Tibetan Buddhism

This audiobook by Pema Chödrön, the renowned American Buddhist nun, offers short, stand-alone sections 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, leading the listener through essential concepts, themes, and practices on the Buddhist path.

Lojong is a powerful Tibetan Buddhist practice created especially for training the mind to work with the challenges of everyday living. It teaches our hearts to soften, reframes our attitude toward difficulty, and allows us to discover a wellspring of inner strength. In this recorded retreat, Pema Chödrön introduces the lojong teachings and explains how we can apply them to any situation in our life—because, as Pema says, "every moment is an opportunity for awakening."

Devotion to one's teacher is the lifeblood of the Vajrayana path. Because the guru can and will use whatever means it takes to wake us up, this relationship may require us to drop our most deeply held beliefs and expectations. Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse addresses some of the most misunderstood aspects of this powerful relationship and gives practical advice on making the most of this precious opportunity for transformation.

Meditation teacher Tenzin Wangyal introduces powerful practices to help you connect deeply with your authentic nature and heal your soul, so you can lead a more joyful and fulfilling life. Drawing on traditional soul-retrieval teachings of Tibetan Bön Buddhism, Tenzin Wangyal offers practical guidance for overcoming feelings of disconnection and dissatisfaction, and reawakening your inherent creativity, playfulness, and sense of ease.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides intimate details on an advanced meditation practice called Dzogchen using a visionary poem by the 19th-century saint Patrul Rinpoche, author of the Buddhist classic Words of My Perfect Teacher. The Dalai Lama deftly connects how training the mind in compassion for other beings is directly related to - and in fact a prerequisite for - the very pinnacle of Buddhist meditation.

The Venerable Ayya Khema was beloved for her crystal-clear presentation, the extremely practical guidance she always gave, and the open-hearted quality of her teachings. In The Path to Peace, she presents a complete course in the active and intentional process to cultivate peace through metta, unconditional love. Peace is the sum of many parts, namely the fifteen wholesome qualities the Buddha himself noted in the Metta Sutta, including usefulness, mildness, humility, contentment, receptivity, and others.

Given the abundance of funerary artifacts that have been found within the sands of Egypt, it sometimes seems as though the Ancient Egyptians were more concerned with the matters of the afterlife than they were with matters of the life they experienced from day to day. This is underscored most prominently by the pyramids, which have captured the world’s imagination for centuries.

For thousands of years, humans have been using Tibetan singing bowls for healing and meditation. Their vibrations open up energies, stimulate the mind and have a wholesome effect on the body. Enjoy the mystical powers of the singing bowls. Their pulsating sounds allow the body to vibrate in resonance, which supports self-healing processes and letting go of tension. Treat yourself to a state of complete deep relaxation that calms the nervous system, regenerates the body and lifts up the soul.

In this gripping account, John Avedon draws on his work and travels with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama to bring us the riveting story of Tibet and its temporal and spiritual leader. Included is an extensive interview with the Dalai Lama, who speaks about the conditions in Tibet, the mind of a Buddha, and the events of his life. Rigorously researched, passionately written, the original edition of In Exile From the Land of Snows was instrumental in launching the modern Tibet movement when it was published in 1984.

This lucid overview of the Buddhist path takes the perspective of the three "vehicles" of Tibetan Buddhism: the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. While these vehicles are usually presented as a historical development, they are here equated with the attitudes that individuals bring to their Buddhist practice. Basic to them all, however, is the need to understand our own immediate condition. The primary tool for achieving this is meditation, and The Essence of Buddhism serves as a handbook for the various meditative approaches of Buddhist practice.

On the spiritual path we speak of enlightenment. But how do we reconcile the idea of enlightenment with what we see when we look in the mirror - when insecurities, doubts, and self-centered tendencies arise in our minds? Dzigar Kongtrül suggests that we need not feel "doomed" when these experiences surface. In fact, such experiences are not a problem if we are able to simply let them arise without judging them or investing them with so much meaning. This approach to experience is what Kongtrül calls self-reflection.

"Everyone dies, but no one is dead," goes the Tibetan saying. It is with these words that Advice on Dying takes flight. Using a 17th-century poem written by a prominent scholar-practitioner, His Holiness the Dalai Lama draws from a wide range of traditions and beliefs to explore the stages we all go through when we die, which are the very same stages we experience in life when we go to sleep, faint, or reach orgasm (Shakespeare's "little death").

Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness is a series of meditation practices on Emptiness, a particular aspect of the Buddha's teachings. The idea is that by beginning with one's first rather coarse commonsense understanding, one progresses through increasingly subtle and more refined stages until one arrives at complete and perfect understanding. Each stage in the process prepares the mind for the next in so far as each step is fully integrated into one's understanding through the meditation process.

Tibetan monks have held anti-aging secrets in the Himalayan Mountains for centuries but now share them with the Western world. In the Western world, there's nothing more mysterious and more confusing to our Western sensibilities and culture than that of the East, especially when it comes to religious practices. In fact, there are so many people in the West that don't really have a firm grasp on what it means to be Buddhist, a Taoist, a Confucian, or any of the other Eastern philosophies that populate the world.

One of the earliest of all Buddhist texts, the Atthakavagga, or Book of Eights, is a remarkable document, not only because it comes from the earliest strain of the literature - before the Buddha, as the title suggests, came to be thought of as a "Buddhist" - but also because its approach to awakening is so simple and free of adherence to any kind of ideology. Instead the Atthakavagga points to a direct and simple approach for attaining peace without requiring the adherence to doctrine.

El llamado Libro Tibetano de los Muertos "Bardo Thodol" ha sido reconocido durante siglos como un clásico de la sabiduría budista. Más recientemente, ha alcanzado gran influencia en el mundo occidental por sus penetraciones psicológicas sobre el proceso de la muerte, y por lo que puede enseñarnos acerca de nuestras vidas. También ha resultado de ayuda en los procesos de duelo de algunas personas que recientemente han perdido a algún ser querido, el "Bardo Thodol" esta dividido en dos libros.

In December 2010 residents of Kalimpong, a town on the Indian border with Tibet, turned out en masse to welcome the Dalai Lama. It was only then they realized for the first time that the neighbor they knew as the noodle maker of Kalimpong was also the Dalai Lama's older brother. The Tibetan spiritual leader had come to visit the Gaden Tharpa Choling monastery and join his brother for lunch in the family compound.

At their first meeting, a remarkable bond was sparked between His Holiness the Dalai Lama, one of the world's most revered spiritual leaders, and the psychologist Paul Ekman, whose groundbreaking work helped to define the science of emotions. Now these two luminaries share their thinking about science and spirituality, the bonds between East and West, and the nature and quality of our emotional lives. In this unparalleled series of conversations, the Dalai Lama and Ekman prod and push toward answers to the central questions of emotional experience.

In this masterwork of an authentic spirit person (Thomas Berry), Buddhist teacher and anthropologist Joan Halifax Roshi delves into the fruitful darkness - the shadow side of being, found in the root truths of Native religions, the fecundity of nature, and the stillness of meditation. In this highly personal and insightful odyssey of the heart and mind, she encounters Tibetan Buddhist meditators, Mexican shamans, and Native American elders, among others.

The term meditation is often spoken of as a single, uniform practice, but in fact there are innumerable techniques that can be employed to achieve different ends. However, to make real progress in any practice, the methods need to be paired with a view of how our minds and our experience of the world around us really work. In this uncommonly practical and experiential guide, Phakchok Rinpoche teaches us how to achieve this correct view so we can genuinely practice a meditation that will transform our lives by helping us abandon our own bad habits and hypocrisy.