Divine Laziness: The Art of Living Effortlessly - Paperback

by Jeremy Cole (Author)

Award-winning guide to living with freedom and ease by feeling more and doing less. This book is about learning to align our actions with our real intentions and developing that as an art form. It's about letting go of what doesn't matter. Drawing on various time-honored spiritual traditions-primarily Buddhism and Taoism, but several others are drawn in their wake-this book explores the effortless engagement with life that lies deep in the heart of these traditions. Such an effortless way of living can be cultivated in our lives, but doing so requires that we forgo the tendency to try forcing things be a certain way, a tendency that is prevalent in modern life. Instead, through learning to feel the nuances of every now, we may align our actions with the natural momentum inherent in each moment, rather than pushing against it. Then our doing can be effortless. This effortlessness, this well-tuned non-resistance to the way things are, I have come to call Divine Laziness (as opposed to sheer laziness, which just doesn't care), and its cultivation in our lives is the art of living effortlessly. The guiding principles of this living art are sensitivity and effortlessness. These two enhance one another, and both are developed through training. This book paints an outline of such a training, and it also reveals how the art forms we already follow with love are smuggling a heart of Divine Laziness. It describes how training in any true art form can take us right to the freedom and ease that waits at the heart of our lives. As one example I describe my own training within the traditional Chinese martial art of Wing Chun, which I have found to be Divine Laziness in action. This book also explores the training in moral uprightness and stillness of mind and heart that must form the bedrock of a life of freedom and ease. Divine Laziness: The Art of Living Effortlessly was the winner of the Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust Literary Awards 2017 (unpublished manuscript category). These annual awards are open to authors in the Mind/Body/Spirit genre.

Author Biography

Jeremy Cole has trained and worked over the years as a jeweller, a musician, a homeopath and, most recently, a web developer. Though diverse, these varied roles have been stitched together by a thread of contemplative inquiry, and each in their own way have contributed to and been shaped by that inquiry. Jeremy has been practicing meditation for the past twenty years, primarily within the Thai Forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism, which has allowed him to develop heartening relationships with its monastic and lay communities. He has also had a long-standing affair with the martial arts, most notably the traditional Chinese art of Wing Chun. This training, perhaps above all else, has been fruitful in weaving a coherent whole from the various parts of his life. And this integration, and the sensitivity and effortlessness that Wing Chun training requires, have led to the writing of this book. He lives on the coast in New Zealand, his homeland, with his partner Kate and a flock of seagulls.