Christopher Ives

Zen on the Trail

Evoking the writings of Gary Snyder, Bill Bryson, and Cheryl Strayed, Zen on the Trail explores the broad question of how to be outside in a meditative way. By directing our attention to how we hike as opposed to where we’re headed, Ives invites us to shift from ego-driven doing to spirit-filled being, and to explore the vast interconnection of ourselves and the natural world. Through this approach, we can wake up in the woods on nature’s own terms.

In erudite and elegant prose, Ives takes us on a journey we will not soon forget.

This book features a new prose poem by Gary Snyder.

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Meditations on the Trail

Meditations on the Trail offers a rich array of do-anywhere meditations that will help you explore and deepen your connection to nature, and yourself, in new ways, making the most of your time on the trail.

This small book—perfect for throwing in a daypack or a back pocket as you head out for the trail—is filled with practices to take you into the heart of the natural world and uncover your most vibrant self. You’ll return home grateful, more aware of interconnection, and maybe just a little wiser.

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Koshin Paley Ellison: Making All of Life a Place of Practice (#125)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast, recorded live as a Wisdom Dharma Chat, features a conversation with Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison. Koshin is an author, Zen teacher, Jungian psychotherapist, and certified chaplaincy educator. Koshin and host Daniel Aitken discuss the Commit-to-Sit: 90-Day Commitment to Practice he ran earlier this year; his most recent book, Wholehearted; his wisdom for making all of life a place of practice, from the bedsides of the dying, to intimate relationships, and to the heart of New York City and beyond.

Remember to subscribe to the Wisdom Podcast for more great conversations on Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness. And please give us a 5-star rating in Apple Podcasts if you enjoy our show—it’s a great support to us and it helps other people find the podcast. Thank you!

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Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche: Dharma for Difficult Times (#124)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast, recorded live as a Wisdom Dharma Chat, features a conversation with beloved teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

Rinpoche and host Daniel Aitken discuss

• practice during lockdown (this episode was recorded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic),
• working with anxiety and stress,
• how to choose which teachings to follow,
• how to understand the nature of your mind,
• how Rinpoche structures his teachings for his students,
• and much more.

Rinpoche is the author of several bestselling books and oversees the Tergar Meditation Community, an international network of Buddhist meditation centers. He is the son of the renowned meditation master Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and was formally enthroned as the seventh incarnation of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche by Tai Situ Rinpoche when he was twelve years old. When he was twenty years old, Rinpoche was appointed as the functioning abbot of Sherab Ling Monastery. In addition to his extensive background in meditation and Buddhist philosophy, Mingyur Rinpoche has held a lifelong interest in psychology, physics, and neurology. He teaches regularly throughout Europe, North and South America, and Asia.

Remember to subscribe to the Wisdom Podcast for more great conversations on Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness. And please give us a 5-star rating in Apple Podcasts if you enjoy our show—it’s a great support to us and it helps other people find the podcast. Thank you!

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Guy Armstrong: Illuminating Emptiness (#121)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast, recorded live as a Wisdom Dharma Chat, features a conversation with beloved teacher Guy Armstrong. He and host Daniel Aitken discuss many aspects of Guy’s journey into Dharma and his practice with many famous Theravadin masters, as well as themes of interest to Guy, like emptiness.

Guy has been leading insight meditation retreats since 1984 in the United States, Europe, and Australia. He is the author of the Wisdom book Emptiness: A Practical Guide for Meditators and taught a Wisdom Academy online course based on the book. His training included living as a monk for a year in the Thai forest lineage. Guy is a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council and a guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society. He lives in Woodacre, California.

Remember to subscribe to the Wisdom Podcast for more great conversations on Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness. And please give us a 5-star rating in Apple Podcasts if you enjoy our show—it’s a great support to us and it helps other people find the podcast. Thank you!

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The Mindful Menopause Workbook

Coming soon! This book will be published in November 2021. Enter your name and email below to be notified when the book is available for purchase.

The Mindful Menopause Workbook will help you bring mindfulness into your day-to-day activities during menopause. The teachings, exercises, and meditations will show you how to recognize and achieve a more balanced, peaceful, and joyful orientation to whatever you experience at menopause and beyond. 

