Ben Connelly:
Mindfulness and Intimacy

Ben Connelly will return to MBZC to give the Tuesday evening talk from his new book, Mindfulness and Intimacy on Tuesday May 7 following zazen and service.

Ben will bring copies of the book to sell and sign.

Ben Connelly is a Soto Zen teacher and Dharma heir in the Katagiri lineage. He has written several books including Inside the Grass Hut: Living Shitao’s Classic Poem and Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara: A Practitioner’s Guide. He also teaches mindfulness in a wide variety of secular contexts including police and corporate training, correctional facilities, and addiction recovery and wellness groups. He is based at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center and travels to teach across the United States. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Mindfulness is an ancient and powerful practice of awareness and nonjudgmental discernment that can help us ground ourselves in the present moment, with the world and our lives just as they are. But there’s a risk: by focusing our attention on something (or someone), we might always see it as something other, as separate from ourselves. To close this distance, mindfulness has traditionally been paired with a focus on intimacy, community, and interdependence. In this book, Ben Connelly shows us how to bring these two practices together—bringing warm hearts to our clear seeing.