Product Description

Pema Chodron provides us with the tools to deal with the problems and difficulties that life in the 21st century throws our way.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9205 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

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

Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
‘Pema’s deep experience and her fresh way of looking at things are like mountain water – clear and deep.’

Synopsis
Pema Chodron reveals the vast potential for happiness, wisdom and courage even in the most painful circumstances. Pema Chodron teaches that there is a fundamental opportunity for happiness right within our reach, yet we usually miss it -- ironically, while we are caught up in attempt to escape pain and suffering. This accessible guide to compassionate living shows us how we can use painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion and courage, ways of communication that lead to openness and true intimacy with others, practices for reversing our negative habitual patterns, methods for working with chaotic situations and ways to cultivate compassionate, energetic social action Recently profiled in Oprah's O magazine, Pema Chodron is a spiritual teacher for anyone -- whether they have a spiritual path or not. Her heartfelt advice and wisdom (developed in her 20 years of practice as a Tibetan Buddhist nun as well as her years previously as a normal 'housewife and mother') give her a wide appeal. This advice strikes just the right note, offering us comfort and challenging us to live deeply and contribute to creating a more loving world.

Customer Reviews

Essential reading
This book is a life-saver, I have already worn out my first copy and am on to the second. I can honestly say that it is the most helpful book I have ever read. Pema Chodron gets to the heart of life's problems and gives genuine, useful, sane advice. Buy it!

Comfort in a Book
A very gentle, calming, comfortable read, this book is taken from the transcripts of various talks which Chodron edited while taking a year out. She looks in detail at suffering and how to live with it rather than how to obliterate it. She mentions loss, addiction, distraction, boredom - the whole picture of what might be described as negativity. Not once does she say, 'Pull yourself together.' Instead the advice is to sit with your feelings, make friends with them and yourself, label your thoughts, meditate, treat yourself (and others) with loving-kindness. I feel like I've been hugged by a very wise and very compassionate being and will seek out more of her work.

Excellent
Amazing book in that everything the author wrote really connected with what I was feeling. You don't have to know anything about Buddhism to read this book - it is a great book for anyone who is struggling with life and looking for happiness.