Daju Suzanne Friedman

Zen Cancer Wisdom

With a much-needed sense of levity, Daju Suzanne Friedman teaches the art of keeping one’s body, mind, and spirit together while living with cancer.

“Layman Wang once asked his attendant,‘What would you do if a dragon suddenly arrived here?’ His attendant answered, ‘I wouldn’t pay attention to anything else.’ This is how it feels when you’ve been diagnosed with cancer. Your attention and focus shift dramatically towards just this one thing. While single-minded focus can be beneficial, it is also important to remember that you are more than your diagnosis, and that there is more to life than being a patient.”
—from the introduction

In Zen Cancer Wisdom, Daju Suzanne Friedman—Zen teacher, Chinese medicine doctor, and Qigong specialist—shares the inspirations, insights, and humor that helped her to continue to live fully in the face of cancer. With sections devoted to soothing the spirit, harnessing the mind, nourishing the body, and qigong stretches for soothing aches and pains, Friedman provides thoughtful guidance on topics ranging from hair loss and constipation to coping with stress and learning to laugh again. Each chapter begins with an anecdote drawn from the Zen tradition, followed by personal reflection, and a brief guided practice specifically for cancer patients. Pocket-sized, with short, buoyant chapters, and meditation exercises designed to be practicable anywhere in only a few minutes time, Zen Cancer Wisdom is the perfect companion book for cancer patients.

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Zen and Psychotherapy

This book is an intimate dialogue that examines the interplay of emotional and spiritual development through the lens of Zen Buddhism and psychotherapy. Zen and Psychotherapy artfully illuminates the intrinsic connections between the two practices, and demonstrates how the traditions can be complementary in helping to live a truly fulfilled and contented life.

Zen teacher and psychologist Joseph Bobrow deftly shows how the major themes of trauma, attachment, emotional communication, and emotional regulation play out in the context of Zen and of psychotherapeutic practice, and how, in concert, both provide a comprehensive, interactive model of fully functioning human life.

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The Foundations of Mindfulness

In this course, you’ll discover some of the most meaningful and profound applications of mindfulness, under the guidance of renowned scholar-monk Venerable Bhikkhu Anālayo and a group of expert guest teachers.

Note: As an act of Dhammadāna, Ven. Anālayo has waived royalty payments for this course.

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Tibetan Yoga

While yoga has been popularized in the West as a practice for physical health and well-being, the ancient practices of Tibetan yoga have often remained secretive.

Now, in this groundbreaking new Wisdom Academy course, Dr. Alejandro Chaoul explains the history of the trul khor, or magical movements, guides you through each yogic posture and movement, and teaches you to work with your body and breath to expand your meditation practice and cultivate well-being in your day-to-day life. Dr. Chaoul has spent the last thirty years studying, translating, and practicing the trul khor. Now with the blessing of contemporary masters—including the late His Holiness Lungtok Tenpai Nyima Rinpoche, His Eminence Yongdzin Lopon Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche—he is sharing these precious and rare teachings with you, in a format that allows them to be accessible to a modern audience.

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How to Be Sick: Your Pocket Companion

You won’t be alone when you have this pocket-sized treasure of transformative practices, written by beloved bestselling author Toni Bernhard.

In 2001, Toni got sick and never recovered. As she faced the confusion, frustration, and despair of a life that was suddenly severely limited, Toni had to learn how to be sick.

In this easy-to-use, easy-to-carry book, Toni shares practices from her bestselling classic How to Be Sick and also offers new suggestions and strategies for coping with a life impacted by chronic pain and illness. Because the book is organized by specific challenges, you can immediately find practices that can help when they’re needed most.

With this book in hand, you will discover the experiential wisdom that has helped Toni live a life of equanimity, compassion, and joy, despite her physical and energetic restrictions—and, sometimes, because of them. In the pages of this loyal companion, you’ll find help, solace, and inspiration, no matter what life challenge you’re facing.

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Creating a Life of Integrity

Creating a Life of Integrity is our personal trainer for strengthening our integrity muscles.

When we don’t speak or act from our own sense of integrity, we feel lousy. Find out how you can live with more integrity—and subsequently more joy—as you follow these lively conversations between Joseph Goldstein, a founder of the modern mindfulness movement, and Gail Stark, a businesswoman and his student and friend of twenty-five years.

As Joseph and Gail unpack the components of integrity—generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, courage, patience, truthfulness, resoluteness, loving-kindness, and equanimity—we discover each is a step on a path that transports us to an empowered place of clarity, commitment, and, consequently, more joy. As we strengthen and weave these qualities into our daily lives they become our trusted first response in a world that needs our integrity now.

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Dharma Matters

Jan Willis was among the first Westerners to encounter exiled Tibetan teachers abroad in the late sixties, instantly finding her spiritual and academic home. TIME Magazine named her one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium,” both for her considerable academic accomplishments and for her cultural relevance. Her writing engages head-on with issues current to Buddhist practitioners in America, including dual-faith practitioners and those from marginalized groups.

