Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness

Kelly's guide to finer spiritual living maintains a non-psychological, nondenominational, and contemporary focus, drawing on wisdom from a diverse selection of traditional teachings, including Mahamudra practice, Taoist teaching, the works of William James, and modern neuroscience. Kelly articulates his structured, unified worldview with coherent language. He stresses a move away from ego-identification in our everyday lives and believes that access to awakening experiences is universally available: "awake awareness" is not reserved for full time spiritual seekers, but is in fact the next developmental step for humankind's new normal. Practices that Kelly calls "glimpses" take readers through the basics of mindful meditation and then through techniques some other teachers reserve for advanced study, including the process of unhooking local awareness from thought, waking up to transcendence, waking in to embodiment, and waking out to interconnectedness. Those who feel that other mindfulness texts are esoteric, foreign, or flaky will find Kelly's exercises easy to understand, his research easy to respect, and his methods blissfully lacking in both the aggressiveness common in the self-improvement genre and the focus on the author's personal experience common in new age takes. (Sept.)