Ellen Birx, a Zen teacher, has a PhD in psychiatric-mental health nursing and for the past twenty years has been a professor at Radford University. She is the author of Healing Zen.
Other books by Ellen Jikai Birx:
Selfless Love
“A tribute to splendid marriage, [from] wise and spirited guides.”—Raphael Cushnir, author of Setting Your Heart on Fire
WAKING UP TOGETHER
Intimate Partnership on the Spiritual Path
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Waking Up Together is written for those who want to journey to new depths of intimacy, both spiritually and in their love relationship. The book shows how a committed, long-term relationship can enhance spiritual development and how relationships can be transformed by spiritual practice. Written by two Zen teachers married for thirty-seven years, it shows that relationships and all that arise from them can be a help—not a hindrance!—as we seek greater freedom and joy. It is possible to wake up together!
Going far beyond merely recommending skills and strategies to improve relationships, Waking Up Together serves as a guide in our ongoing process of spiritual discovery and intimacy. Throughout the book the authors intermingle stories and poems along with anecdotes from their married life, empowering couples to awaken to an ever-expanding experience of relationship that is full of spontaneity, mystery, awe, love, and unlimited possibility. Waking Up Together will be useful for couples of all persuasions. It affirms and encourages couples to cultivate the richness of their own relationship, and open to the unbounded potential of love.
about the author
Charles Birx, also a Zen teacher, has an Ed.D. and has worked for many years as a reading specialist and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Radford University. The Birxes are cofounders of New River Zen Community. They have been married for thirty-seven years and live together in Radford, Virginia.
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A Monk’s Guide to Finding Joy
Coming soon! This book will be available in July 2024. Enter your name and email below to be notified when this book is available for purchase.
A profound and practical guide to uncovering your own wise mind and kind heart.
We all want to find happiness. But how do we go about it? In this easygoing and clear-sighted guide, celebrated Buddhist meditation and philosophy master His Eminence Khangser Rinpoche provides us with down-to-earth advice on how to train our minds and find our own innate wisdom and kindness along the way. He helps us see the profound insight that is open to us all, and how it can awaken us to the truth of the way things are. This insight into the truth, and the practices that help you cultivate this awareness, transform suffering into wisdom and compassion—and ultimately joy.
A Monk’s Guide to Finding Joy brings the ancient Tibetan mind-training tradition into our twenty-first-century lives. Through stories, real-life examples, reflections, and meditation practices—all told with warmth and humor—H.E. Khangser Rinpoche shows us how we can transform the suffering of our life into happiness. When we train the mind from within the context of our difficult emotions, we can find true joy, just as the oyster transforms sand into a pearl.
Bearing the Unbearable
In this journaling book, grief expert Joanne Cacciatore provides support and guidance, as writing prompts, for anyone experiencing traumatic loss and grief. This beautifully designed book offers 52 writing prompts for exploring grief and journaling about those whom we’ve lost. Writing about those we’ve lost can be part of a contemplative practice, alone or with therapists, family, friends, or with a grief support group. However you use this journal and its writing prompts, please take the time to write from the heart, really be with each prompt, dive deeply—and do so with a spirit of love and compassion for all beings, including yourself.
A Note from Dr. Jo:
This journal is an invitation. A passage. An open heart. Use the prompts throughout for deep contemplation. Write your experiences, feelings, memories of your beloved. Know that, wherever you are, you are not alone in this. We grievers, we rememberers, walk the same road, some ahead and some behind. But we walk together. Let this journal be the invisible thread that weaves together our hearts and souls and minds as we endure one more day—together, never alone. Let this journal be a space in which you remember and grieve and explore.
You can also explore Dr. Jo’s books, Bearing the Unbearable and Grieving is Loving, her Cards for Bearing the Unbearable, as well her Wisdom Academy course, Bearing the Unbearable.
Dharma Talk
A new volume of original poetry from the bestselling creator of Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.
In Dharma Talk, award-winning poet John Brehm explores the perennial themes of aging, compassion, emptiness, nonseparation, and more. At once poignant and humorous, Brehm’s gentle, wry poems remind us that the personal and the universal are not different—and point us to the Dharma of everyday life.
Cards for Bearing the Unbearable
Grief sometimes leaves us without words. Yet narrating our feelings, thoughts, and experiences can be so helpful in relating to our inner world. These cards are an invitation to begin that process.
