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NEW BOOK!!!
YEARNINGS: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life
by Irwin Kula
September 2006
$23.95US (hardcover);
336 pages; ISBN:1-4013-0192-4
To order
Yearnings from Barnes &
Noble, click here.
To order
Yearnings from Amazon, click here.
"Irwin Kula is a masterful
teacher. He is passionate about his message and every page shimmers with
excitement as he conveys his inner knowing that 'you can become all that you
yearn to manifest' – very readable!" – Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, author of
Inspiration and
The Power of Intention
"This wonderful book does
what so many like it fail to do: it embraces the magic of day to day living,
the spirituality that can be found in our questions, our mistakes, our
passions and our doubts. Life is indeed messy, but as Rabbi Irwin Kula shows
us, sorting through it is what transforms us to higher ground." – Mitch
Albom, author of
Tuesdays with Morrie
and The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Life is messy and imperfect.
Living in this world is anything but simple. We yearn for answers – clear
paths ... comfortable easy solutions. Whether we are facing a mid-life
crisis, raising our children, confronting the betrayal of a loved one, or
trying to find meaning in the conflicts and disasters that blanket the
evening news, we need to accept that sometimes we do not have the answers,
that there are no final solutions to our deepest questions and no quick
fixes to complex problems. But to do that, we need a guide. Enter Irwin Kula
and his new book, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life.
Around the world the pursuit
of spirituality and the need for spiritual guidance has never been stronger.
Yearnings merges ancient Jewish wisdom with contemporary insights and
intimate stories to offer practical perspectives on everyday problems. From
our most complicated (love and relationships, loss and death) to the
deceptively simple (figuring out how to be creative and happy, what to do
with your teenager’s messy room), Kula explains how our yearning for answers
is no different now than it was in the times of Moses, Buddha, and Jesus. He
shows how ancient wisdom and practices can inform and enrich our own search
for meaning. More important, he invites us to accept, even celebrate the
messiness and complexities behind these human experiences in order to
embrace the endless and glorious project of building a life.
In this, his first book,
Rabbi Kula explores the essence of human desire applying ancient Jewish
teachings to seven of our most wonderful yearnings: Yearning for Truth,
Yearning for Meaning, Yearning for the Way, Yearning for Love, Yearning to
Create, Yearning for Happiness, Yearning for Transcendence. He then guides
us through these yearnings showing how we can use them as a path to
blessing, prompting questions and insights that result in new ways of being
and believing.
For example, consider our
Yearning for Truth. We must realize that there are no absolutes, no escape
from responsibility simply by dismissing views with which we disagree. Kula
is tired of the polarities that dismiss contradiction and so neatly split
our world into right and wrong (or right and left). Instead, Kula contends,
we should seek the partial truths (or what he calls “moment truths”) that
exist in an opposing view. We never need to lock ourselves into one side or
another. Instead, Kula wants us to find the wisdom that exists in every
conflict. “Disagreement is a gift,” he writes. It’s an invitation to engage
in the harder conversations that enable us to grow in understanding
ourselves and each other.
Similarly in Yearning for Meaning, Kula sees
appreciating life’s messiness as the key to our desire to have life always
make sense. Life has no straight lines or easy paths. When happy times give
way to sad times, when families do not get along, when jobs are lost, when
illness strikes and accidents happen, we are surprised, thinking life is
supposed to work out just the way we hope it will. But if we never have
dirty dishes in the kitchen sink we probably never had a home cooked meal.
Life is always an exquisite dance between joy and sadness, certainty and
uncertainty, hope and anxiety, meaning and absurdity, pleasure and
disappointment, and when we confuse our yearning for meaning with a desire
for stability and simplicity, meaning eludes us. The wisdom is in the dance,
the meaning in embracing the sacred messiness of life.
In Yearning for the Way, Kula
shows how our desire for certainty obscures the doubt that is necessary for
any personal growth and enlightenment. In Yearning for Love, he reveals how
the messiness of love and relationships ─ fights, disappointments, even
betrayals ─ is a necessary path to deeper intimacy. (As the Talmud says:
Love will always upset the balance.) We think we need to understand people
in order to love them, but Kula shows that until we love someone we can
never understand them. In Yearning for Happiness, the most encompassing
yearning of them all, Kula notes how there is always a space between our
imagined happiness and the happiness available to us and shows how to live
fully in that space between wanting it all and finding enough. Kula invites
us to consider that the yearning for happiness that remains even after we
have everything we need points to a hidden wisdom: Our yearning for
happiness is really our desire to give happiness.
Yearnings concludes
with the Yearning for Transcendence ─ the yearning for forever, that in the
face of the inevitability of death is an essential part of being human. Kula
shows us how to bring death into the service of life. In order to be ready
to die, we need to live with such care and passion that we redeem life from
the absurdity that death imposes. Then we can “die fully alive.” In the
“end,” Kula invites us to embrace the fact that we so much more than simply
the sum of our parts. He inspires us and comforts us by reminding us of the
final delicious ambiguity: That though we are all dust in the end ─ it is
all magic dust.
Click here to read
an excerpt!
Click here to
read words of praise for Yearnings...
To order
Yearnings from Barnes &
Noble, click here.
To order
Yearnings from Amazon, click here.
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