Tarthang Tulku - Gesture of Balance
A Guide to Awareness, Self-Healing and Meditation
This comes from the Nyingma Psychology Series printed by Dharma Publishing.
Excerpt from Foreword
The essays in this book are unusual in the sense that they present Buddhist ideas and perspectives without indulging in theories about Buddhism. The very fact that we in the Western world speak about Buddhism as if it were a rigid system, that can (and maybe should) be dealt with in abstract terms, shows how little real understanding of a different set of values exists even at the present time. These values are inherent in a person's life and are not merely arbitrarily assigned to it.
The following essays address themselves to the living person, not to an abstraction or a shadowy image; and they do so in terms which a living person can understand intellectually as well as feel deep within his heart. That is why these essays are unusual- they are not simply props or pegs on which to hang one's preconceptions, but stimulants to reconsider and to reassess the situation in which we find ourselves; and through this re-awakening to what is at hand, we are stimulated to set out on the path toward growth and maturation.
Although each essay is self-contained, in their totality they reveal a steady progression. The starting-point is honesty - honesty toward ourselves as being part of a wider life-stream and as sharing in its vicissitudes, not as being detached onlookers. As participants of an ever-widening life-stream we will not be able to grow when we struggle against it, when we build up tensions and blockages, but only when we learn to relax so that the stream can flow calmly in us. Relaxation thus becomes the indispensable prerequisite for meditation which is a 'tuning-in' to the life-stream and not the build-up of new fixations, even if they are advertised as a cure-all.
~ Herbert V. Guenther
The layout of the book is in five parts:
• OPENING
• RELAXATION
• MEDITATION
• AWARENESS
• TRANSMISSION
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