From the bestselling author of Bearing the Unbearable, here are 52 cards with prompts for exploring grief and starting conversations about those whom we’ve lost. These cards can be used as part of a contemplative practice, as journaling prompts, by or with therapists, or used in community with family, friends, or with a grief support group. They can be read aloud, alone or with others. You can read one card prior to meditation, or simply take one in and reflect deeply on what arises. However you use these cards, please take the time to really be with each one, dive deeply—and do so with a spirit of love and compassion for all beings, including yourself.
Click here to watch a message from Dr. Jo.
You can also explore Dr. Jo’s books, Bearing the Unbearable and Grieving is Loving, as well her her Wisdom Academy course, Bearing the Unbearable.
Impermanence in Plain English
The bestselling author of Mindfulness in Plain English guides the reader toward a direct and personal realization of one of the foundational tenets of Buddhism: all things that arise must pass away.
Once-youthful bodies grow old and weary. New thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise and fade every second. Impermanence is not some abstract metaphysical idea. This is the Dhamma, and you can see it for yourself.
Drawing from Pali scriptures and writing with fresh, direct language, Bhante Gunaratana and his student Julia Harris highlight the Buddha’s exhortation that we must directly realize for ourselves the liberating insights that free us from suffering and cyclic existence, without relying only on the word of religious authorities or academic or philosophical musings.
Being Human and a Buddha Too
In writing that sparkles and inspires, Anne Klein (Lama Rigzin Drolma) shows us how to liberate our buddha nature to be both human and a buddha too.
This first volume in the House of Adzom series centers on Longchenpa’s seven trainings in bodhicitta, our awakened mind, the ultimate purpose of our practice and training. Anne Klein’s original composition masterfully weaves in Adzom Paylo Rinpoche’s commentary and Jigme Lingpa’s five pith practices and commentary on the trainings, in keeping with Longchenpa’s skillful integration of sutra, tantra, and Dzogchen, to resolve our most challenging questions about what awakening involves and how it relates to the truth of our human situation right now. As foundational teachings for Dzogchen practitioners, the seven trainings are framed as contemplations on impermanence, the adventitiousness of happiness and its short duration, the multiple causes of death, the meaninglessness of our worldly activities, reliance on the Buddha’s good qualities, the teacher’s pith instructions, and ultimately nonconceptual meditation on bliss and emptiness, clarity and emptiness, and reality itself.
Ultimate Healing
We experience illness on a physical level, but in order to be healed, we must understand where true healing begins: within our hearts and minds. In Ultimate Healing, internationally renowned meditation master Lama Zopa Rinpoche helps us to recognize the root of illness and gives us the tools to create our future happiness. Beginning with stories of people who have recovered from disease through meditation, Rinpoche addresses the central role played by karma and by the mental habit of “labeling” in causing illness, and shows how meditation and other thought techniques for developing compassion and insight can eliminate the ultimate cause of all disease.
Ultimate Healing shows us that by transforming our minds, especially through the development of compassion, we can eliminate the ultimate cause of all disease. In addition to relating stories of people who have recovered from disease through meditation, Lama Zopa presents practical healing meditations, including white-light healing, compassion meditation, “taking and giving”, and techniques to cure depression.
Calm Breath, Calm Mind
Discover ancient Tibetan breath practices for calming your mind and improving your health in this plain-English guide.
Over millennia, many Eastern traditions have developed practices that use the powerful healing energy of breath to treat physical, emotional, and mental problems. In Chinese, this energy is called chi; in Sanskrit it is called prana; and in Tibetan it is called lung.
Lung is life-giving energy that moves through our bodies. A lack or imbalance of lung can create illnesses of body and mind or cause emotional struggles such as confusion, anger, and sadness. In this book Geshe YongDong Losar, a scholar and monk in the ancient Bön tradition of Tibet, guides us through time-tested practices to help balance our lung. His deep knowledge—garnered through years of study and practice—renders the practices simple and achievable, creating a clear path for us toward greater calmness, strength, and clarity.
“Over and over I have personally witnessed, both in myself and in my students, the breath’s clear potential to heal and deeply transform lives. I truly believe that in the future such practices will play an important role as a medicine for preventing and treating physical, emotional, and mental maladies. I am glad that Geshe YongDong is making these practices widely available, and I’m sure that by doing so, he is bringing benefit to countless lives.”
