bodhi tree swaying

Sounds True recently sent me the copy for the back cover of Living as a River:

“At a time when it’s increasingly challenging to find clear and honest direction on the spiritual path, Living as a River offers contemporary insight into an ancient practice and wise counsel we can trust. This book is both beautifully written and useful to all serious seekers.”
—Mariana Caplan, PhD, author of Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path and Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment

To face reality is to embrace change; to resist change is to suffer. This is the liberating insight that unfolds with Living as a River. A masterful investigation of the nature of self, this eloquent blend of current science and time-honored spiritual insight is meant to free us from the fear of impermanence in a world defined by change.

The primary vehicle for

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Shelly, on the the publicists at Sounds True, has been pushing my forthcoming book, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change, at Book Expo America in NYC. (I’m sorry for using the phrase “The Big Apple.” It’s tacky and I promise not to do it again.) Anyway, Shelly kindly sent me a couple of photos of the book from the expo!

The other day I was sent a draft of the blurb for “Living as a River,” to be published by Sounds True on October 1, 2010.

This will give you an idea of what the book’s about.

I must say that I’m enormously impressed by the degree of skill shown by all the staff at Sounds True, the blurb-writers included. Incidentally, I was told “Joe, our Copy Chief who wrote this copy said to tell you that he (like many of us) has a great feeling about this book!” How very encouraging!

10.01.10 is the date (US-style) of when my book, Living As a River, is published by Sounds True. The date has a rather symmetrical loveliness.

I just got the MS back from my editor today, along with her suggested changes and with some lovely comments.

She said: “I have totally fallen in love with this book.”

She also said: “It has opened my heart and mind up in countless ways.”

These are nice things to hear.

I received this email from my publisher today:

I saw the content from the book that you sent to Jaime, and it really looks like it’s coming along. I think it’s going to be a truly brilliant book.

We had a meeting today to discuss the title and subtitle, and to brainstorm a bit around it. The goal was to create a title that really represents what’s in the book, but also conveys the benefit the reader might receive. This is a tough balance to strike! But we hammered something out that Tami and I both think is great. You’ll see we stole from the title of the podcast here, which we both liked a great deal. With some subtitle iterations, and in the order of our preference, our proposals are:LIVING AS A RIVER: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of ChangeLIVING AS A RIVER:

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Friday, November 13. An easy date to remember!

It’s the day that the new and updated edition of my book on Buddhism and Vegetarianism, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, will become available.

I’m celebrating the day by dedicating my whole time to being on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/bodhipaksa), (Facebook), and my blog (that’s where you are right now), talking about Buddhism and vegetarianism. And just generally hanging out as well, so that things don’t get too serious.

As well as playing the suave host and urging people to mingle, mingle, mingle, I’ll be posting articles, quotes, and video to feed into a discussion about this important topic. I’ll also be happy to take questions.

I’ll be online all day, from 9 until 9 (Eastern), but you can drop by on any of those three platforms (again, that’s Twitter, Facebook, my blog). Just remember to say “hi”! …

I was talking to my publisher this morning about the forthcoming second edition of Wildmind: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation, and she showed me no fewer than eight drafts of the cover. A couple of them were particularly stunning, including this one. I love the wildness and boldness of the brush strokes. The hills are a bit too dark, but the artist will be working on that.

The book’s going to be in a new and more conventional format this time. The first edition was in a landscape format and it was also rather large, which meant it was hard for bookstores to shelve it properly. Despite this it’s still one of the publisher’s best-selling titles.

I’ll keep you posted on the release, and perhaps I’ll have some kind of launch party. In fact the other thing we talked about was an online launch …

I’m a bit late in mentioning this, but Sounds True has released my latest (double) CD, The Wisdom of the Breath.

Here’s what Sounds True has to say about it:

The answers to the most profound spiritual questions lie within us—but how do we gain access to our deepest wisdom? “Breathing is a gateway to insight,” reveals Scottish-born teacher Bodhipaksa, “and meditation gives us the key.” On The Wisdom of Your Breath, this master teacher guides listeners through breath-centered meditations for opening to the inner core of spiritual awareness we all possess.With these three essential practices, he reveals how the breath can help you:

• Let go of the past and future, and rest in pure presence
• Dissolve the sense of separateness to experience oneness with the world around you
• Embrace the essential impermanence of all life with serenity and joy
• Tap into your

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I should be in bed, but I just have to say that this NYT piece by Lisa Jones is one of the most beautiful things I have read in ages.

She writes about spending time on the Wind River Indian Reservation with Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic Northern Arapaho horse gentler and traditional healer.

Addison’s story of youthful violence, a devastating accident, and realization that he was a healer is inspiring.

Before his accident, he was as heartless and handsome as a young rebel could be. He was a small-time outlaw who busted broncs, broke hearts, robbed cafes and dealt drugs. After the accident, his 20-year-old body lay unmoving, visited by doctors, nurses, and spirits who began to endow him with unwanted healing powers.

