Unity & Oneness

Anger serves as a bodyguard for our personal pain and suffering. When book-love-and-rage.jpgrecognized and handled with attention, love, and compassion, it can be a powerful mobilizing factor in our solidarity and commitment to enacting social change. However, too many activist communities have an ill-informed, immature, and romanticized relationship to it. What is needed, says Owens, is a relationship to the heartbreak of anger that is embodied, nondestructive, and deeply healing for all. Here he offers personal insights, stories from others, as well as Buddhist teachings and meditations for tapping into anger’s liberating

In undertaking a spiritual life, we must make certain that our path is conbook-a-path-with-heart.jpgnected with our heart. Since 1974 (long before it gained popularity in the 1990s), Jack has been teaching westerners how to integrate Eastern teaching into their daily lives. Through generous storytelling and unmitigated warmth, Jack offers this guidebook on living with attentiveness, meditation, and full-tilt compassion. Part of what makes this book so accessible is Jack’s use of everyday metaphors to describe the elusive lessons of spiritual transformation. For example, he opens with “the one seat” lesson taught to him by his esteemed teacher. Literally it means sitting in the center of a room and not being swayed or moved by all the people and dramas happening around you. On a spiritual level it means sticking “with one practice and teacher among all of the possibilities,” he writes; “inwardly it means having the determination to stick with that practice through whatever difficulties and doubts arise until you have come to true clarity and understanding.” The same could be said for this “one book.” Among all the spiritual self-help books, this is a classic worth sticking with and returning to–a highly approachable teacher that can only lead to greater clarity and understanding. – Gail

Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, “The Prophet,” is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies. The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran’s musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death. –

Ishmael is a half ton silverback gorilla. He is a student of life, freedom, and the human condition. He is also a teacher. He teaches that which all humans need to learn — must learn — if our species, and the rest of life on Earth as we know it, is to survive. The book opens with a deceptively ordinary personals ad: “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world.” Seeking a direction for his life, a young man answers the ad and is startled to find that the teacher is a lowland gorilla named Ishmael, a creature uniquely placed to vision anew the human story. Ishmael’s paradigm of history is startlingly different from the one wired into our cultural consciousness. For Ishmael, our agricultural revolution was not a technological event but a moral one, a rebellion against an ethical structure inherent in the community of life since its foundation four billion years ago. Having escaped the restraints of this ethical structure, humankind made itself a global tyrant, wielding deadly force over all other species while lacking the wisdom to make its tyranny a beneficial one or even a sustainable one. That tyranny is now hurtling us toward a planetary disaster of pollution and overpopulation. If we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to work our way back to some fundamental truths: that we weren’t born a menace to the world and that no irresistible fate compels us to go on being a menace to the

There is a fundamental opportunity for happiness right within our reach, yet we usually miss it – ironically while we are caught up in attempts to escape pain and suffering. Drawn from traditional Buddhist wisdom, Pema’s radical and compassionate advice for what to do when things fall apart in our lives goes against the grain of our usual habits and expectations. There is only one approach to suffering that is of lasting benefit, Pema teaches, and that approach involves moving toward painful situations with friendliness and curiosity, relaxing into the essential groundlessness of our entire situation. It is there, in the midst of chaos, that we can discover the truth and love that are

The Presence Process> invites us to experience present moment awareness as a book-the-presence-process.jpgway of life. Author Michael Brown shows us how it’s possible to experience awareness of the present moment without having to take the long, challenging path most of us usually take as we attempt to live in the “now.” We all long to be free of our discomfort and experience inner peace. However, the attempt to get rid of our discomfort is misguided. We’re not broken and don’t need to be “healed.” Our difficulty is that our deeply suppressed emotional imprints from childhood distract us from an awareness of the present moment. Until this emotional charge from our past is integrated, our attempts to quiet our thoughts and access the peace, joy, and love that are bedrock to our being are of only limited success. Since presence is universal, it has the ability to manifest in our daily experience the very circumstances required for us to integrate the dysfunction that keeps us from experiencing the radiance of present moment awareness. We are each responsible for determining the quality of our personal experience, and The Presence Process guides us into taking responsibility for our emotional integration. It’s a way to consciously “grow