This book, designed for anyone interested in how meditation techniques can enhance a life, reveals how to do that from Buddhist perspectives. The author studied at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and lived for eight years among Tibetan refugees in Nepal.
The greatest hits are all here, including the importance of posture and breath in sitting meditation, renunciation, the Middle Way, life of the Buddha, Four Noble Truths, and the meaning of suffering and yanas (vehicles) for understanding it: awareness, compassion, and wisdom.
Unique are words such as “Vajra” and the teachings generally of Vajrayana Buddhism, associated with the Tibetan Buddhism tradition. Dahl comes to this in the final third. He explains: “The Vajrayana, or Vajra Vehicle, is rooted in the idea that awakening is not a goal or destination that we reach at the end of our journey. Rather, awakening is the true nature of our mind in this, and every, moment.” So, if the aim of meditation is to awaken us to who we truly are, then the process of doing so is self-discovery, becoming familiar with a part of ourselves we may not have realized we were.
Each person has an “awakened nature,” even if we don’t know it yet. Dahl began to set this out in an early chapter called “Coming Home,” included practices such as “finding a home in pure awareness,” but then concludes with a chapter called “Walking the Path” which begins with a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh: “Freedom is not given to us by anyone. We have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice.”
There, Dahl reveals his own shaky past as a meditator — on again, off again, only when he was feeling “inspired” — and then hopes that others will learn from his failures “the importance of surrounding ourselves with conditions that will support us on the path of awakening.” Several tools for this are offered, among them: “pith instructions” (condensed essential teachings), rituals and liturgies, practicing in retreat, and becoming a “householder yogi.”
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