A year’s worth of daily teachings will offer you micro-moments of self-care and self-development—mentally, physically, and spiritually. Following each teaching is space for you to journal whatever thoughts, emotions, or sensations arise. The exercise section includes an illustrated guide to yoga postures and outlines sequential poses that foster greater ease and awareness of the body, while the guided meditations and breath exercises promote body-mind unity through expanded peaceful awareness. The book addresses issues common to women during menopause sensitively and gives recommendations for dealing with common complaints such as insomnia, fatigue, low energy and libido, anxiety, depression, hot flashes, physical discomfort, poor digestion, and weight gain. 

Together, these teachings, exercises, and reflections will help you approach menopause mindfully, and joyfully, as you deepen your practice and transition into a new stage of life. 

“The Mindful Menopause Workbook is an ideal companion for navigating the transitional tidal waves of feminine growth. It is a great resource to rejuvenate the heart, mind, and body as you step into the next phase of life with renewed hope, confidence, and wisdom. Francesca Dupraz-Brossard has mapped out exciting pathways for women to appreciate and connect with their heart, mind, and body with love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, and to rediscover the beauty of their lives.”
—Dr. Charika Marasinghe, PhD, trustee, Vishva Niketan International Peace Centre

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Tibetan Yoga

Coming soon! This book will be published in November 2021. Enter your name and email below to be notified when the book is available for purchase.

Discover ancient Tibetan yogic practices that integrate body, breath, and mind on the journey to personal cultivation and enlightenment.

Tibetan Yoga offers accessible instructions for performing the ancient yogic techniques of Tibet’s Bön religion. This is Tibetan yoga, or trul khor, a deeply authentic yogic practice.

Drawing on thirty years of training with Bön’s most senior masters as well as advanced academic study, Dr. Alejandro Chaoul offers expert guidance on practices that were first developed by Bön masters over a millennia ago, framing them according to the needs of contemporary yoga practitioners and meditators.

No matter their level of experience, dedicated practitioners of Tibetan yoga will discover their ability to clear away obstacles and give rise to meditative states of mind. In Tibetan Yoga, you’ll learn what it means to practice for the benefit of all beings and to experience your body as a mandala, from center to periphery. These movements help you live in a more interconnected mind-breath-body experience, with benefits including better focus, stress reduction, the elimination of intrusive thoughts, better sleep, and general well-being.

“Alejandro Chaoul offers the gift of his lifelong passion for studying the ancient tradition of Tibetan Yoga so that we may all benefit from these practices. Whether you are looking to heal your heart, body, or mind, this book sets forth a clear path to aid in your journey toward wholeness.”
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Change

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Awake Where You Are

Coming soon! This book will be published in November 2021. Enter your name and email below to be notified when the book is available for purchase.

“Embodied awareness is the way back home—intimacy with where and how we are right now, with what is happening and how we are meeting it. This book will lead you into the heart of your life, into your body, where everything happens—with quality of listening rather than knowledge, of feeling rather than reaction. Practicing in this way is radically transformative.”
—Martin Aylward

Pulled around by desires and distractions, we’re so easily disconnected from ourselves. Life is happening right in front of us, and within us—but still, we manage to miss so much of it.

Awake Where You Are provides the antidote, inviting us to go deep into our own bodies, to inhabit our sensory experience carefully; to learn the art of living from the inside out, and in the process to find ease, clarity, and an authentic, unshakeable freedom.

The practices in the book literally bring us back into our skin, where we can reconnect with a more rich, meaningful, and peaceful life. Aylward writes with sophisticated subtlety, as well as the heart-opening simplicity and clarity born of deep experience. 

More than a meditation guide, this book is a guide to living an embodied life. You’ll learn about the following areas and practices:

• • Understanding and liberating our primal human drives.
  • Integrating psychological understanding with meditative practice.
  • Investigating the nuances of love.

“Martin is a marvelous teacher and offers us the refreshing wisdom of an embodied life.”
—Jack Kornfield, author of No Time Like the Present

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Chris Ives: Meditations on the Trail (#115)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast features a conversation with writer, professor, and Wisdom author Chris Ives. Chris has published two books with Wisdom: Zen on the Trail: Hiking as Pilgrimage and Meditations on the Trail: A Guidebook for Self-Discovery, which came out on May 11, 2021. In this conversation, Chris and host Daniel Aitken explore the idea at the heart of these two books: that the hiking trail and the spiritual path can often be one and the same. When we bring a certain presence to our time in nature—whether it’s a city park or the Appalachian trail—that time can become a profound and spiritual experience. And our time in the outdoors can also lead to insights and wisdom that we can then take with us to the cushion, or wherever our spiritual practice takes place. Topics discussed include

• how to turn preparing for a hike into a mindfulness practice;
• shared values between spiritual practice and hiking, such as simplicity;
• how to prepare a mindful and respectful mind-state for entering the hiking experience;
• how to be more fully present while hiking;
• the difference between various terms that can be helpful for practicing mindful hiking, such as mindfulness, immersing yourself, and presencing;
• and much more.

