorin Roche. HarperOne, $17.95 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-06-251697-8

In this powerful book, the husband-wife team of Maurine and Roche explore the particular needs women have in meditation. They point out that most ancient meditation texts were meant for cloistered male monks living a celibate life, with meditation techniques used to ""eradicate passion, emotion, and sexuality."" Maurine and Roche find that women require precisely the opposite approach: an ability to use meditation to embrace their psyches including passion, emotion and sexuality. Maurine (who comes from an eclectic background of Transcendental Meditation, Zen, esoteric yoga, dance and Tibetan Buddhism) and Roche (who teaches Himalayan meditation and is the author of Meditation Made Easy) employ the various components of their backgrounds to argue that women should custom-tailor their meditation practice to suit their individual needs and circumstances. With tips, exercises, meditations, reflections and other women's stories, Maurine and Roche share enthusiastically and thoroughly what they have found works for women, leaving the dry legalisms behind. If one's mind rambles, they say, that's all right flow with it and turn it into meditation. If one is nursing a baby, she should become a nursing meditator. The book conveys a strong sense that both Maurine and Roche delight in women and their gifts. This is an excellent, empowering resource for novices, as well as for those who have spent a lifetime meditating. (Feb.)