Reverse Meditation: How to Use Your Pain and Most Difficult Emotions as the Doorway to Inner Freedom

Book Synopsis: Disruptive practices to revolutionize your relationship with meditation and fully engage with the full breadth of your experience. Why do we meditate? The main reason most modern people start meditating is because it helps us feel better—reducing anxiety, improving sleep, decluttering the mind, and so forth. “But where does your meditation go when things go bad?” asks Andrew Holecek. “Where is your spirituality when ‘rock meets bone,’ as they say in Tibet—when the crap hits the fan?” Reverse Meditation is for anyone who wants to bring the challenges of life onto the path of awakening. When things get hard, it’s time to turn your practice on its head—and throw out any assumption that meditation exists to insulate you from the confusion, difficulties, and uncertainty of life. “By putting your meditation into reverse,” Holecek teaches, “you’ll actually find yourself going forward. Step into your pain and you can step up your evolution.”

With his signature blend of depth and accessibility, Holecek invites you to explore:

• Three core forms of meditation—mindfulness, open awareness, and the boundary-smashing reverse meditations
• How to know when you’re ready to engage with reverse meditation
• On-the-spot practices for snapping into a meditative mindset in difficult situations
• Contraction and expansion—how to dismantle habits of avoidance to become more open, resilient, and fully alive
• How reverse meditation opens you to a direct experience of the fundamental perfection of reality—just as it is

“These unique meditations are designed to reverse our relationship to unwanted experiences, which means going directly into them instead of avoiding them,” says Andrew Holecek. “It’s not an easy journey—yet this path leads to the discovery of unconditional happiness, basic goodness, and true freedom in the most turbulent situations.”