Practice the Pause, Caroline Oakes
Practice the Pause, Caroline Oakes
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Practice the Pause
Jesus' Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What It Means to Be Fully Human

Author: Caroline Oakes

Narrator: Nan McNamara

Unabridged: 8 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/12/2023


Synopsis

These days, many of us live in a state of overreactive fight-or-flight response and chronic stress. The demands of modern life pull us in all directions and can often put the meaningful connections in our lives at risk—connections to our deepest selves, to others, and even to God.

But there is good news. New developments in brain science have recently proven that an intentional practice of pausing for a few minutes of meditation, prayer, or other contemplative practice actually rewires our brain in ways that make us calmer, less reactive, and better able to see the bigger picture.

In Practice the Pause, spiritual director and writer Caroline Oakes offers easy-to-understand explanations of how this new brain science is confirming what every spiritual tradition has been telling us for millennia: by practicing the pause, we become more self-aware and better able to understand others. We become more "God aware." With a refreshing focus on the Eastern Christian understanding of Jesus as a master of wisdom, Oakes shines a spotlight on Jesus's own centering pause practice as a transformative path for personal and social change. We learn that even a seven-second pause practice can move us beyond the fight-or-flight responses of our ego in our daily lives and actually equip us to cultivate the common good in the world.

About Caroline Oakes

Caroline Oakes is a writer and spiritual director whose essays have been published at On Being, the Huffington Post, and her bimonthly "Mind & Spirit" column in the Bucks County Herald, an award-winning regional newspaper. A student of everyday spirituality, wisdom teachings, and the human spirit, she has a master's degree in ascetical theology from the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church and participated in Thomas Keating's Contemplative Ministry Project. She is trained in teaching contemplative practice and mindfulness meditation by Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation and by Mindful Schools, Inc. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nicholas on February 03, 2024

I feel like I’ve been searching for Caroline Oakes’ “Practice the Pause” for most of my adult life. After going to parochial school and serving as a Catholic altar boy, I always felt a strange disconnect between the stories and words of Jesus of Nazareth from the Gospels and what I was hearing from......more

Goodreads review by Renee Davis Meyer on October 30, 2023

I read this book for class (my spiritual direction training) and did not love it. There are nuggets of goodness and the concept is lovely. But it is extremely repetitive (I actually looked up the publisher bc it was edited so poorly I wondered if it was self published). And while I am a big fan of b......more

Goodreads review by Adam on April 04, 2023

This book was exactly what I needed, and I wish I could give it 6 stars. It is a refreshing take on Jesus through the eyes of the "East" instead of the "West." I grew up in a mainline Protestant household in the Midwest, but never truly felt comfortable with "Jesus as Divine Savior" being the only ga......more

Goodreads review by Cayley on March 03, 2023

As a formerly religious person, I’m not really sure why I picked up this book. I thought it would be more of an academic take on Jesus’ practices. I should’ve expected it to be a Christian book. That being said, I found it very interesting, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is trying......more

Goodreads review by Sue on January 25, 2023

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in mindfulness, and it is proof that "being mindful" is not just a temporary fad propelled by recent neuroscience discoveries. With a style that makes readers feel like they are having lunch with Richard Rohr or aother contemplative leader, Caroline Oak......more