Ben Connelly

Go beyond mere mindfulness—and deepen your connection to your self, the people in your life, and the world around you. 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. Helpful meditations and exercises show how mindfulness and intimacy can together enrich our empathetic engagement with ourselves and the world around us—with our values, with the environment, and with the people in our lives, in all their distinct manifestations of race and religion, sexuality and gender, culture and class—and lead to a truly engaged, compassionate, and joy-filled life

Mindfulness and Intimacy

In so many ways, our lives are easier than ever. We’re sheltered from the elements our ancestors braved daily. We don’t need to grow, hunt, or gather our food, nor do we ever need to feel hungry for more than a few hours. We can immerse ourselves in digital entertainment that stimulates us in ways our great grandparents never could have imagined. And yet we’re unhappy. There were over 45,000 suicides and over 100,000 drug overdoses in America in 2021, and surveys have been consistently showing that we’re the unhappiest we’ve been in decades since before the pandemic. This is the problem of ease. We’re drowning in pleasure, and yet so many of us seem unable to bear one minute without it. We’re more comfortable than ever, and less able to handle discomforts our ancestors would have found trivial. Grit is an antidote to this problem, an exploration of the value of chosen suffering. In a time when we’re so comfortable some people wonder whether we even need grit anymore, this book is a meditation on the virtue of it. Grit is a roadmap for anyone looking to escape the suffocation of ease. It’s a blueprint for tapping into the natural antifragility of the human mind and body. Along the way, you’ll learn about the power of habit, the role of external environment, risk, fear, courage, and more. Grit will teach you new ways to challenge yourself physically and mentally, from fasting, to exercise, to cold exposure, to memorizing poetry. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, and experience, Ben Connelly will show you not only why a good life requires chosen suffering, but how and what to choose.

A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness

Grit

A practical guide to Vasubandhu's classic work "Thirty Verses of Consciousness Only" that can transform modern life and change how you see the world. In this down-to-earth book, Ben Connelly sure-handedly guides us through the intricacies of Yogacara and the richness of the “Thirty Verses.” Dedicating a chapter of the book to each line of the poem, he lets us thoroughly lose ourselves in its depths. His warm and wise voice unpacks and contextualizes its wisdom, showing us how we can apply its ancient insights to our own modern lives, to create a life of engaged peace, harmony, compassion, and joy. In fourth-century India one of the great geniuses of Buddhism, Vasubandhu, sought to reconcile the diverse ideas and forms of Buddhism practiced at the time and demonstrate how they could be effectively integrated into a single system. This was the Yogacara movement, and it continues to have great influence in modern Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. “Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only,” or “Trimshika,” is the most concise, comprehensive, and accessible work by this revered figure. Vasubandhu’s “Thirty Verses” lay out a path of practice that integrates the most powerful of Buddhism’s psychological and mystical possibilities: Early Buddhism’s practices for shedding afflictive emotional habit and the Mahayana emphasis on shedding divisive concepts, the path of individual liberation and the path of freeing all beings, the path to nirvana and the path of enlightenment as the very ground of being right now. Although Yogacara has a reputation for being extremely complex, the “Thirty Verses” distills the principles of these traditions to their most practical forms, and this book follows that sense of focus; it goes to the heart of the matter—how do we alleviate suffering through shedding our emotional knots and our sense of alienation? This is a great introduction to a philosophy, a master, and a work whose influence reverberates throughout modern Buddhism.

A Practitioner's Guide

Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara

Go beyond mere mindfulness—and deepen your connection to your self, the people in your life, and the world around you. 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 up 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. Helpful meditations and exercises show how mindfulness and intimacy can together enrich our empathetic engagement with ourselves and the word around us—with our values, with the environment, and with the people in our lives, in all their distinct manifestations of race and religion, sexuality and gender, culture and class—and lead to a truly engaged, compassionate, and joy-filled life.