This collection of eighteen scholarly and popular essays spans a lifetime of reflection and teaching by Willis. Grouped in four sections—Women and Buddhism, Buddhism and Race, Tantric Buddhism and Saints’ Lives, and Buddhist-Christian Reflections—the essays provide timeless wisdom for all who are interested in contemporary Buddhism and its interface with ancient tradition.

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Inspiring Forgiveness

Sometimes forgiveness can feel unfathomable, unreachable, or even just plain wrong. Inspiring Forgiveness throws wide open the doors of possibility within the human heart with the wise words of philosophers, writers, poets, and great thinkers from across centuries and continents. Each offering can serve as a guidepost along the path to bringing greater forgiveness into our lives. This book also tells the stories of real-world people—from the Dalai Lama to Congressman John Lewis and more—whose lives were changed forever by forgiveness, including for themselves. Just bearing witness to these experiences can itself be transformative.

One wise teacher quoted in this book, Pema Chödrön, offers a simple practice for cultivating forgiveness: “First we acknowledge what we feel—shame, revenge, embarrassment, remorse. Then we forgive ourselves for being human. Each moment is an opportunity to make a fresh start.” This book is a collection of those moments.

Inspiring Forgiveness consists of twelve true stories of people who have endured great pain at the hands of others and have found a way to open themselves to forgiveness in its many forms. Each story is followed by extraordinary poems that speak to forgiveness, and the book contains a collection of over 100 inspiring quotations.

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The Foundations of Mindfulness

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What, Why, How

Everything you ever wanted to know but never had a chance to ask about meditation and Buddhist spiritual practice, from one of the greatest mindfulness teachers of our time.

How can I fit meditation into my busy life?
How should I understand karma and rebirth?
Is enlightenment even possible for me?

Sound familiar? If you’ve ever meditated or studied Buddhism, you may have found yourself asking these questions—and many more! Here’s the good news: there are answers, and you’ll find them all in this book. Imagine that you could sit down with one of Buddhism’s most accomplished and plainspoken teachers—and imagine that he patiently agreed to answer any question you had about meditation, living mindfully, and key Buddhist concepts—even the myriad brilliant questions you’ve never thought to ask! What, Why, How condenses into one volume a half-century of Bhante G.’s wise answers to common questions about the Buddha’s core teachings on meditation and spiritual practice. With his kind and clear guidance, you’ll gain simple yet powerful insights and practices to end unhealthy patterns and habits so that you can transform your experience of the world—from your own mind to your relationships, your job, and beyond.

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Bearing the Unbearable

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is an acclaimed bereavement counselor and bereaved mother herself. In this course, she reveals how grief can open our hearts to connection, compassion, and the very essence of our shared humanity. Over the course of these ten lessons we learn what grief is and how we can identify its effects within ourselves. Dr. Cacciatore guides us through the Selah model of grief, which emphasizes not overcoming grief but rather creating space for it in our lives in a threefold way: by being with our grief, surrendering to it, and finally, doing with our grief—or transfiguring it into compassionate action in the world. Dr. Cacciatore opens a space to process, integrate, and deeply honor our grief, with her lessons augmented by guided meditations and yoga exercises by co-teacher and fellow counselor Karla Helbert. Through this course, you’ll not only learn how to care for yourself in your grief but also how, by staying with the pain, we can make the world a beautiful place for the ones we have loved and lost.

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The Zen of R2-D2

Did you ever wonder why R2-D2 is

• always calm and cool under pressure,
• the key to the rebellion’s survival, and
• the one who never fails to save the day?

Could it be because he’s secretly a Zen master?

Discover your inner R2—and the truth about who you really are! 

This delightful and illuminating romp unfolds in the form of a fictional dialogue between the author—a die-hard Star Wars devotee with a deep connection to Zen—and two cosplayers dressed as C-3PO and R2-D2 who insist on being called by their character names. Along the way, you’ll come to see what everyone’s favorite astromech can teach us about peace, happiness, and life’s true meaning.

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The Death of You

If you might someday die, 

 if you know someone who will . . .

Join Miguel Chen for a wild ride where we get real about death—and even have a few laughs at its expense. In plainspoken, kind, and encouraging language, Miguel will show you how to transform your relationship with death—and in doing so, get to know your life in a whole new way. Today is the perfect day to start. Don’t wait . . . you’re not gonna live forever.

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Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck

“How do I make a living doing what I love?”
“Am I a sellout as an artist if I want to be successful?”
“How do I integrate my spiritual principles with the art of running a business? And actually, um, how do I run a business?”

Are you struggling to reconcile your calling with your need to make a living wage? Are you wondering what to do once your art starts selling, or how to achieve success in your field, or what it even means to be successful?

In Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck, David Nichtern—a beloved Buddhist teacher and successful musician, composer, and producer who has worked with the likes of Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, and Lana Del Rey—offers his lived, learned experience as an entrepreneur, musician, and Buddhist teacher to first help you figure out what “success” means to you and then show you how to get there. If you’re trying to align your spiritual, creative, and financial pursuits and discover what it means to truly live well, this book is for you.

“Everybody has a hungry heart. We are hungry for so many different kinds of food. The table is set and the meal is laid out for us…but how do we put that food into our mouths and TASTE IT? In this book, David Nichtern guides us with wisdom, joy, and humor to make our whole lives a tasty meal to be enjoyed and shared with others.”—Krishna Das, author of Chants of a Lifetime and Grammy-nominated kirtan artist

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Sculpting the Buddha Within

Sculpting the Buddha Within is the first major biography of Shinjo Ito, the founder of the Shinnyo-en tradition of Buddhism and one of the twentieth century’s most innovative spiritual teachers. Ito was schooled in Shingon, the millennium-old esoteric Buddhism of Japan, and used that as the basis for developing a unique lay practice grounded in the principles and concepts of the Mahayana version of the Nirvana Sutra.

Ito’s wish was to help his practitioners see their own potential for goodness so that they, too, would be inspired to work diligently to shape and give form to their inner buddha. Rather than encouraging his followers to believe in a fixed system of practice or beliefs, Ito taught how to live life in accordance with one’s buddha nature—and the gratitude, creativity, and happiness latent within it.

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What Makes You So Busy?

Khenpo Sodargye, a world-famous Tibetan Buddhist lama and scholar, offers guidance on an issue that troubles so many of us in the modern world:  What is true happiness, and how do we achieve it? 

Bombarded with information, endlessly pursuing possessions—we look for happiness in all the wrong places. Khenpo Sodargye, one of the busiest Buddhist teachers in the world, shows us how to redirect our attention away from such distractions and instead calm our minds and find true contentment.

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The Illustrated Lotus Sutra

The Lotus Sutra is regarded as one of the world’s great religious scriptures and most influential texts. It’s a seminal work in the development of Buddhism throughout East Asia and, by extension, in the development of Mahayana Buddhism throughout the world. Taking place in a vast and fantastical cosmic setting, the Lotus Sutra places emphasis on skillfully doing whatever is needed to serve and compassionately care for others, on breaking down distinctions between the fully enlightened buddha and the bodhisattva who vows to postpone salvation until all beings may share it, and especially on each and every being’s innate capacity to become a buddha.

This illustrated edition features more than 110 full-page and two-page illustrations by a world-renowned and award-winning artist, and brings the fantastical and image-filled world of the Lotus Sutra vividly to life. Demi’s illustrations are both classical and contemporary in feel, perfectly complementing Reeves’s masterful and modern translation.

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Bearing the Unbearable

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore is an acclaimed bereavement counselor and bereaved mother herself. In this course, she reveals how grief can open our hearts to connection, compassion, and the very essence of our shared humanity. Over the course of these ten lessons we learn what grief is and how we can identify its effects within ourselves. Dr. Cacciatore guides us through the Selah model of grief, which emphasizes not overcoming grief but rather creating space for it in our lives in a threefold way: by being with our grief, surrendering to it, and finally, doing with our grief—or transfiguring it into compassionate action in the world. Dr. Cacciatore opens a space to process, integrate, and deeply honor our grief, with her lessons augmented by guided meditations and yoga exercises by co-teacher and fellow counselor Karla Helbert. Through this course, you’ll not only learn how to care for yourself in your grief but also how, by staying with the pain, we can make the world a beautiful place for the ones we have loved and lost.

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Wholehearted

“Intimacy is based on the willingness to open ourselves to many others, to family, friends, and even strangers, forming genuine and deep bonds based on common humanity. Koshin Paley Ellison’s teachings share the way forward into a path of connection, compassion, and intimacy.”

—His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Each of us has an enormous capacity for love—a deep well of attention and care that we can offer to ourselves and others. With guidance that is both simple and wholly transformative, Koshin Paley Ellison, Zen teacher and psychotherapist, shows us how to uncover it: pay attention, be of service, and be with others.

With this inspiring and down-to-earth book, drawn from the Zen precepts and illustrated with anecdotes from Koshin’s own life and practice, you’ll learn how to

• explore and investigate with your own core values,
• identify the mental habits that could be unconsciously hurting yourself and others, and
• overcome isolation.

Each chapter closes with a contemplation to help integrate the teachings into your life.

This book is about getting back in touch with your values, so you can live energetically, authentically, and lovingly. This is an invitation to close the gaps we create between ourselves and others—to wake up to ourselves and the world around us.

It’s time to live wholeheartedly.

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