Enlightened Bodies

Enlightened Bodies
Author: Lumpkin Khalsa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2015-12-15
Genre: Hatha yoga
ISBN: 9781934532003

This is an essential book for yoga enthusiasts and healthcare practitioners who are looking for a deeper understanding of the human body and ways to incorporate complementary health practices in their treatment plan. Enlightened Bodies inspires and elevates the approach and study of the human body, interconnecting anatomy, physiology, and ancient yogic teachings. Enlightened Bodies presents the complexities of the body in a refreshing and approachable style, integrating multiple perspectives including Human Anatomy, Ayurveda, Kundalini Yoga, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Self-Care, and other lifestyle traditions.This is an essential book for yoga enthusiasts and healthcare practitioners who are looking for a deeper understanding of the human body and ways to incorporate complementary health practices in their treatment plan."Yoga is an exceptional and time-tested form of preventive medicine. Whether a practitioner or teacher of yoga, it's nice to understand what's going on inside one's body and mind. This lovely book helps you do just that. In my view this is the right book for you right now" - Dr. Dharma Singh, in his foreword for Enlightened Bodies"This book is a public service for anyone interested in yoga including teachers and practitioners as well as those interested in going forward in the new field of yoga therapy. Also, it's for bodyworkers, spiritual people, and even high school students who want to learn more about how yoga can make them smarter and happier." Dr. Japa Kaur, co-author

A Death on Diamond Mountain

A Death on Diamond Mountain
Author: Scott Carney
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-03-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 069818629X

An investigative reporter explores an infamous case where an obsessive and unorthodox search for enlightenment went terribly wrong. When thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson died from dehydration and dysentery on a remote Arizona mountaintop in 2012, The New York Times reported the story under the headline: "Mysterious Buddhist Retreat in the Desert Ends in a Grisly Death." Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, was struck by how Thorson’s death echoed other incidents that reflected the little-talked-about connection between intensive meditation and mental instability. Using these tragedies as a springboard, Carney explores how those who go to extremes to achieve divine revelations—and undertake it in illusory ways—can tangle with madness. He also delves into the unorthodox interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Thorson and the bizarre teachings of its chief evangelists: Thorson’s wife, Lama Christie McNally, and her previous husband, Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University, where Thorson died. Carney unravels how the cultlike practices of McNally and Roach and the questionable circumstances surrounding Thorson’s death illuminate a uniquely American tendency to mix and match eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces in a quest to reach an enlightened, perfected state, no matter the cost. Aided by Thorson’s private papers, along with cutting-edge neurological research that reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain and stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes, A Death on Diamond Mountain is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.

Zen Body-Being

Zen Body-Being
Author: Peter Ralston
Publisher: Frog Books
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2006-07-27
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9781583941591

A Zen-inspired “physical education” program for martial arts practitioners and anyone interested in mind-body transformation Using simple, clear language to demystify the Zen mindset, Ralston draws on more than three decades of experience teaching students and apprentices worldwide who have applied his body-being approach. More of a transformative guide than a specific list of exercises devoted to any particular physical approach, Zen Body-Being explains how to create a state of mental control, enhanced feeling-awareness, correct structural alignment, increased spatial acuity, and even a greater interactive presence. Exercises are simple, often involving feeling-imagery and meditative awareness, which have a profound and sometimes instant effect. Areas of exploration include: • Beginner’s Body-Being • Three aspects of body awareness • Five principles for an effortlessly effective body • Opening a door--five steps to transformation • Fourteen points on structural alignment Where similar guides teach readers what to do, this book teaches readers how to be.

Embodied Enlightenment

Embodied Enlightenment
Author: Amoda Maa Jeevan
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1626258414

In Embodied Enlightenment, contemporary spiritual teacher Amoda Maa Jeevan dispels the outdated view of a transcendent enlightenment and instead presents a new, feminine expression of awakened consciousness for all—one that is felt and known through what our everyday lives are made of: our emotions, bodies, intimate relationships, work, and life’s purpose. This book is a direct invitation to awaken in a profound, embodied way, and to participate in a collective evolution that can create a new world. When many of us think of enlightenment, we may envision a life of seclusion and contemplation, transcending the body and worldly attachments, or the achievement of karmic perfection. But what if, rather than something reserved for the mountaintop meditator or sage, the call to awaken is meant for us all? And how can we consciously live that awakening in the midst of our complex, messy, modern lives? Speaking from her own awakened experience, Amoda Maa Jeevan offers a timeless wisdom, busting some of the common myths about enlightenment and addressing topics often excluded from more traditional spiritual conversations—from the connection between consciousness and the body to relationships to planetary health. In addition, she covers the unfamiliar territory of what happens after enlightenment, delving into awakened action, creative expression, and more. There’s an urgency today to evolve beyond humanity’s current ego-based paradigm, and along with it, a unique expression of enlightenment is emerging. With clarity, passion, and grace, Embodied Enlightenment invites you on an exploration of consciousness that embraces both the messiness of your earthly experience and the non-duality of pure awareness, offering guidance on how your daily life can bring you into alignment with a divine destiny of individual and collective awakening.

Passionate Enlightenment

Passionate Enlightenment
Author: Miranda Shaw
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1995-10-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780691010908

Anyone who reads a Tantric text or enters a Tantric temple immediately encounters a pantheon of female Buddhas and a host of female enlighteners known as "dakinis," who dance and leap in joyous poses that communicate a sense of mastery and spiritual power. This striking female imagery is fully compatible with Shaw's findings. Drawing on interviews and archival research conducted during two years of fieldwork in India and Nepal, including more than forty previously unnoticed works by women of the Pala period (eighth through twelfth centuries C.E.), she substantially reinterprets the history of Tantric Buddhism during its first four centuries. In her view, the Tantric theory of this period promotes an ideal of cooperative, mutually liberative relationships between women and men while encouraging a sense of reliance on women as a source of spiritual insight and power.

Enlightenment Now

Enlightenment Now
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0525427570

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Boundless Healing

Boundless Healing
Author: Tulku Thondup
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2001-10-16
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0834828332

This book offers simple meditation techniques to awaken healing energies in the body and mind. Using Buddhist principles as a basis, Tulku Thondup has created a universal guide that anyone can use. It will benefit those who want to preserve good health as well as those who need comfort and relief from illness or mental distress. Boundless Healing offers: • Ways to employ the four healing powers: positive images, positive words, positive feelings, and positive belief • Detailed healing exercises that can be done individually or as part of a twelve-stage program • Exercises for dispelling anxiety • Healing prayers for the dying and the deceased, plus advice for helpers and survivors These meditations draw on our innate capacity for imagination and memory, our natural enjoyment of beauty, and our deep-seated longing for a state of quiet calm. For all those who wish to become healthier, happier, and more peaceful in everyday life.