About the Book
Fractures and Echoes is a project based simply on the author's story of learning and growing. This project has been about the nudges to share with others the author's own hard-learned lessons. It is written through the lens of conversations between a student and his teacher. The student is young and highly inexperienced. His reliance upon his teacher's guidance brings him to moments of deep reflection of his motives and intentions. The student is consistently challenged to prove his resolve in his commitments. In the face of the wisdom of his teacher, the student's true heart is revealed.
Each conversation is designed to stand alone and allow the reader the opportunity to reflect through his own experience. Each entry is a one page spread, with intention, to cater to a reader that may have limited time for leisure. In this way, the reader is provided with thoughtful seeds to consider that are elicited by new perspectives, emotional responses, or a combination therein.
The reader is invited to actively participate with the entries. The meditative format presented provides guidance in the creation of a space that allows the reader to attune to the lessons and awareness that may be received. Whether the reader chooses to read one page to the next or simply a single entry as so moved, there are guiding questions to prompt deeper reflections. The motivation is to allow the reader to open to the ways and nuances that each entry's lessons have operated in the reader's own life. As an adjunct, the reader will be provided with conscious language to give expression to insights that the reader might not otherwise have had access to.
Fractures and Echoes is intended to be the first installment of fifty entries with four additional volumes to follow. Each volume will build to capture a progression in the quality of the student's questions. Through the course of this series, the student is offered the opportunity to become the teacher, passing along all that has been learned to another generation.
About the Author
Coninyah was born in Chicago in 1974 to a family that valued education and service. Though he was raised by a single mom, alongside his sister, Coninyah learned at an early age to question why he felt disconnected from his family and from himself. His formative years were shaped by his affinity for poetry, science, and athletic competition. After graduating high school in Wheaton, Maryland in 1992, he graduated in 1996 from the United States Military Academy at West Point with a Bachelor of Science degree in General Engineering. Coninyah then spent 5 years as a military police officer in the US Army, which challenged his perspective of who he thought himself to be.
Resigning from the military left Coninyah questioning who he was outside of the context of the army. Traveling from job to job, he found his way to New Mexico where he earned a Master of Science in Oriental Medicine in 2006. Coninyah, along the way, also found teachers who would be instrumental in his course corrections. He would work to lay down dysfunctional habits of distraction and engage what would be his life's work that continues to unfold. Coninyah now teaches meditation and is a practitioner of the healing arts.