After two years of hospitalization and rehab, he returned home, recognized the sorrow and pity in the eyes of his friends, and decided to kill himself. He tried, failed,

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"Forthcoming" in this case means you might be able to get it as a Christmas present in 2010! However, I’m hard at work on my book on the Six Elements, to be published by Sounds True, and I’m most of the way through the sixth element, consciousness. Here’s what one advance reader, Steve Bell, had to say in his blog:

Bodhipaksa is working on a book developed out of reflections on the 6 Element practice, and he’s allowed me to read 4 of the chapters so far. It’s an amazing book, I can’t wait till it comes out.In the 6 Element Practice you contemplate how the elements of earth, water, air, fire (energy), space and consciousness are inside of us, outside of us, then you say, "they are not me, they are not mine."It leads to a kind of spiritual death,

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There’s an interesting little snippet in the Boston Globe today:

Perhaps heartfelt decisions are smarter than we think. A team of psychologists in Germany [Werner, N. et al., ”Enhanced Cardiac Perception Is Associated with Benefits in Decision-Making,” Psychophysiology] asked people to count their own heartbeats (without taking a pulse) and then asked them to play a computer gambling game, which required choosing repeatedly among four card decks that yielded different returns. People who were more accurate at counting their own heartbeats picked more cards from the decks with better returns. It seems that people who are in touch with feedback from their own body have an easier time learning from positive and negative experiences.

I was talking about something similar in a podcast interview with Tami Simon of Sounds True (I’ll let you know when the podcast goes online). She asked me about writing as a spiritual practice and I explained …

• I managed to get a lot of writing done yesterday. I’ve been going back over a chapter I wrote on the Water Element (for a book on the Six Elements). I think I’m going to have to fork some of the material into a new chapter either at the start or end of the book, but that’s ultimately a good thing. I find sometimes I have to print stuff to be able to get some perspective on it — otherwise it’s hard to keep track of where I am in the document. Since I have a quiet morning I’m hoping to be able to get some more work done before heading off for a 4th July family gathering.
• Watched the final episode of Frasier last night What a great show! I’m going go miss those characters and the wit of the script. Even

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Part I. It was rather amusing to see on a review for a desktop blogging application that it had a "three pain interface." Actually, using the application wasn’t at all painful.

Part II. On Twitter, Susan Orlean wrote, "Why oh why do some people insist on saying ‘eighteen years of age’? What’s wrong with "eighteen years old"?"

Those "some people" include Shakespeare, incidentally. This is from Cymbelline:

I had rather
Have skipp’d from sixteen years of age to sixty,
To have turn’d my leaping-time into a crutch,
Than have seen this.

In this regard, Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe is rather refreshing. She’s not one of those "pet peeve" grammarians, and she rather enjoys debunking those who are. Here’s a recent column of hers in which she discusses "peeveblogging." Enjoy.

Part III. Lastly, here’s one that at first puzzled me, and then almost made me laugh out loud:

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I use Twitter a lot and appreciate the ease of posting there. For a start, the maximum length of a tweet is 140 characters, which means you don’t have to put much thought into writing something, compared to a blog post. For another thing, not much is required to tweet: I use Tweetdeck, where I can post from the same place I read other people’s messages. To post on my blog I have to log in and then click on a couple of links, which may not sound like much but it acts as a psychological barrier.

I recently downloaded the Wordpress app for iPhone, and I think it comes close to making posting as easy as tweeting. It’s now easy enough to post that it seems worthwhile just to say a few words, while logging in through a browser is tedious enough that I only feel inspired to …

In the hunt for quicker and easier ways to maintain this blog, I’m going to be experimenting with posting by email. This is just a test to see if I have the settings right.

A lot of people are moving on to posting “LifeStreams” or some such thing because it can be rather tedious to have to log into a blog to make a post. I sympathize. It’s a symptom of modern life can be rather daunting to log into a site to tell the world what you’re thinking about — in the way that one might inwardly groan when you realize you have to print out a letter, put in in an envelope, find a stamp, and make a trip to the Post Office. Anyway, here are a few tweet-like highlights of the last day or so.

• Here’s an audio tweet:
  
• In the middle of writing a blog post, Xmarks gets stuck while syncing and crashes Firefox. I’m experiencing some frustration.
• Posted a new Meditation Zeitgeist article on Wildmind
• Puzzled by the fact that wildmind.org is not on the first page of results for

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How to use view two parts of a document at once

I don’t use MS Word very much these days for writing. Generally I use WriteRoom, which offers the advantage of an uncluttered full-screen interface that cuts down on distraction. But my publisher’s bringing out a new edition of my book on Buddhism and vegetarianism, and using Word became a necessity. In fact I had the unpleasant task of taking a text file they sent me and turning it back into a fully-fledged Word doc. The unpleasant part was the the document had about 90 plain text endnotes, which I had to manually convert into Word endnotes. I had to copy text from the end of the document, create footnote markers in the relevant places, and then paste in the text. This required a lot of scrolling up and down the document.

Fortunately I remembered the “split window” trick, where you …

This is the introduction to a book I’m writing on the Six Element Practice, which is a traditional Buddhist reflection on impermanence, interconnectedness, and non-self. For some reason I posted the first part of a draft of the first chapter before I posted this, which is unfortunate since there’s a reference in the first chapter that makes no sense until you’ve read this. Comments are very welcome. I’d like this to be a good book, and feedback is an important part of honing the writing. Chapter One has changed a lot since I posted it, so once it’s done I’ll re-post it in its entirety. In future you’ll be able to find drafts of the Six Element Book by following the six element book tags. Enjoy!

Andrew walks into a laboratory in the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and stands opposite a plastic mannequin. …

In a letter to August Röckel on January 25, 1854, Richard Wagner wrote in regard to The Ring: “We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness…”

And I wrote a commentary on that quote on Wildmind.

I’ve tried listening to The Ring, but have never found it very satisfying. In theory, however, I find all the symbolism fascinating. I guess what I want is for Peter Jackson, that wonderful interpreter of the other famous Ring cycle, to turn it into a really compelling movie.