David Brazier
Personal Information
Description
My next book is Love and Its Disappointment: The meaning of life, therapy and art. O-Books Auguat 2009. "Love and Its Disappointment: The meaning of life, therapy and art" has been found to be lucid and helpful and has excellent endorsements: "compelling..., power house..., brilliant..., convincing..., nourishing..., enlightening..., wise..., insightful..., compassionate... For flyer, please scroll down. ENDORSEMENTS AND REVIEWS: Julia Samuel, Metanoia Institute Tutor, Honorary Fellow of Imperial College: A compelling book, like a power house of thought that has been building up over a long time and successfully found its voice, as it pulled me the reader along. The clarity of the author's thought is rare indeed. His overall thesis that as loving beings we are inevitably thwarted, and how art and therapy can inform, help and occasionally heal us finds a way of saying what I have felt for a long time. His skill at drawing on other theorists, writers, philosophers, and his own thinking and integrating it into one clear treatise is brilliant. The risk he takes in standing up and banging the drum for love as the main motivation in man is convincing and lays bare our defences against it, and of course its frustration. Robert Wicks, Author of Riding the Dragon (Sorin Books) and The Resilient Clinician (Oxford University Press). Catholic. Professor, Loyola University Maryland: In Love and Disappointment David Brazier calls us to see what is at the core of life in refreshing, vitalizing ways. He offers new insights that seminal thinker Carl Rogers might have offered himself if he were alive today. It is thought provoking, nourishing of the inner life, and ideal reflective material for both professionals and searchers seeking to live "the honourable life". This book is about the possibility of love in a world that fails to really recognize the true import of its motivating force. Brazier's approach not only educates and helps us think differently but also, in Iris Murdoch's words, it " inspires love in the part of us that is most worthy." What more can you ask of a book than this? Nathan Katz, Jewish, Professor of Religious Studies, Florida International University: This is just what we need: a psychology based not on raw sex, or power, or fear, or mystical obscurantism, but on love and beauty. Here a skilled psychologist, artist and priest opens us to hopeful, enlightening and heretofore unanticipated possibilities. It is a book for all of us, professional and lay, western and eastern, sceptical and credulous. Gregg Krech, Buddhist, author of Naikan: Gratitude, Grace and the Japanese Art of Self-reflection; and of other books on Naikan and Constructive Living: Wise, insightful, compassionate observations that teach us that we find love not in ourselves but in that which we are devoted to. Brazier has created a thought-provoking paradigm in which love, art, spirituality and psychotherapy attempt to dance together to the symphony of life's meaning, conducted passionately within the corridor of the human heart. {} Review copies: office1@o-books.net Author interviews: david@amidatrust.com Pre-release orders at Amazon.com: Facebook Promotion: Conscious TV Interview
Books
The New Buddhism
"A manifesto for a more active, compassionate, and socially engaged Buddhism, The New Buddhism asserts that Buddha was a radical critic of society, and that his vision of a new social order transcended racial and economic divisions. Brazier takes a new look at various aspects of Buddhism, juxtaposing Western and Eastern visions of enlightenment. He distinguishes between "extinction Buddhism" and "liberation Buddhism" - the former seeks to release the individual from the world, while the latter seeks to perfect the world by freeing it from the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion."--BOOK JACKET.
The Feeling Buddha
With astonishing simplicity, David Brazier has distilled in The Feeling Buddha the essence of the Buddha's message from a talk the Buddha gave after he attained enlightenment. Here the Buddha spelled out a practical approach to the problems of life, defining spirituality as the art of converting base passion into noble engagement. The Feeling Buddha makes the teachings of India's greatest sage, who finally emerges here as a very human figure full of passion, ultimately accessible. It also serves as a practical guide for living life fully and deeply today, enhanced by Brazier's unique experience as a social worker, Buddhist minister and psychotherapist. For students of Buddhism, it is a challenge to orthodoxy; for psychotherapists and philosophers, an insight into emotion and existential realities; and for the general reader, an inspiration.
Zen therapy
When Gautama Buddha first set forth the principles of what came to be known as Buddhism, it was, above all, in an effort to help people achieve freedom from mental suffering. In the twenty-five hundred years since the death of the "Great Physician," his disciples have continued to expand upon his teachings and to develop sophisticated psychotherapeutic methodologies. Yet, only recently has Western medicine begun to take its first tentative steps toward recognizing and embracing the therapeutic potential of Buddhism. In a book that will do much to advance the fusion of two great psychotherapeutic traditions, psychotherapist David Brazier offers mental health practitioners in the West a fresh perspective on Buddhist psychology and demonstrates how Zen Buddhist techniques can be integrated successfully into their clinical practices. Writing from the perspective of a Western psychotherapist, Dr. Brazier successfully demystifies Buddhist psychology for fellow practitioners. He carefully explains the conceptual foundations of Buddhist thought, and with the help of numerous case studies, he clearly demonstrates their clinical applications.
Africas
"Africas: The Artist and The City is an exhibition that contains a double affirmation: it corroborates the existence of an "other" urban and artistic reality in Africa; and it asserts that these realities do not correspond with what topics and stereotypes would have us see as Africa's sole reality. In the words of Pep Subiros, we should talk not of Africa, but of Africas. Yet until now, there has been little said about the Africas depicted by this exhibition. Because what, in fact, do we really know about processes of urban change in cities like Dakar, Cape Town, Abidjan or other cities that are undergoing urbanisation and growth at breakneck speed? And what do we know about the work of the artists based in these cities? Very little, it must be said. Africas: The Artist and The City aims to illustrate a moment in which a fertile collision is taking place between tradition and modernity, between the local and the global. And it seeks to introduce us into the settings where this confluence is occurring." "The exhibition Africas: The Artist and the City is one of the chief proposals of the first Barcelona Art Report 2001 which, under the name Experiences, are jointly presented by the Institute of Culture, the MACBA and the CCCB. This makes the vision and reflection proposed by the exhibition on the special moment being experienced by contemporary art in Africa all the more relevant. A vision that is necessary if we want to better understand and grasp what is happening to us ourselves."--BOOK JACKET.