Das - Awakening the Buddhist Heart

With his first bestseller, Awakening the Buddha Within , Lama Surya Das gave the Western world a primer for Tibetan Buddhism.

In Awakening the Buddhist Heart , he shows us how to integrate all the experiences of our lives, both positive and negative, to build more loving connections with others.

How happy we are in our relationships with others, the world and ourselves determines our quality of life. Lama Surya Das shows us how to cultivate our innate spiritual intelligence to increase our sensitivity towards others, making us better partners, parents, friends, colleagues and people. In clear and simple language, he guides us through Buddhist practices and meditations that release negative emotion, enabling us to learn from those we love and those we dont. If you have never read a book on Buddhism, let this be the first.

As always, Lama Surya Das provides a bridge between East and West, making Buddhist teachings relevant and meaningful in our everyday lives.

Awakening the Buddhist Heart is essential reading for anyone looking for more love and meaning in their lives.

The Buddhist heart is alive and well in all of us. It is just a matter of awakening to it. This luminous spiritual jewel is what the Dalai Lama calls the good heart, representing our own inner goodnessour most tender, compassionate, and caring side. That is why the Dalai Lama always says, My religion is loving-kindness. The loving heart is our share of the true, good, and beautifulsomething genuine to cherish and venerate.

This basic goodness is our true nature, or Buddha-natureour highest, wisest self. Our best Self. It is like the little Buddha within each of us. This radiant innate jewel represents what we aspire toward as well as who we truly are. These two aspectsa developmental, growth-oriented, higher educational side and the innate, timeless, immanent sideare like two sides of a single hand. It is a helping hand as well as a hand that is complete in itself. This is what Tibets Dzogchen masters call Buddha-hood in the palm of your hand; it is all right there. You may feel far from it, but it is never far from you.

As we enter a new century and a new millennium, and in the light of all the challenges, changes, and uncertainty we must face daily, it seems increasingly important to awaken our Buddha-like hearts through spiritual connections. We can make spiritual connections within ourselves, with all the various aspects and facets of ourselves and our lifephysical, mental, emotional, psychological, spiritualrecognizing that everything we do and feel is part of our spiritual journey.

What better time to awaken our hearts and make meaningful connections with others as well through the avenue of friendship and relationship? We can do this with our families, our romantic partners, and our colleagues, through work, with our neighbors, our society, our country, and our world; we can do this with our pets and animals and all creatures, great and small. Moreover we can extend ourselves to include in our radiant hearts awakened embrace all things, animate and inanimateeverything that is in our natural environment. And we can connect with that which is greater than, yet within and all around, each of us.

Where better to make this spiritual connection than here and now, with our best selves and with each other, in every part of our lives? Awakening the Buddhist heart that beats within each of us will bring us directly into intimate relatedness to one and to all, unveiling our innate spiritual connectedness to the source and ground of our very being, thus informing every aspect of our daily lives with purpose, meaning, and love.

Life is about relationshipthe relationship we have with ourselves, with each other, with the world, as well as the connection to that which is beyond any of us yet immanent in each of us. When our relationships are good, we feel good; when they are bad, we feel awful. Lets accept it. We need each other. We need to feel connected; we need to feel each others presence and love.

The most ancient scriptures of India say that we are all part of a universal web of light. Each of us is a glowing, shining, mirrorlike jewel reflecting and containing the light of the whole. All in one. One in all. We are never disconnected from the whole. This intrinsic knowledge of our place in the greater picture is part of our spiritual DNA, our original softwareor heart-ware.

Nonetheless, at one time or another most of us feel disconnected from this knowledge of our place in the great web of being. We lose sight of where we belong, and instead, we experience intense feelings of loneliness, alienation, and confusion. Trying to find the way back to our place in the whole is what the spiritual seekers search is all about. It represents a journey home to who we are.

How about you? Do you ever suffer from a sense that you are lost and wanderingalmost as though you have been through some kind of an emotional holocaust? Most of us here in America are very fortunate. We have little idea of what its like to live in a war-torn country. Even so, from the safety of your own secure home, do you sometimes feel as though you have an uncanny sense of what it must feel like to be a displaced personunsafe and at the mercy of strangers? Mother Teresa said, The biggest problem facing the world today is not people dying in the streets of Calcutta, and not inflation, but spiritual deprivation this feeling of emptiness associated with feeling separate from God, and from all our sisters and brothers on planet earth. Loneliness, she said, is like the leprosy of the West.

Mother Teresa was talking about the pain associated with feelings of isolation and separateness. These feelings are common to mankind. They can overtake any one of us in a heartbeat, even in the very midst of happiness and joy. Loneliness implies a lack of meaningful connection. For most people, it is a familiar travelling companion. Even when were surrounded by people we know, we can feel separate and apart. Separate from what, we might ask? Separate from others, separate from ourselves, separate from the Divine, separate from meaning, separate from love. Separate from a sense of belonging.

The promise of spiritual life is that we will be able to heal these feelings through love and an experiential understanding of the essential interconnectedness of all beings. The Dalai Lama of Tibet, for example, often says that no matter how many new faces he sees each day, he never feels as though he is meeting anyone for the first time. Thats because the Dalai Lama knows that every single one of us is on an infinite journey that began aeons ago. According to Tibetan Buddhism we have each had so many births that in all probability our paths have crossed time and time again. Wondrously connected one to the other, we have been for each other brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, children, fathers, mothers, and mates. At the heart of Tibetan Buddhism is this belief: Each person we meet has at one time been a close, caring family member and should be treated with the respect and love such a relationship deserves.