Routledge Empowering Mindfulness for Women: An Ethnographic Exploration

Empowering Mindfulness for Women is centred around a a 5-day intensive mindfulness course attended by eight women from different backgrounds. The reader is invited to imagine they are actively participating in the teaching and learning moments and turning points encountered in teaching and learning mindfulness around themes such as making space for mindfulness, safeguarding mindfulness for women, engendering mindfulness, mindfulness dreaming and a mandala of wisdoms. Evocative accounts of experience bring to life the women’s growing awareness that mindfulness can be both a separate practice and a natural part of life and that it can help them to nurture what they have neglected in themselves by not tapping into the full spectrum of their experience. Each chapter provides useful follow-up activities and questions for individual or group reflection, journaling, sharing and conversation. Empowering Mindfulness for Women is aimed at those who teach mindfulness to women in educational, community or clinical settings and at women who want to learn mindfulness in a manner that positions them as experts in their own learning. Review "Burrows’ rendition of mindfulness teaching and practice is remarkable in its close adherence to the original understanding (as conveyed, for instance, by Thich Nhat Hanh) while simultaneously contemporary in its sensitivity to the cultural context of mindfulness practice today . . . Facilitating, as a workshop facilitator or coursework teacher, as Burrows has been doing, such sharing with knowledge, wisdom, experience, and guidance, too, is integral to mindfulness practice. Unfortunately, we rarely see this done. Therein lies an immeasurable value of Burrows’ book under discussion here . . . Empowering Mindfulness for Women is an engaging read with its at-ease and flowing conversational style of writing, filled with the mindfulness workshop participants’ and Burrows’ dialogues, both online and in-person, as well as with reflective writings by the author and her students/participants." Dr Heesoon Bai, Professor, Philosophy of Education, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. "This is much more than a mindfulness book. It’s a book about the inner life of women today: their struggles, dreams, and how they’ve come to find nourishment through Leigh Burrows’ meditative guidance. Centred on a mindfulness course taught by the author, the book challenges us to go to places where few mindfulness authors dare venture. It talks of wounds ― individual and collective; the aggression and competitiveness which has taken over western civilisation and is killing us from within, both women and men. Burrows confronts our world and our psychic lives, as she gently guides the women she’s teaching to a place of healing which our world desperately needs" Miguel Farias, Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Meditation, author of The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You. "I have admired Leigh’s writing for some time now, and this book is her next gift to us as she takes us into her inner thoughts, lived experiences, teachings, celebrations, realisations and tensions of being a woman with a mindfulness practice. To truly be present is something we all work on and we are offered not only a glimpse as Leigh draws back the curtain on empowering mindfulness for women, but we are drawn into each thread, intersection, and binary. Thank you, Leigh, for writing this book in the creative way that you have. You draw us into how we can and are a teacher, co-learner and researcher of our embodied mindfulness practice. You reveal so much of the unsaid, hidden and evaded of mindfulness. And most importantly you remind us of the how essential it is to make physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual space for ourselves." Dr Narelle Lemon, Associate Professor in Education, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia "A wonderful book to savour, chapter by chapter as the