I’m surrounded by people at church . . . so why do I feel so alone? You show up at church every Sunday. You see people you know. You listen to a sermon together. And then you go home feeling just as isolated as you did before. What’s going on? We all know that a church is supposed to be a community. The trick is to actually make it one. Communities don’t happen by chance—certainly not in our Lone Ranger culture that values independence and individualism. A truly Christian community must be built by intentional practices that allow for deeper connections, centered on the unity that can only be found in Christ. In A Field Guide for Genuine Community, longtime pastor and discipleship trainer Ben Connelly shows you that the biblical model for community is the family of God. In twenty-five short, practical readings, he takes you beyond the surface and helps you learn to connect with your brothers and sisters as true family members. The church isn’t meant to be a collection of strangers. God intends for you to find a unified and purposeful household where you truly belong.

25 Days & 101 Ways to Move from Façade to Family

A Field Guide for Genuine Community

Enter the mind and practice of Zen: apply the insights of one of Zen's classic poems to your life--here and now. Destined to become a trusted, dog-eared companion. Shitou Xiqian’s “Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage” is a remarkably accessible work of profound depth; in thirty-two lines Shitou expresses the breadth of the entire Buddhist tradition with simple, vivid imagery. Ben Connelly’s Inside the Grass Hut unpacks the timeless poem and applies it to contemporary life. His book delivers a wealth of information on the context and content of this eighth-century work, as well as directly evokes the poem’s themes of simple living, calm, and a deep sense of connection to all things. Each pithy chapter focuses on a single line of the poem, letting the reader immerse himself thoroughly in each line and then come up for air before moving on to the next. Line by line, Connelly shows how the poem draws on and expresses elements from the thousand years of Buddhist thought that preceded it, expands on the poem’s depiction of a life of simple practice in nature, and tells stories of the way these teachings manifest in modern life. Connelly, like Shitou before him, proves himself adept at taking profound and complex themes from Zen and laying them out in a practical and understandable way. Eminently readable, thoroughly illuminating, Inside the Grass Hut shows the reader a path of wholehearted engagement—with the poem, and with the world. Destined to become a trusted, dog-eared companion.

Living Shitou's Classic Zen Poem

Inside the Grass Hut

Jeff Vanderstelt

Whether you're just beginning a relationship with Jesus or you've been a follower of Jesus for a long while, many of us have a hard time translating the truths we believe in our mind, to the reality of our everyday life. Given our tendency to wander away from God, we need both encouragement and tools to keep the gospel at the center of our action in the everyday stuff of our lives. This 8-week guide offers an all-of-life approach to being disciples who make disciples of Jesus. The questions, activities, prayers, and exercises will prompt you to do exactly that-put your thoughts and theology into hands-on practice. Designed for both group and individual use, each week will build on the next, aligning your heart with the will of God, examining your core identity beliefs, and launching you into mission. When God's people commit together to sow gospel seeds in the everyday rhythms of life, a ripple effect moves through our lives, out toward the whole earth, saturating it with the good news of Jesus.

Practices and Principles of Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life

Saturate Field Guide

Bob Roberts

Surprise – whoever you are, you’re a missionary! If you call yourself a follower of Jesus, God calls you his missionary. You may never go halfway around the world. You may not raise financial support. But because of God’s gospel work in you, you are on mission: to people in your work, school, neighborhood, and those in need. As everyday missionaries, God has sent us to live out his Great Commission in the ordinary, normal, all-too-busy, and even most mundane moments of our lives. But what exactly does an everyday missionary do? Where and when does this everyday mission happen? Most importantly, how can you possibly share the gospel, without killing your relationships?! Those are the types of questions A Field Guide for Everyday Mission answers for individuals, churches, small groups, Sunday schools, and missional communities. Many resources exist on missional theory, missional leadership, and even missional stories. But based on their years of helping people tangibly demonstrate the gospel, pastors and practitioners Ben Connelly and Bob Roberts Jr. have created an immediately implementable resource to help ordinary followers of Jesus put the idea of mission into everyday practice. Each day’s reading includes a biblical principle that can immediately be put into practice. Each reading ends with a few ways to help you live out the principle in your daily life. By the end of day 30, you’ll have 101 different ways to demonstrate the gospel in your daily life. And along the way, other practitioners such as Jeff Vanderstelt, Rick McKinley, and Lance Ford share stories about living on God’s everyday mission in their unique context. A Field Guide for Everyday Mission is a tool designed for you, whether you’re newly considering the missional idea, whether you’ve never heard the word before, or whether you’ve spent years trying to figure out how to put that idea into practice.

Ben Connelly

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