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Empowering Mindfulness for Women

Author(s) : Leigh Burrows

Reviews and Endorsements

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 exploring how to flexibly move along, with and in-between the yin and yang. 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 ourself - Dr Narelle Lemon, Associate Professor in Education, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

This book opens a new door to contemporary mindfulness practices. It is both original and highly accessible. The reader participates in a women's mindfulness course facilitated by the author who, true to the text's autoethnographic style, reveals her own considerable experience and wisdom as a long-term researcher and teacher of mindfulness. As I read, I was struck by how deftly and how clearly Burrows was able to contextualise and integrate the threads of contemporary mindfulness, highlighting how transformative mindfulness can be for mental health and how important it is to find what suits the individual.

Previously published in the field of trauma sensitive mindfulness, her scholarship here is seamlessly integrated. Chapter resource links take the reader into even richer experience and appreciation of the benefits of mindfulness practice for everyday wellbeing. One link for example, leads to the 'deep listening' Dadirri of the Australian Aboriginal people. Similar to other First Nation peoples globally, in demonstrating that to listen deeply is to connect - to Nature, to something greater, to others, to oneself - is key to the awareness needed for reciprocal warming. It doesn't take long for the reader to join the dots, that a 'full spectrum mindfulness' in the workplace could begin to address the very kind of competitive, capitalist culture that helped spark this book. Another standout was the potential of mindfulness to liberate women from socially conditioned limitations through becoming aware of their capacity to choose how to move along the 'yin-yang' feminine-masculine spectrum according to their situation.

Written by one of Australia's foremost authors on the subject, this book is indispensable reading for anyone seeking an authentic mindfulness practice for their own individual need and lifestyle. - Gaylene Denford-Wood PhD, Former Senior Lecturer AUT University, NZ, and Director at The Mindfulness of Seminaria.