Authenticity
Clearing the Junk: A Buddhist Perspective

Yifa

Softbound

$10.00

Do you find yourself overwhelmed by junk? Is your house full of stuff you don't know what to do with? Do you eat too much unhealthy food? Are you involved in destructive relationships? Do you find yourself surrounded by trivialities or engaged in meaningless conversation? Do you feel there's little of value in your life?

If the answer to any of these questions is "yes," then you'll want to read Authenticity. Clearly and compassionately, Ven. Yifa explores junk in all its ramifications: junk food, junk stuff, junk relationships, junk communication, and junk thoughts and feelings. She shows how our obsession with materialism, convenience, and the fast-paced nature of our society is diminishing our ability to connect wholeheartedly with others and making it harder for us to lead authentic lives. Through consciously separating out what is junk from what is genuine, she says, and through practicing right-mindedness, we can gain equanimity, clarity of purpose, true friendship, and the ultimate realization of our Buddha-nature.

Comfotable with Uncertainty
108 Teachings

Pema Chödrön

Hardbound, dustjacketed

$19.95

This is a great book for our times - which, as someone once pointed out, are just about any old time. Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön offers short, stand-alone readings designed to help us cultivate compassion and awareness amid the challenges of daily living. More than a collection of thoughts for the day, Comfortable with Uncertainty offers a progressive program of spiritual study. Inspired by the Buddhist tradition of the 108-day retreat, the book leads the reader through essential concepts, themes, and practices on the Buddhist path.

Comfortable with Uncertainty does not assume prior knowledge of Buddhist thought or practice, making it a perfect introduction to Chödrön's teaching. Through the course of this book readers will learn practical methods for heightening awareness and overcoming habitual patterns that block compassion.

Comfortable with Uncertainty is like a set of Buddhist prayer beads - 108 gems to guide and inspire!

The Places that Scare You

Pema Chödrön

Hardbound, Dust Jacketed

$21.95

We always have a choice, Pema Chödrön teaches: We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us and make us increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder. Pema’s previous works provided the inspiration and guidance to confront the problems and difficulties that life throws our way. Here she provides the specific tools to deal with them – to cultivate the awakened, compassionate ability to open our hearts and minds to our own suffering and that of others. This wisdom is always available to us, Pema teaches, but we usually block it with habitual patterns rooted in fear. Beyond that fear lies a state of openheartedness and tenderness. In The Places That Scare You, Pema Chödrön shows us how to:

• move toward what makes us feel insecure, uncertain, and fearful as a way to awaken our basic goodness and connect with others
• cultivate loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity
• accept ourselves and others, complete with faults and imperfections
• stay in the present moment by seeing through the strategies of ego that cause us to resist life as it is
• use “on-the-spot” practices to tap into natural reservoirs of humor, flexibility, courage, and wisdom
• establish a relationship with a spiritual teacher
  

Start Where You Are
A Guide to Compassionate Living

Pema Chödrön

Softbound

$12.95

Start Where You Are is a remarkable handbook for cultivating fearlessness and awakening a compassionate heart. Pema Chödrön, in her usual warm, down-to-earth way, presents guidance on how to make friends with ourselves and develop genuine compassion toward others. The author shows how we can "start where we are" by embracing rather than denying the painful aspects of our lives. She frames her teachings around the 59 slogans that form the framework of the lojong ("mind training") teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Each of these slogans focusses our attention on a different facet of our heart, gradually enticing it open, one step at a time.

Awakening Compassion
Meditation Practice for Difficult Times

Audio Learning Course

Pema Chödrön

6 Audio Cassettes - 7 hours - includes a 9-page study guide

Regular Price: $69.95

Our Price: $59.95

Awakening Compassion is an audio extension of Chödrön's book, Start Where You Are. I found it extremely helpful in better understanding how to use the lojong maxims and engaging in lojong meditations.

For more than 800 years, Tibetan Buddhists have used the practice of lojong, or "mind training," to transform difficulties into insights. Lojong training is grounded in a special meditation technique and complemented by 59 written maxims - a treasury of practical wisdom that inspires everyday awareness. On Awakening Compassion, Pema Chödrön, one of the Western world's best-known lojong teachers and practitioners, shows you how to use your own painful emotions as stepping stones to wisdom, compassion, and fearlessness.

