Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart

Buddhist teachings and heart-centered practices from the "feminine paradigm" to embrace receptivity and bring more balance to your life, relationships, and the world.

With deeply thoughtful, lyrical prose, this book invites listeners to engage with the world from a unique perspective that encourages feeling, intuitive understanding, embodiment, interdependence, and sacredness. Weaving together classical Theravada Buddhist teachings and mindfulness practices, the book teaches us when and how to channel our receptive and active orientations--sometimes called the feminine and masculine paradigms--to feel more at home in ourselves and the world and drop more deeply into the Buddhist teachings on suffering and happiness.

Rebecca Bradshaw, a respected Buddhist teacher in the Insight Meditation community, offers teachings that are simple yet require us to explore aspects of ourselves that go against much of our social conditioning that values goal-oriented busyness, productivity, independence, outgoing energy, and other "active" qualities. When overemphasized, this orientation can cause destructive emotions and behaviors, but we can counter them by embracing more receptive qualities. The receptive or feminine paradigm takes us deeper into the heart of the classical Buddhist teachings, leading to openness and freedom of the heart-mind.