Remember to subscribe to the Wisdom Podcast for more great conversations on Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness. And please give us a 5-star rating in Apple Podcasts if you enjoy our show—it’s a great way to support us and it helps other people find the podcast. Thank you!

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The Dharma of Well-Being

Welcome to The Dharma of Well-Being! In this course, drawn on insights and methods from both the Buddhist tradition and Western psychology and philosophy, B. Alan Wallace invites you to investigate the causes of both genuine unhappiness and genuine well-being. You’ll start by looking into what genuine well-being is before delving into what it is not as Alan explores the causes of suffering, mental afflictions, and unhappiness, along with the internal factors that often prevent us from being truly happy. He then turns to the causes of genuine happiness and offers skills, practices, and insights that will help you achieve genuine happiness and well-being in your own life.

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The Dharma of Well-Being

Drawing on insights and methods from both the Buddhist tradition and Western psychology and philosophy, B. Alan Wallace invites you to investigate the causes of both genuine unhappiness and genuine well-being. You’ll start by looking into what genuine well-being is before delving into what it is not as Alan explores the causes of suffering, mental afflictions, and unhappiness, along with the internal factors that often prevent us from being truly happy. He then turns to the causes of genuine happiness and offers skills, practices, and insights that will help you achieve genuine happiness.

We hope you’ll join us and take the next step on your path toward developing genuine well-being in your life.

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Exchanging Air with Trees

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Leo Babauta: Zen Habits (#111)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast, recorded live as a Wisdom Dharma Chat, features a conversation with simplicity blogger and bestselling author Leo Babauta.

Leo created Zen Habits, a Top 25 blog with over a million readers, when he started writing to chronicle and share what he’s learned while changing a number of habits, including waking early, losing weight, quitting smoking, becoming a runner, eliminating debt, and more. In this wide-ranging conversation, Leo shares some of his approaches to eliminating “bad” habits and developing “good” habits, explaining how bringing awareness to thought and behavior allows for examination of deeply embedded psychological patterns and is thus instrumental in creating sustainable change within oneself. 

Remember to subscribe and give the Wisdom Podcast a 5-star rating in Apple Podcasts if you enjoy our show!

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Storied Companions

“With my diagnosis of grade IV brain cancer, I no longer observe the truth of impermanence from a critical, analytical distance. I am crashing into it, or it into me.”

Facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, Karen Derris—professor, mother, and Buddhist practitioner—instinctually turned to books. By rereading ancient Buddhist stories with fresh questions and a new purpose in mind, she discovered evolving ways to make them immediate and real. Storied Companions interweaves Karen’s memoir of her lived experiences of trauma and terminal illness with stories from Buddhist literary traditions, sharing with the reader how she found ways to live fully even with the reality that she won’t live as long as she needs—or wants.

Using her knowledge, practice, and imagination, Karen illustrates how placing yourself within narratives can turn them from distant and static sources into companions, and from companions into guides. Reading along with her, you’ll realize how this practice of reading and these ancient narratives can help us come to terms with impermanence, develop empathy and compassion, and realize our own interconnectedness.

Honest, powerful, and insightful, Storied Companions itself becomes an invaluable companion, guiding the reader to discover new ways of facing and experiencing life, death, and impermanence.

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Mark Van Buren: Your Life Is Meditation (#107)

This episode of the Wisdom Podcast features an interview with Mark Van Buren, a mindful living trainer, yoga and meditation instructor, personal trainer, and musician who has been promoting health and wellness for over a decade. He’s the author of A Fool’s Guide to Actual Happiness and Your Life IS Meditation. 

Mark discusses:

• how it can sometimes feel like everyday life is in opposition to practice, and how we can transform our understanding of this seeming conflict;
• the ways in which he applies mindfulness in daily life, including how driving to work can be like working on a koan;
• how to turn interactions with difficult people into opportunities for practice;
• what it means to experience a “profound okayness”;
• and much more.

Correction: In this episode, Mark mentions 10,000 chants; he meant to say 100,000.

