Skymind
The Radical Path of Open Awareness
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Tibetan Buddhist wisdom meets modern life in this powerful guide that teaches you to face inner obstacles with courage, embrace all of life’s experiences, and live with clarity and boundless awareness—even amid constant ups and downs.
Amid life’s relentless challenges, uncertainties, and endless striving, how do we find a sense of ease, clarity, and connection? Skymind offers a way to step back from life’s constant push and pull and discover the spaciousness and wholeness that has always been within you. Inspired by the revolutionary teachings of Machig Labdrön, an 11th-century Tibetan yogini who pioneered a radical approach to inner freedom, this book introduces Skymind meditation—a practice that helps you cultivate clarity, compassion, and resilience by resting in the sky-like nature of your mind.
Through simple exercises, contemplations, and Machig’s powerful verses, you’ll be guided to meet life’s challenges with courage and radical acceptance. These teachings invite you to embrace every part of your experience—even the emotions and thoughts you’d rather avoid—and discover the freedom that comes from including everything in your awareness. Whether you are new to meditation or a seasoned practitioner, Skymind offers profound insights and practical tools to help you live with authenticity, ease, and a heart as vast as the sky.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tibetan Buddhist teachers Rotterdam and Oosthuizen debut with a comprehensive introduction to Chöd, the practice of "severance" or "cutting through." Developed in the 11th century by the Tibetan Buddhist nun Machig Labdrön, Chöd teaches that reality, being, and mind are like the sky: all-inclusive, nondiscriminating, and ever-present. What keeps people from embracing them is a "root demon" that views the self as separate from the world, reinforcing the ego and causing suffering. Readers can "cut through" such attachments (to the self and the ego) via meditation practices that cultivate mindfulness and sharpen awareness, along with targeted reflections like considering what one is "holding and dragging around... unnecessarily." Such practices help practitioners understand their oneness with the world and enter into Skymind, "the vast, luminous radiance of being," where they can assume "radical responsibility" for their own lives and their role in the world's "ongoing dynamics of justice and injustice, freedom and suffering." Though repetitive descriptions of Skymind and nonduality occasionally slow things down, the authors' smart exercises and encouraging tone make for a compassionate yet urgent call for readers to embrace the full, undiluted reality of life. It's an excellent introduction to Chöd that honors the practice's roots without getting mired in doctrine.
