In a collaboration between the Frenchwoman Alexandra David-Neel and her friend, the Tibetan lama Aphur Yongden, these teaching are presented clearly and elegantly, intended for the layman who seeks a way to practice and experience the realization of oneness with all existence."...this is the most direct, no-nonsense, and down-to-earth explanation of Mahayana Buddhism that has been written. Specifically, it is a wonderfully lucid account of the Middle Way method of enlightenment worked out by the great Indian sage Nagarjuna." —Alan Watts, The Book"The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden, is always on my night stand. I return to it again and again in different stages of my life." —Marina Ambramovic"David-Neél herself is often relegated to the ranks of "women adventurers" this despite the production of some forty-odd books, several of which have wielded an extraordinary influence." —Harry Oldmeadow, La Trobe University, Bendigo, AustraliaAlexandra David-Neel was born in 1868 in Paris. In her youth she wrote an incendiary anarchist treatise and was an acclaimed opera singer; then she decided to devote her life to exploration and the study of world religions, including Buddhist philosophy. She traveled extensively to in Central Asia and the Far East, where she learned a number of Asian languages, including Tibetan. In 1914, she met Lama Yongden, who became her adopted son, teacher, and companion. In 1923, at the age of fifty-five, she disguised herself as a pilgrim and journeyed to Tibet, where she was the first European woman to enter Lhasa, which was closed to foreigners at the time. In her late seventies, she settled in the south of France, where she lived until her death at 101 in 1969.

    Today's young Muslims will be tomorrow's leaders, and yet too many are vulnerable to extremist propaganda that seems omnipresent in our technological age. The burning question, Ghobash argues, is how moderate Muslims can unite to find a voice that is true to Islam while actively and productively engaging in the modern world. What does it mean to be a good Muslim?What is the concept of a good life? And is it acceptable to stand up and openly condemn those who take the Islamic faith and twist it to suit their own misguided political agendas? In taking a hard look at these seemingly simple questions, Ghobash encourages his sons to face issues others insist are not relevant, not applicable, or may even be Islamophobic. These letters serve as a clear-eyed inspiration for the next generation of Muslims to understand how to be faithful to their religion and still navigate through the complexities of today's world. They also reveal an intimate glimpse into a world many are unfamiliar with and offer to provide an understanding of the everyday struggles Muslims face around the globe."

    With wit and candor, Patchett tells her own story of attending college, graduating, and struggling with the inevitable question, What now?From student to line cook to teacher to waitress and eventually to award-winning author, Patchett's own life has taken many twists and turns that make her exploration genuine and resonant. As Patchett writes, "'What now?' represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life." She highlights the possibilities the unknown offers and reminds us that there is as much joy in the journey as there is in reaching the destination.

    Since his death in 1987, countless readers have been challenged to encounter DeMellos message.

    According to Adyashanti, this idea may actually be the most powerful impediment to our awakening. On Spontaneous Awakening, he invites you to inquire into the “ordinary nature” of enlightenment—and the profound truth of who you really are. “Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special—it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred,” teaches Adyashanti. So where do we start? With the desire to look fearlessly at and inquire passionately into truth, explains Adyashanti. “When you stop resisting experience, what remains is the bliss of sheer nothingness. And everything that is possible lives in that nothingness.” With more than seven hours of teachings, two guided meditations, and an exclusive Sounds True interview, Spontaneous Awakening is an eye-opening program that explores topics including: The self-authenticating nature of spiritual discovery• The link between personal awareness and awareness itself• How attachment can lead to complete freedom and unattachment• Why genuine spiritual knowing requires mental subtraction—not addition.

    Part chronicle of an extraordinary life and part spiritual and philosophical discourse, The Tao of Wu is a nonfiction Siddhartha for the hip-hop generation-an engaging, seeking book that will enlighten, entertain, and inspire.The legions of Wu-Tang fans are accustomed to this heady mix-their obsession with the band's puzzlelike lyrics and elaborate mythology has propelled the group through fifteen years of dazzling, multiplatform success. In his 2005 bestseller The Wu-Tang Manual, the RZA provided the barest glimpse of how that mythology worked. In The Tao of Wu, he takes us deep inside the complex sense of wisdom and spirituality that has been at the core of his commercial and creative success.The book is built around major moments in the RZA's life when he was faced with a dramatic turning point, either bad (a potential prison sentence) or good (a record deal that could pull his family out of poverty), and the lessons he took from each experience. His points of view are always surprising and provocative, and reveal a profound, genuine, and abiding wisdom-consistently tempered with humor and peppered with unique, colloquial phraseology. It is a spiritual memoir as the world has never seen before, and will never see again.

    Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, Katharine Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Clementine Churchill, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and many more.

     Centered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person grew into the exuberant woman she was meant to be all along by battling the demons within and winning.Jen did not intend to become a yoga teacher, but when she was given the opportunity to host her own retreats, she left her thirteen-year waitressing job and said “yes,” despite crippling fears of her inexperience and her own potential. After years of feeling depressed, anxious, and hopeless, in a life that seemed to have no escape, she healed her own heart by caring for others. She has learned to fiercely listen despite being nearly deaf, to banish shame attached to a body mass index, and to rebuild a family after the debilitating loss of her father when she was eight. Through her journey, Jen conveys the experience most of us are missing in our lives: being heard and being told, “I got you.” Exuberant, triumphantly messy, and brave, On Being Human is a celebration of happiness and self-realization over darkness and doubt. Her complicated yet imperfectly perfect life path is an inspiration to live outside the box and to reject the all-too-common belief of “I am not enough.” Jen will help readers find, accept, and embrace their own vulnerability, bravery, and humanness.

    I bump along, in fits and starts, on a perpetual path to finding better ways for me and my mate, Anxiety, to get around. It's everything I do.Sarah Wilson—bestselling author and entrepreneur, intrepid solver of problems and investigator of how to live a better life—has helped over 1.2 million people across the world to quit sugar. She has also been an anxiety sufferer her whole life.In her new book, she directs her intense focus and fierce investigatory skills onto this lifetime companion of hers, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism her own experiences.Sarah pulls at the thread of accepted definitions of anxiety, and unravels the notion that it is a difficult, dangerous disease that must be medicated into submission. Ultimately, she re-frames anxiety as a spiritual quest rather than a burdensome affliction, a state of yearning that will lead us closer to what really matters.Practical and poetic, wise and funny, this is a small book with a big heart. It will encourage the myriad sufferers of the world's most common mental illness to feel not just better about their condition, but delighted by the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life.

    Elegant and honest… one of those rare books that finds its way into our hearts, and stays there.” — Ann Hood, author of The Knitting CircleA meditation on silence, the art of being present, and simple spirituality from critically acclaimed novelist Anne D. LeClaire (Entering Normal, The Lavender Hour), Listening Below the Noise offers a practical path to achieving calm, peaceful solitude in hectic lives. Practitioners of yoga and meditation of various traditions have long known the curative powers of stillness; in Listening Below the Noise, LeClaire offers her own unique, compelling version of this ancient wisdom tradition.

    The most potential you can have on your contemplative path is a trusted teacher like Jack Kornfield, who stands out as one of the most helpful and encouraging Western instructors for newcomers to the art of meditation.With Guided Meditation, this renowned Buddhist teacher brings you six practices that will open the door to the serenity and joy of meditation, and serve as your foundation for years to come.Offering you precise guidance through every step of these transformational practices, Kornfield introduces you to:Basic sitting practice—The essential starting point for nurturing nonjudgmental spaciousness• The heart-opening techniques of lovingkindness and forgiveness meditation to help you discover liberation from suffering• A visualization exercise for overcoming difficulties by making direct contact with the voice of your highest wisdom• The gratitude and joy meditation, which nourishes an innocent rejoicing in life itself• Mind Like Sky—a practice to enter "original mind," the pure space of awareness that is consciousness itselfSince the time of the Buddha, meditation taught under the guidance of an expert has proven to be the easiest and most effective way to begin. Whether you are just starting out with meditation or have decided to reconnect with the ground of your practice, Jack Kornfield's Guided Meditation provides concise and gentle training of the heart and mind to enjoy the fruits of this centuries-old art.Course objectives:Apply the six guided meditation practices to cultivate love, awareness, and wisdom• Practice each of the six guided meditation practices as a way to cultivate stillness and "knowing"• Explore mindfulness practices related to awareness of the breath, loving kindness, forgiveness, visualization, gratitude, and the spaciousness of consciousness