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John Tarrant Roshi: Koans, Uncertainty, and Insight (#103)

For this episode of the Wisdom Podcast, host Daniel Aitken speaks with Zen teacher John Tarrant Roshi about one of John’s favorite topics: Zen koans. As a meditation teacher, koans are a core foundation of John’s teaching methodology, and he has spent a lifetime refining his understanding of their function as a gateway to insight as well as a teaching tool. For John, a koan is not a gadget but a method and an environment. Instead of viewing Zen as a set of rules and procedures, he discusses koan practice as a creative process. Like a poet who trusts that the next line will appear in his or her poem, engaging with a koan requires a similar leap into uncertainty. Likewise, uncertainty can itself function as a method and an object of trust. John also speaks to the function of beauty, art, and music as being koan-like in their ability to spark insight.

A native of Australia, John also considers the parallels between Aboriginal spirituality and Buddhist practice and shares stories from his early years meditating in the rainforest that laid the foundation for his spiritual practice. The podcast concludes with John sharing a reading of “The Master Song Man: An Australian Koan” from his book Bring Me the Rhinoceros.

John is the Dharma heir of Zen teacher Robert Aitken and is also the director of the Pacific Zen Institute, which has centers in California, Arizona, and Canada.

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The Complete Illustrated Guide to Zen

The Complete Illustrated Guide to Zen offers a comprehensive overview of Soto Zen Buddhism in a delightfully captivating way. Complete with dynamic, detailed illustrations, Soto Zen Priest Seigaku Amato uses a semi-narrative style to take you on a visual tour of Buddhism and, using specifics to illuminate universals, dives deep into the practices and forms of Soto Zen.

Whether you are just taking your first step or have been practicing Zen for years, this creative and profound book will be a constant companion and guide on your journey as it explores topics such as: 

• A brief history of Buddhism
• An iconographic overview of various buddhas and bodhisattvas
• An introduction to the various practices of Zen including meditation (zazen), work practice (samu), and meditative eating (oryoki)
• A what’s what of holidays, ceremonies, temple instruments, and religious vestments
• A how-to guide for setting up a home altar

“This is a cute book! But it’s not just cute, it’s also deep and profound, and is one of the best guides to Zen practice I have ever come across. The illustrations are delightful and the written sections are clear and easy to understand. I give it a million zillion stars!”—Brad Warner, author of Hardcore Zen

“I loved this book and smiled the whole way through. But don’t be fooled by its whimsy! There’s a wealth of experience, knowledge, and devotion behind these illustrations. This book is a perfect guide for a beginning Zen student and makes a delicious snack for the more advanced practitioner.”—Gesshin Greenwood, author of Bow First, Ask Questions Later

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Meditations on the Trail

Meditations on the Trail offers a rich array of do-anywhere meditations that will help you explore and deepen your connection to nature, and yourself, in new ways, making the most of your time on the trail.

This small book—perfect for throwing in a daypack or a back pocket as you head out for the trail—is filled with practices to take you into the heart of the natural world and uncover your most vibrant self. You’ll return home grateful, more aware of interconnection, and maybe just a little wiser.

• Buy

The Dharma of Poetry

In The Dharma of Poetry, John Brehm shows how poems can open up new ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. Brehm demonstrates the practice of mindfully entering a poem, with an alertness, curiosity, and open-hearted responsiveness very much like the attention we cultivate in meditation. Complete with poetry-related meditations and writing prompts, this collection of lively, elegantly written essays can be read as a standalone book or as a companion to the author’s acclaimed anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.

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I See You, Buddha

An instant classic, this book will help children (and their parents) learn patience and to see the good in everyone—including themselves! It will also help children meet difficult circumstances, such as being sick, doing chores, and not getting everything they want—and help them overcome low self-esteem and negative self-talk.

I See You, Buddha is based on a chapter in the Lotus Sutra, one of the most influential Buddhist texts worldwide—a classical scripture that has inspired a whole genre of works, especially in Japan, known as Lotus Literature. The Lotus Sutra teaches the way of the bodhisattva—a being engaged in compassionate, enlightened activity in the service of all—by offering examples of what this activity might look like in the world. One such model in the text is Bodhisattva Never Disrespectful (or Never Disparaging), who, despite troubling encounters with and even harsh treatment from others, bows down respectfully to everyone, recognizing their Buddha nature and honoring their own journeys along the bodhisattva path to enlightenment—whether they know they’re future buddhas or not!

Listen to author Josh Bartok as he reads I See You, Buddha in this video reading.

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