Author Description

What happens when one of America's best-known haiku poets joins forces with her psychologist husband to write a book? The answer: Take a Deep Breath: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace -- a unique collection of guided meditations, drawn from and experienced through the appreciation of haiku. Sylvia Forges-Ryan, an award-winning poet, and Edward Ryan, a Yale psychologist, have teamed up to introduce an original and heartfelt technique for relaxing: a combination of restful haiku with clear and simple instructions on how to draw out the insights each one contains, and use them for one's own well-being. Haiku are the perfect form for their exercises because they are the shortest of poems, with the longest of echoes. A good haiku distills a great deal of experience into a few phrases, and sets off a chain of thoughts that expand like the ripples in a pond. Each haiku here makes that little splash which creates a ripple of thought explored in the short commentary that follows. In today's fast-paced, high-pressure world, Take a Deep Breath can help anyone learn to slow down and take stock, relax and focus on the present moment, and find poetry and depth in their own lives.