—from the foreword by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
Dogen’s Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki
Discover the teachings of the preeminent Zen Master Dōgen in his own words, written down by his Dharma successor, Koun Ejō. This edition includes both the Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki and translations of and commentary on Dōgen’s luminously evocative waka poetry.
Distinct from Dōgen’s similarly titled magnum opus (simply called the Shōbōgenzō), the Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki can be read as a highly practical manual of Buddhist practice. Consisting of straightforward and accessible teachings and making more limited use of the allusion, wordplay, and metaphor that characterize the essays in the Shōbōgenzō, this work is an essential read for any student of Zen Buddhism. Among the many topics covered, Dōgen especially emphasizes the following points: seeing impermanence, departing from the ego-centered self, being free from greed, giving up self-attachment, following the guidance of a true teacher, and the practice of zazen, specifically shikantaza, or “just sitting.” Additionally, this translation of the Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki has extensive notes, which help to provide you with a new way of approaching the text.
The collection of waka poems included in this volume are a beautiful artistic expression of the Dharma. Rarely seen in this large of a collection or with commentary, this poetry offers unique insight into an important expression of Dōgen’s teachings.
By the spring wind
my words are blown and scattered
people may see them
the song of flowers
These teachings, which have informed teachers and practitioners alike throughout the centuries, will deepen your knowledge, understanding, and experience of the Sōtō Zen tradition.
Mind Sky
“In Zen meditation, anything that comes in your mind will eventually leave, because nothing is permanent. A thought is like a cloud moving across the blue sky. Nothing can disturb that all-encompassing vastness. This is the Dharma.”
In a collection of talks and anecdotes, Jakusho Kwong-roshi, a Dharma successor of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, presents his approach to Buddhist teaching. Containing photos of Kwong-roshi with his teachers, as well as a selection of his vibrant calligraphy, Mind Sky explores the profound beauty of Zen history and practice, nature, and the philosophy of the ancient Zen master Eihei Dōgen.
With an elegant simplicity, Kwong-roshi shows how Zen is experiential rather than intellectual. And with persistent practice, realization is already yours.
Beyond Distraction
The mind can be a potent tool, used to guide extraordinary achievements, inspire good works, and incline your spiritual path toward peace and awakening. But the mind can also produce thoughts that lead to suffering. For many people, thoughts run rampant and seem to oppress or control their lives. Even the Buddha tells us that before his enlightenment, he sometimes found his mind preoccupied by thoughts connected with sensual desire, ill will, and harm. But he figured out how to respond to thoughts skillfully and developed a step-by-step approach to calm the restless mind. Now, Insight Meditation teacher Shaila Catherine offers an accessible approach to training the mind that is guided by the Buddha’s pragmatic instructions on removing distracting thoughts. Drawing on two scriptures in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Shaila shows you how to overcome habitual modes of thinking, develop deeper concentration, and discover the insights into emptiness that are vital for a liberating spiritual path.
Following the Buddha’s pragmatic approach, Shaila guides you through five steps for overcoming distraction and focusing the mind:
- Replace unwholesome thoughts with wholesome thoughts.
- Examine the dangers of distracting thoughts.
- Avoid it, ignore it, forget it.
- Investigate the causes of distraction.
- Apply determination and resolve.
Each chapter includes exercises and reflections to help you cultivate the five steps to deeper concentration. You’ll learn about your mind and develop your ability to direct your attention more skillfully in meditation and daily activities. And ultimately, you’ll discover for yourself how these five steps boil down to one key realization: In the moment you recognize that a thought is just a thought, you will find yourself on the path to a life of remarkable freedom.
A Peaceful Piggy’s Guide to Sickness and Death, Sadness and Love
When someone we love gets sick, we little piggies worry! It can feel scary when a person we care about is sick or in a hospital. Luckily, there is one good thing we peaceful piggies can do: meditate.
This is a story about love.
Experiencing a loved one’s illness or death is challenging for both children and their grownups. With three distinct sections to choose from—when someone we love is sick, dying, or has died—this guide will help you easily find soothing and practical mindfulness activities focused on what your young one needs in order to guide them through their big emotions and questions. These practices will help calm and empower children—and their grownups—as they discover they can still be with their loved ones through their heart connection, no matter where they are.
Click here for an animated video based on the story.
The Mindful Menopause Workbook
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
Tibetan Yoga
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.
Save 20% on the Tibetan Yoga online course when you buy this book! Your discount code is at the end of the book.
Awake Where You Are
“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:
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- 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
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.
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
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.
