Meditation Secrets for Women: Discovering Your Passion, Pleasure, and Inner Peace

"The field of meditation has been not just a man's world but a monk's world," write Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche, Ph.D., who assert that the techniques that worked for "reclusive and celibate males" need updating for contemporary women. In Meditation Secrets for Women, they introduce a refreshingly modern, female-oriented approach to meditation that encourages "luxuriating in the sensory world, resting in the simplicity of your own being, enjoying yourself shamelessly."

Meditation fills a need that women crave: to carve out time for themselves "to rest, to restore, to settle in." Rather than impose rules and strict discipline, however, the authors encourage women to rejuvenate themselves, open up, and affirm their "womanness" through meditation.

Meditation Secrets for Women presents 12 "secrets" in 12 chapters. Each secret is a theme, such as "celebrate your senses," "claim your inner authority," "ride your rhythms," or "love your body." Each chapter starts with a poem and includes explorations (questions for you to ponder), skill circle (practical tips for skill building), meditations, and reflections. This is a nurturing book, filled with acceptance, warmth, and encouragement. If you've tried to meditate but found it too restrictive, dull, or difficult, this book will give you a different, distinctly womanly, approach.

The authors are a married couple who have been teaching meditation to women for 50 combined years. Maurine is also a dancer and healing practitioner. Roche is the author of Meditation Made Easy. --Joan Price