Giving Up Without Giving Up : Meditation and Depressions

A simple, intelligent guide to meditation and contemplation for those dealing with depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

Drawing on his experience of meditation within both the Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions, as well as his own times of personal loss and bewilderment, Jim Green offers us a moving account of just how this wisdom practice can accompany each of us as we make 'the gentle pilgrimage of recovery'. He offers a thorough and practical approach to our times of personal desolation, centered on the practice of meditation, showing how we can learn to treat ourselves and each other with care and compassion.

Giving Up Without Giving Up explores the possibility that we have much to learn from the desert times in our lives, when it feels as though we are losing everything, most of all any sense of who we are.

“Jim Green has described a new approach to the corrosive suffering of depression … His special gift is shown in connecting to the sources of healing found in literature, faith and contemplative practice. Anyone suffering from depression who reads this book will feel both understood and gently guided forward.” —Laurence Freeman, Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation

“Might “depression” be, not a cold, deterministic diagnosis, but a call to spiritual awakening, to a graced construction of self? Jim Green says it may, and presents his case persuasively.” —Erik Varden, author of The Shattering of Loneliness

“If it is true that all human griefs have their roots in our inability to sit quietly in our own company for five minutes, this spare, candid and calm introduction to meditative practice will be a life-saving gift for many living in or on the edge of the darkness that regularly overtakes us in this uncontrollable world.” —Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury