{"product_id":"the-interior-silence-10-lessons-from-monastic-life","title":"The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Inspirational\" - The Daily Mail  \"Sarah Sands has written about stillness with an eloquence that fizzes with vitality and wit. This wonderful book charts a journey to some of the most beautiful and tranquil places on earth  and introduces us to people whose inner peace is a balm for our troubled times. I loved every page of it.\" - Nicholas Hytner  Suffering from information overload  unable to sleep  Sarah Sands  former editor of the BBCs Today programme  has tried many different strategies to de-stress... only to reject them because  as she says  all too often they threaten to become an exercise in self-absorption.  Inspired by the ruins of an ancient Cistercian abbey at the bottom of her Norfolk garden  she begins to research the lives of the monks who once resided there  and realises how much we may have to learn from monasticism.  Renouncing the world  monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live: they labour  they learn and they acquire the interior silence. This book is a quest for that hidden knowledge - a pilgrimage to ten monasteries round the world.  From a Coptic desert community in Egypt to a retreat in the Japanese mountains  we follow Sands as she identifies the common characteristics of monastic life and the wisdoms to be learned from them; and as she discovers  behind the cloistered walls  a clarity of mind and an unexpected capacity for solitude which enable her  after years of insomnia  to experience that elusive  dreamless sleep.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44963192111157,"sku":"ByrdShop_1780724543","price":35.38,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781780724546.jpg?v=1770408621","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-interior-silence-10-lessons-from-monastic-life","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}