By combining the teachings of Zen with the modern science of psychology, the authors have forged a new path to peace and healing. The method is accessible regardless of spiritual background, and requires less than half an hour a day.

Experienced practitioners Gerry Shishin Wick and Ilia Shinko Perez have drawn from a wide array of disciplines to create the Great Heart Method. It transcends the erstwhile limitations of Zen, which sometimes can be used to deny feelings and personal problems, but uses meditation as an effective means of identifying and working through mental blockages. The book focuses on restoring a heart-mind connection, compassionately healing one's wounded inner self, and fully experiencing difficult emotions with nonjudgmental awareness in order to fully transform them.

The Great Heart Way: How To Heal Your Life and Find Self-Fulfillment, Gerry Shishin Wick & Ilia Shinko Perez, Wisdom Publications, Paperback, 199 pp, $16.95

Gerry Shishin Wick is a Soto Zen roshi, author, oceanographer and abbot of Great Mountain Zen Center in Berthoud, Colorado, which he founded in 1996. He is one of the twelve Dharma Successors of the late Taizan Maezumi, receiving Dharma transmission and a Denkai (precept transmission) from him in 1990. Prior to it, for 24 years he underwent Zen training with Maezumi, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and Sochu Suzuki Roshi. He remained the president of White Plum Asanga, a Zen school in the Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi lineage, from 2007 to 2014.[1] He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held a variety of jobs in the scientific community as well as an adjunct teaching position at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He also administered the Zen Center of Los Angeles and the Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and Human Values from 1978 to 1986. In 2006, Wick received inka from Bernard Glassman. He was acknowledged as a roshi in 2000 at White Plum Asanga, where he remained the president from 2007 to 2014, when he retired as an eldery.


Ilia Shinko Perez, Roshi, MA received transmission in the Zen tradition from Gerry Shishin Wick, Roshi in 2000. She is the co-spiritual leader of the Great Mountain Zen Center and abbess of Maitreya Abbey in Berthoud, Colorado. Roshi Shinko is co-author of The Great Heart Way.

CONTENTS: The Great Heart Way
	Introduction		1
1.	Recovering Creativity and Consciousness		13
2.	The Royal Road to the Unconscious		31
3.	The Heart-Mind Connection		47
	Exercises		73
4.	The Ego's Fixed Images of Self		77
	Exercises		93
5.	Releasing Fixed Images		95
	Exercises		116
6.	Transforming Negative Karma		119
	Exercises		142
7.	The Great Heart Practice		145
	Appendices
		Summary: Eight Steps on the Great Heart Way	161
		Exercises	163
	Acknowledgments		173
	Notes		175
	Bibliography		189
	Index		195
	Acknowledgments		173