A self-help book for those who want to heal themselves from pain and suffering using Buddhist meditation.

In 2000, incapacitating headaches nearly destroyed Richard Ellis's career. He suffered from the pain and, even more, from his outrage over the pain. His experiences with all but one of the doctors he consulted were disastrous. Their only response to the pain was to prescribe pills, which changed his personality and drained all his intellectual and emotional energy. One wise doctor recommended meditation.

Buddhist teachings and daily meditation empowered Richard to heal the suffering caused by both his physical and emotional pain. The pain, once his brutal enemy, became his best teacher, inviting him to let go of the suffering and the image of himself as a victim. "As I have learned," explains Richard, "so can you also learn to reexamine your experiences with suffering and pain and eventually to embrace your life with equanimity, gratitude and joy."

Blinding Pain, Simple Truth: Changing Your Life Through Buddhist Meditation, Richard Ellis, Rainbow Books, Paperback, 239 pages, $16.95

Richard S. Ellis grew up in Boston and attended Harvard, where he majored in mathematics and German literature. He earned his Ph.D. at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He then taught at Northwestern University and in 1975 joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is now a professor. Richard has published numerous papers in mathematics and related areas and is the author of two math books (the second with Paul Dupuis), which explore the theory of large deviations in probability theory. Richard's experiences while living in Israel in 1982 and 1986 inspired him to teach the Torah and to lead a Jewish faculty group at UMass Amherst. These activities led to his appointment in 1998 as an adjunct professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at UMass Amherst, where he has taught courses on the Book of Genesis, the Book of Job, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He has also published articles on the Torah, literature, art, and anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Richard has lectured widely on his work in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. He has also had extensive experience with Buddhist meditation, having led a number of meditation groups and participated in retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. His personal web page offers detailed information about his work and his interests and can be viewed at http://www.math.umass.edu/~rsellis.