Notes from the Cushion and the Kitchen Table: Insights from a Contemplative Life (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781923690158)

A small book came home from a Burmese monastery in a traveller's bag. Twelve years later it is still there - and these essays are what carrying it produced.

Notes from the Cushion and the Kitchen Table is a collection of contemplative essays about the part of the spiritual life almost no one writes about: the rest of the day. Not the retreat. Not the breakthrough on the cushion. The email that lands at the wrong moment. The neighbour's lawnmower. The favour done with a hidden invoice quietly attached. The person you decided about years ago and never really saw again.

Across sixteen essays - moving from a forest monastery in Myanmar to a suburban front garden - Quinn Path follows the plain, unflattering teachings of Burmese meditation master Sayadaw U Tejaniya into ordinary life and, more often than not, watches himself fail to live them. A frog crosses the drinking water at three in the morning and dismantles a lifelong idea of clean and unclean. A gecko clicks through the dark and becomes the monastery's smallest teacher. A missed wave ruins a whole surf session, and then a whole dinner. The result is a quiet, honest, frequently funny education in the small ways the mind fools itself.

This is everyday mindfulness writing for readers tired of five-step methods and manufactured serenity. There are no programs here, no stages, no promises of transformation - only the patient work of noticing, and the slow honesty that comes from doing it badly for years. If you love the contemplative memoir of Anne Lamott, Pema Chödrön, Cheryl Strayed, or Sarah Manguso, you will feel at home in these pages.

It is a book about insight meditation and the practice of letting go - of anger, of judgement, of the quiet story we keep about ourselves - written not from the mountaintop but from the kitchen table, where most of a life actually happens.

For anyone who has ever told themselves I've let it go - and quietly suspected they hadn't.