Spirituality Buddhism

Thich Nhat Hanh says that when we relax, we “become calm water, and we will reflect reality as it is. If we’re not calm, the image we reflect will be distorted. When the image is distorted by our minds, it’s not the reality, and it causes lots of suffering.” Relaxation is essential for accessing the tranquility and joy that lead to increased personal well-being. How to Relax includes meditations you can do to help you achieve the benefits of relaxation.

We’ve all heard platitudes about cultivating love and compassion, but how can we really develop these qualities in ourselves and—crucially—share them in our world? Khentrul Rinpoche teaches that regardless of what’s unfolding in our lives, our route to freedom lies in our minds—and how we work with them. The Power of Mind shares instructions that we can work through, one by one—from recognizing the preciousness and impermanence of our lives to avoiding drama and self-centeredness. This wisdom is accessible to anyone seeking inner transformation—Buddhist or not.

This classic memoir by the remarkable French explorer and Buddhist Alexandra David-Néel is the one of the greatest Buddhist travelogues of the 20th century. She was the first European woman to meet the Dalai Lama (in the 1920s) and in 1924 became the first to enter the forbidden Tibetan capital, Lhasa. She had already spent a decade travelling through China and Sikkim, India; lived and meditated in a cave on the Tibetan border; and everywhere learned about Buddhism from hermits, mystics and bandits.

Awakening Somatic Intelligence offers a guide to Somatic Learning, an innovative body-oriented approach that incorporates mindfulness, visualization, breathing exercises, postures, and stretches. Developed by author, psychotherapist, and award-winning songwriter and poet Risa Kaparo, PhD, Somatic Learning is based on leading-edge research demonstrating the power of the mind to activate physiological, mental, and emotional healing. Kaparo has successfully used her approach with patients suffering from chronic pain, high blood pressure, and mood disorders including depression and anxiety.

This is not your typical Zen book. Brad Warner, a young punk who grew up to be a Zen master, spares no one. This bold new approach to the "Why?" of Zen Buddhism is as strongly grounded in the tradition of Zen as it is utterly revolutionary. Warner's voice is hilarious, and he calls on the wisdom of everyone from punk and pop culture icons to the Buddha himself to make sure his points come through loud and clear.

Those moments in your life when there was openness, a spacious quality to your existence - those are the moments that truly make life remarkable. Creating those moments is the focus of this program by Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher who has studied and practiced meditation for many years.

Mention creativity, and what comes to mind? For many of us, creativity is the province of someone with a singular gift toiling away in service to their art. From this perspective, creativity is a solitary endeavor - the struggle of the individual to express their distinctive vision to the world. But what if we looked at creativity through a wider lens, as a dynamic force that animates us and connects us with every being on the planet? From this perspective, creativity is not just a spark igniting the fire of inspiration.

Compassion, kindness, equanimity, and joy are not only the fruits of the awakened life but also the path to it: attitudes of mind that can be cultivated by anyone willing to set the intention for doing so. Christina Feldman shows how these ennobling qualities - known in Buddhism as the brahma viharas (sublime abodes) or the Four Immeasurables - are far more than simply the "feel-good" states they are sometimes mistaken for.

Over a decade ago, when Writing Down the Bones first appeared, Natalie Goldberg started a revolution in the way we practice writing. Now, for the first time, Goldberg reads her classic work, while offering new commentary about the creative, spiritual, and practical dimensions of writing. This collector's edition also includes an exclusive interview with the author.

In The Gateless Gate, one of modern Zen Buddhism's uniquely influential masters offers classic commentaries on the Mumonkan, one of Zen's greatest collections of teaching stories. This translation was compiled with the Western listener in mind, and includes Koan Yamada's clear and penetrating comments on each case. Yamada played a seminal role in bringing Zen Buddhism to the West from Japan, going on to be the head of the Sanbo Kyodan Zen Community.

The question-and-answer format makes this introduction to Zen especially easy to understand - and also to use as a reference, as you can easily look up just the question you had in mind. The esteemed Zen teacher Norman Fischer and his old friend and teaching colleague Susan Moon (both of them in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind) give this collaborative effort a playful tone: Susan asks a question on our behalf, Norman answers it, and then Sue challenges him.

This rich, timely, and highly original portrait of the Buddha explores both the archetypal religious icon and Buddha the man. In lucid and compelling prose, Armstrong brings to life the Buddha's quest, from his renunciation of his privileged life to the discovery of a truth that he believed would utterly transform human beings and enable them to live at peace in the midst of life's suffering.

In Tantric Transformation, we are introduced to the sacred and ancient tradition of tantra by a contemporary tantric master Osho. We are given a detailed map of tantra: inner man, inner woman; the meeting of man and woman; the transformation of energy through sex, love, and meditation. Based on the Royal Song of Saraha, we are not just introduced to an Asian sex tradition, but with Osho we enter the higher levels of transformation. Here, we find tantra as a door to freedom.

How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and their Caregivers is a life-affirming, instructive, and inspiring book about living gracefully and purposefully with the challengesfaced by those with chronic pain or illness. These conditions, while not always life-threatening, are life-disrupting and stressful. The audiobook contains over two dozen tools and practices to help people live skillfully and to find equanimity and joy despite the profound changes in their lives.

Learn Buddhist principles that can help enrich your romantic life, your life in general, and the lives of those around you. Surely a happy marriage for a normally adjusted couple is a simple matter of give and take - some patience, tolerance, and just trying to be cheerful as often as possible. There is no shortage of books providing relationship advice that can help us with these matters. But Buddhist teachings address more than just surface knowledge and guide us to delve deeper into our psyches.

The Shadow is the part of us made up of all that we hide from others: our shame, our fears and our wounds, but also our divine spirit, our blinding beauty and our hidden talents. The Shadow is not bad—in fact it is the source of our creativity and power—but until we bring it into the light this power will remain untapped and our full potential unreached. This audiobook will show you how to fearlessly embrace your shadow side in both your dreams and daily life, thereby manifesting the awakened power of your full potential.

Yoga Nidra is considered to be the state in which the Gods reside. This is because the goal of Yoga Nidra is to attain complete relaxation while maintaining consciousness. The ability to do this allows for our deepest levels of creativity and healing energies to come to the surface. One session of Yoga Nidra is equal to approximately 3 hours of sleep in its ability to rejuvenate.

In frightening times, we wish the world could be otherwise. With a touch of imagination, it can be. Imagination helps us see what’s hidden, and it shape-shifts reality’s roiling twisting waves. In this inspiring reframe of a classic Buddhist teaching, Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes that the paramitas, or “six perfections” - generosity, ethical conduct, patience, joyful effort, meditation, and understanding - can help us reconfigure the world we live in.

Power is one of the central issues in our lives. From work to personal relationships, the struggle for power plays a pivotal role and, more often than not, prevents us from attaining freedom and happiness. The bottom-line mentality in our culture seeps unnoticed into every other part of our lives. Thich Nhat Hanh illustrates how our current understanding of power leads us on a never-ending search for external markers like job title or salary.

The most well-known Buddhist teachers on the planet all have something in common: they are excellent communicators. This is not by accident, as the Buddha taught what are called the four elements of right speech over 2,600 years ago. In this one-of-a-kind book, certified meditation and mindfulness instructor Cynthia Kane has taken the four elements of right speech and developed them into a modern practice based on mindful listening, mindful speech, and mindful silence.