    In the Dam Square in Amsterdam, long-haired young people wearing vibrant clothes and burning incense could be found meditating, playing music and discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness and the search for an inner truth. They were a generation refusing to live the robotic and unquestioning life that their parents had known.At this time, Paulo is a young, skinny Brazilian with a goatee and long, flowing hair who wants to become a writer. He sets off on a journey in search of freedom and a deeper meaning for his life: first, with a girlfriend, on the famous “Death Train to Bolivia,” then on to Peru and later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina.His travels take him further, to the famous square in Amsterdam, where Paulo meets Karla, a Dutch woman also in her 20s. She convinces Paulo to join her on a trip to Nepal, aboard the Magic Bus that travels across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. They embark on a journey in the company of fascinating fellow travelers, each of whom has a story to tell, and each of whom will undergo a transformation, changing their priorities and values, along the way. As they travel together, Paulo and Karla explore their own relationship, an awakening on every level that brings each of them to a choice and a decision that sets the course for their lives thereafter.

    Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers.The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.Jacobs's quest transforms his life even more radically than the year spent reading the entire "Encyclopedia Britannica" for "The Know-It-All." His beard grows so unruly that he is regularly mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. He immerses himself in prayer, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, battles idolatry, and tells the absolute truth in all situations - much to his wife's chagrin.Throughout the book, Jacobs also embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally. He tours a Kentucky-based creationist museum and sings hymns with Pennsylvania Amish. He dances with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and does Scripture study with Jehovah's Witnesses. He discovers ancient biblical wisdom of startling relevance. And he wrestles with seemingly archaic rules that baffle the twenty-first-century brain.Jacobs's extraordinary undertaking yields unexpected epiphanies and challenges. A book that will charm readers both secular and religious, "The Year of Living Biblically" is part Cliff Notes to the Bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to put it down.

    But it wasn’t always roses for Pete. Growing up, Pete was raised an evangelical Christian, but his religion taught him that being “bad”—smoking, drinking, having doubts or premarital sex—would get him sent to an eternity in hell. So, terrified of the God he loved, Pete devoted his life to being “good,” even marrying his first girlfriend at the age of twenty-two only to discover a few years later he was being cheated on. Thanks for nothing, God.Pete’s failed attempt at a picture-perfect life forced him to reexamine his beliefs, but neither atheism, nor Christianity, nor copious bottles of Yellow Tail led him to enlightenment. Pete longed for a model of faith that served him and his newfound uncertainties about the universe, so he embarked on a soul-seeking journey that continues to this day. Through encounters with mind-altering substances, honing his craft in front of thousands of his comedy fans, and spending time with savants like Ram Dass, Pete forged a new life—both spiritually and personally.Beautifully written and often completely hilarious—imagine Dass’s Be Here Now if penned by one of the funniest people alive—Comedy Sex God reveals a man at the top of his game and a seeker in search of the deeper meanings of life, love, and comedy.

    They had signed up for this lovely New Age weekend down in Florida -- what was going on with this Natalie Goldberg? I knew only a handful had read any of my books. How was I going to leap over this mess smoothly and talk about writing practice, where I was on solid ground? I mentioned the horses from the seminar title -- ahh, relief on their faces -- they had come to the correct lecture hall after all.Then everything dropped away. I had nothing to say.•••So begins the journey by one of America's favorite writing teachers. Natalie Goldberg has inspired millions to write to develop an intimate relationship with their minds and a greater understanding of the world in which they live. Now, through this honest exploration of her own life, Goldberg puts her teachings to work.In this wry, nimble memoir, Natalie Goldberg candidly depicts her father, Ben, an old-fashioned man's man who knew no boundaries -- a trait that was at once his greatest strength and most profound weakness. In capturing the essence of this larger-than-life Jewish bartender, she reveals the intricacies of a precarious father-daughter relationship. The tenuous bond with her father leads her in many directions and ultimately to Dainin Katagiri Roshi, a dynamic, celebrated Zen master. In light of an eye-opening discovery that shakes her ideal of this beloved teacher, Goldberg revisits her many years of loyal practice under Roshi's guidance.Elegantly weaving these tales together, this story is finally a search for truth when there are no easy answers. Filled with Goldberg's trademark gifts for both humor and teaching, The Great Failure touches our hearts and minds as we come to recognize the ways in which we fail to confront our illusions.