The body is of course integral to meditation, but there are only a few books that focus this specifically on the body and the meditative experience. Awake Where You Are addresses that need, and additionally integrates psychological concepts, which provides a more familiar entry point for people less familiar with Buddhism.
“Embodied awareness is the way back home—intimacy with where and how we are right now, with what is happening and how we are meeting it. My intention is to lead you into the heart of your life. Inside your body, where everything happens—within a quality of listening rather than knowledge, of feeling rather than reaction. This meditative practice is radically transformative.”
—Martin Aylward
Pulled around by desires and distractions, we’re so easily disconnected from ourselves.
Life is happening right in front of us, and within us—but still, we manage to miss so much of it.
Awake Where You Are provides the antidote, inviting us to go deep into our own bodies, to inhabit our sensory experience carefully; to learn the art of living from the inside out, and in the process to find ease, clarity, and an authentic, unshakeable freedom.
The practices in the book literally bring us back into our skin, where we can reconnect with a more rich, meaningful, and peaceful life. Aylward writes with sophisticated subtlety, as well as the heart-opening simplicity and clarity born of deep experience.
And this book is more than a meditation guide—it’s a guide to living an embodied life. You’ll learn about the following areas and practices:
- Understanding and liberating our primal human drives. Aylward explains how the three primary drives—survival, sexual, and social—function within us, and how we can engage their energy to explore, understand, and liberate them.
- Integrating psychological understanding with meditative practice. Awake Where You Are goes beyond the broad brushstrokes of Buddhist psychology, inviting the reader into an exploration of their own particular psychological history and conditioning.
- Investigating the nuances of love. Readers will learn to see the classical Buddhist heart qualities, or brahmaviharas (loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity) as distinct flavors of love, and as the natural resting places of a free heart.
“Martin is a marvelous teacher and offers us the refreshing wisdom of an embodied life.”
—Jack Kornfield, author of No Time Like the Present
“In the introduction to Awake Where You Are, Martin Aylward tells the reader that this is not another book about ‘how to meditate,’ and that is very true. He writes with honesty, insight, and experience to offer us a guidebook to awareness of the body, connection to the body, and deep acceptance no matter the state of that body.”
“All that we cherish—love, creativity, wisdom, and aliveness—becomes available when we are fully grounded in our bodies. In Awake Where You Are, Martin Aylward offers his profound wisdom for how we become disconnected and the timeless practices that lead us home to embodied presence.”
“This beautiful and subtle book illuminates and grounds us in the truth that meditation and the practice of loving awareness are an ‘in-the-body’ experience.”
“Awake Where You Are is a marvelous offering for anyone who is on the path of embodied living. Martin is a jewel of a teacher and friend, and his book is a beautiful afternoon listening to a dear companion. This book is a treasure.”