You will learn how to make friends with the painful parts of your life experience and how to use your natural courage and honesty to transform even the most difficult situations. With an informal teaching style, both playful and insightful, Pema Chödrön makes this timeless way of bringing compassion into the world easy to understand and apply to your own life. More than seven hours of practical, compassionate guidance for shedding your cocoon and meeting your world with fresh appreciation. Includes 9-page booklet with lojong slogans and additional resources.

LEARN MORE ABOUT:

• How to see your life freshly, clearly, and vividly
• Using the lojong slogans to cultivate your bravery
• The attitude of a bodhisattva, or fully awakened person
• Practical techniques for working with jealousy, resentment, and rage
• How to open your heart in even the most difficult situations
• On-the-spot practices for dealing with anger, jealousy, and fear
• How to change the habits that shut you off from those who love you most
• The secret of transforming conflict into genuine communication.
  

The Zen of Recovery

Mel Ash

Softbound

$15.95

In this compelling blend of East and West, Mel Ash shows how Zen mind and practice connect to the heart of recovery. Courageously drawing from his own experience as an abused child, alcoholic, Zen student, and dharma teacher, Ash presents a practical synthesis of AA's Twelve Steps adn Zen's Eightfold Path.

You don't have to be Buddhist to appreciate the healing power of The Zen of Recovery. The book makes Zen available to all seeking to improve the quality of their spiritual and everyday life. It also includes practical instructions on how to meditate and put the book into action. It's message will help readers live more profoundly "one day at a time."

This is a really, really good book on the subject of recovery - one that I can recommend without reservation.

I love this from the notes about the author on the back page:

In spare moments he listens to music, wrestles with demons, points at the moon and sits on his porch drinking lots of black coffee.

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual

Jack Kornfield

Softbound

$18.00

Most spiritual accounts end with illumination or enlightenment. But what if we ask what happens after that? What happens when the Zen master returns home to spouse and children? What happens when the Christian mystic goes shopping? What is life like after the ecstasy?

From the author's introduction

I have given this book as gifts to more people than any other book I carry. Like myself, none of them considers themselves Buddhists. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry addresses one of our most pressing needs in such an immediate, accurate and (thankfully!) useful and healing way that it doesn't matter what one's personal or affiliations may be - this book will speak for your heart and to your heart, with a perspective that rings true and offers solutions. This is the book for anyone who has pursued the spiritual life with commitment and integrity and then found themselves - after years of gathering insight upon glorious insight - staring their own failure square in the face. Kornfield draws on the life stories of practitioners of Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, Islam, Hinduism and others - stories that demonstrate that the bright dawn of one's awakening is invariably followed by what the Christian tradition terms "the dark night of the soul." But these stories don't stop there - they allow us to follow others as they find their way back to a more truly wakeful daylight. The ways share many common traits along with uniquely creative moments. Kornfield also provides clear instruction for meditative practices (each addressing a key common issue) based on the Vipassana tradition where meditation is an invitation to "know thyself" in an intimate and compassionate way. Anyone who is past the salad days of their spiritual journey will love this book. Recommended without reservation!

A Path with Heart
A Guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life

Jack Kornfield

$15.95

In my opinion, Jack Kornfield is a master not only of meditation, but of a universal outlook toward spiritual experience. His understanding of the nature of inner transformation plums a depth sufficient to include a recognition of nearly every existing spiritual pathway. With his added gift of storytelling and warmth of humor, A Path with Heart brings alive, one by one, the challenges of spiritual living in the modern world. It is filled with practical techniques and (more importantly to me in this context) a discerning eye for the points in life where one's inner achievements lead to the discovery of an increased, not decreased, sense of separation from the world. Gently, humorously, Kornfield reminds us that this separation comes of having gone too far alone, of having left our heart behind in our quest for spiritual development. This is a great book - I hope many of you take the opportunity to read it.

