Buddhism focuses on compassion and balance. When your world is turned upside down due to the loss of a loved one, or some other traumatic event, how do you incorporate the balance of life? How is it possible to have compassion for others when you feel the world has stripped away the very thing that is the key to your own life and left you raw, alone and empty? Guy Newland writes of his own loss in the book A Buddhist Grief Observed in a deeply personal account of his own life and the journey to it, through it, and from it. An honest and deep sense of the connections most people go through and can identify with it, while grasping at meaning and purpose are laid out in a black and white text which is brilliant and colorful in the words and emotions which are described along the way.

 “So it is that when someone asked me in the early months whether my familiarity with Buddhist teachings on emptiness had consoled me in my grief, my reflexive answer was just no. All I could think of was Valier, empty or not, was definitely around here before and now she is definitely not. And that hurts.”

Newland philosophizes on his own life choices and how to restore normalcy which won’t and can’t ever be the same. Along the journey Newland shapes and highlights the clarity through the path or understanding that life is bigger than the why and more often just is. A Buddhist Grief Observed is a deeply passionate story which would serve any spiritual person well during their most difficult time in life, and possibly awaken their own faith along the way.

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