A Beginner's Guide to Forgiveness
How to Free Your Heart and Awaken Compassion

Jack Kornfield

Audio CD, 74 minutes

$15.95

I believe that the most profoundly healing thing anyone can do - whether they want to heal themselves or to heal others or to heal our Earth - is to truly forgive. Anytime anyone can really forgive a wrong - including forgiving ourselves for wrongs committed - it shifts everything for everyone and gives us all fresher air to breath.

What is marvelous about Jack Kornfield's teaching on this CD is that in addition to discussing the nature of forgiveness and its many gifts, he also teaches a practice that, if done over time, opens the human heart and enables us to really forgive. The 'forgiveness meditation' which he teaches comes from his training as a Buddhist monk in Cambodia - it is simply amazing and is something I wish I could share with everyone, so powerful is its capacity to move us closer to being able to completely forgive even devastating wrongs. I can't think of anything the world needs more, than that we all come to be able to do this.

Through stories, teachings and guided meditation, Kornfield opens the way for us to understand

• how forgiveness and compassion are possible in situations of suffering
• how forgiveness can be coupled with strength and self-protection
• the practices that lead to forgiveness of yourself and others

This teaching is a gift toward freedom and love - enjoy!

When Things Fall Apart

Pema Chödrön

Papberbound

$12.95

I love this book. It is preeminently practical - it ought to forever put to rest the myth that Buddhism is for dreamers and those otherwise unconnected with modern life. Think of the most painful period of your life. Now, imagine that someone had told you, step by step, with love and enormous understanding, how to turn that pain into energetic, fundamental happiness right in the moment it is happening! And, how it is this fundamental happiness that is the true source of our growth and transformation. This is what Pema Chödrön, an American Buddhist nun and great lady, does on every page of When Things Fall Apart. I found that her wise insights and clear advice were like beacons shining light on the whereabouts of my core being, enabling me to regain balance quickly and once more rejoice at being alive.

As one of Pema Chödrön's grateful students, I have been learning the most pressing and necessary lesson of all: how to keep opening wider my own heart.

- Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple

Peace Is Every Step
The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Thich Nhat Hanh

Forward by
His Holiness
The Dalai Lama

$12.95

Modern life is so pressing, so stressful, so time consuming that we don't have time to meditate or savor the eternal peace present in each cosmic moment. Right? Not any more. Here are dishwashing meditations, starting the car verses, telephone meditations, ways cooking potatoes that illuminate vistas of truth - in short, a joyful, gentle guide that hands us the keys to peace in every moment of our very real-world lives. The gifts Thich Naht Hahn placed into this book are simple, easy-to-do, fun, and transformative. In short, just playing at the suggestions in this book can easily change your life and thereby, the world. Try it, you'll love it!

Healing Anger
The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective

The Dalai Lama

$14.95

Healing Anger is the translated transcripts of a series of lectures and workshops offered by the Dalai Lama in September, 1993. They are permeated with a wisdom and compassion that is so strong and so deep that even through the printed page they can move your heart to greater openness. There are several meditations given by the Dalai Lama through the course of the conference which can lead you to an increased compassion toward all life. This is a beautiful, healing book. We find ourselves joining the organizers of the conference in their wish for the Dalai Lama: "May he live long to turn the Wheel of Dharma for his people and for all people around the world who look to him as an example of enlightened compassion and kindness in a world too filled with distrust, conflict and anger."

Blue Cliff Record
Zen Echoes

David Rothenberg

Foreword by Sam Hamill

Softbound

$15.95

Blue Cliff Record is a poetic, personal rendering of the classical collection of Zen (Ch'an) Buddhist koans - those amazing paradoxes that are themselves keys to breakthroughs in insight, understanding, awareness. David Rothenberg has brought his own experience, sensibilities, and even questions to these verses that echo the fruit of their ancient inspiration. In so doing, he has made accessible a very difficult classical text, breathing into it new life, new energy. These 100 koans are an extraordinary collection; the rendering of Blue Cliff Record invites both seasoned meditators and students just beginning their quest to take of them, contemplate them, and discover their truth and their delight.