Essential Mind Training is the first volume in the Tibetan Classics series, which aims to make available accessible paperback editions of key Tibetan Buddhist works drawn from Wisdom Publications' Library of Tibetan Classics. The key to happiness is not the eradication of all problems but rather the development of a mind capable of transforming any problem into a cause of happiness. Essential Mind Training is full of guidance for cultivating new mental habits for mastering our thoughts and emotions. This volume contains eighteen individual works selected from Mind Training: The Great Collection, the earliest compilation of mind-training (lojong) literature. The first volume of the historic Tibetan Classics series, Essential Mind Training includes both lesser-known and renowned classics such as Eight Verses on Mind Training and The Seven-Point Mind Training. These texts offer methods for practicing the golden rule of learning to love your neighbor as yourself and are full of practical and down-to-earth advice. The techniques explained here, by enhancing our capacity for compassion, love, and perseverance, can give us the freedom to embrace the world.
Compiled in the fifteenth century, Mind Training: The Great Collection is the earliest anthology of a special genre of Tibetan literature known as "mind training," or lojong in Tibetan. The principal focus of these texts is the systematic cultivation of such altruistic thoughts and emotions as compassion, love, forbearance, and perseverance. The mind-training teachings are highly revered by the Tibetan people for their pragmatism and down-to-earth advice on coping with the various challenges and hardships that unavoidably characterize everyday human existence. The volume contains forty-four individual texts, including the most important works of the mind training cycle, such as Serlingpa's well-known Leveling Out All Preconceptions, Atisha's Bodhisattva's Jewel Garland, Langri Thangpa's Eight Verses on Training the Mind, and Chekawa's Seven-Point Mind Training together with the earliest commentaries on these seminal texts. An accurate and lyrical translation of these texts, many of which are in metered verse, marks an important contribution to the world's literary heritage, enriching its spiritual resources.
A guide to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of lojong meditation—or mind training—as a way to pause, reflect, and discover the true meaning and value of life In this society, with its hurly-burly pace demanding of our time, it is ever so easy to let life slip by. Looking back after ten, twenty, thirty, years—we wonder what we have really accomplished. The process of simply existing is not necessarily meaningful. And yet there is an unlimited potential for meaning and value in this human existence. The Seven-Point Mind Training is one eminently practical way of tapping into that meaning. At the heart of the Seven-Point Mind Training lies the transformation of the circumstances that life brings us, however hard as the raw material from which we create our own spiritual path. The central theme of the Seven-Point Mind Training is to make the liberating passage from the constricting solitude of self-centeredness to the warm kinship with others which occurs with the cultivation of cherishing others. This Mind Training is especially well-suited for an active life. It helps us to reexamine our relationships—to family, friends, enemies, and strangers—and gradually transform our responses to whatever life throws our way
Warning: Using this book could be hazardous to your ego! The slogans it contains are designed to awaken the heart and cultivate love and kindness toward others. They are revolutionary in that practicing them fosters abandonment of personal territory in relating to others and in understanding the world as it is. The fifty-nine provocative slogans presented here-each with a commentary by the Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa-have been used by Tibetan Buddhists for eight centuries to help meditation students remember and focus on important principles and practices of mind training. They emphasize meeting the ordinary situations of life with intelligence and compassion under all circumstances. Slogans include, "Don't be swayed by external circumstances," "Be grateful to everyone," and "Always maintain only a joyful mind." This edition contains a new foreword by Pema Chodron.
Cutting-edge science and the ancient wisdom of Buddhism have come together to reveal that, contrary to popular belief, we have the power to literally change our brains by changing our minds. Recent pioneering experiments in neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to change in response to experience—reveal that the brain is capable of altering its structure and function, and even of generating new neurons, a power we retain well into old age. The brain can adapt, heal, renew itself after trauma, compensate for disabilities, rewire itself to overcome dyslexia, and break cycles of depression and OCD. And as scientists are learning from studies performed on Buddhist monks, it is not only the outside world that can change the brain, so can the mind and, in particular, focused attention through the classic Buddhist practice of mindfulness. With her gift for making science accessible, meaningful, and compelling, science writer Sharon Begley illuminates a profound shift in our understanding of how the brain and the mind interact and takes us to the leading edge of a revolution in what it means to be human. Praise for Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain “There are two great things about this book. One is that it shows us how nothing about our brains is set in stone. The other is that it is written by Sharon Begley, one of the best science writers around. Begley is superb at framing the latest facts within the larger context of the field. This is a terrific book.”—Robert M. Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers “Excellent . . . elegant and lucid prose . . . an open mind here will be rewarded.”—Discover “A strong dose of hope along with a strong does of science and Buddhist thought.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune
Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children’s learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development.
"Building a second brain is getting things done for the digital age. It's a ... productivity method for consuming, synthesizing, and remembering the vast amount of information we take in, allowing us to become more effective and creative and harness the unprecedented amount of technology we have at our disposal"--
The mind training teachings are a great vehicle instruction, because they are most concerned with developing the awakening mind, the altruistic mind of enlightenment. They are directed primarily towards the practitioner of great capacity, and deal essentially with transforming our metal attitudes. One special feature of the mind training teachings is the advice to transform adversity into advantage. So, not only do these instructions help us open out towards other beings, but they also help us transform whatever difficulties come our way into something valuable. The Mind Training Like the Rays of the Sun exemplifies Tsong-khapa’s presentation of mind training. The author, Nam-kha Pel, as he mentions in his introduction, received the lineage of the explanation of the Seven Point Mind Training, which is the fundamental text here, from various sources including Je Rinpoche, his principal teacher. what is distinctive about this presentation is that he has managed to combine both the mind training instructions as they are recorded in Geshey Che-ka-wa’s text with the pattern of the Stages of the Path.
Mind, Brain and the Path to Happiness presents a contemporary account of traditional Buddhist mind training and the pursuit of wellbeing and happiness in the context of the latest research in psychology and the neuroscience of meditation. Following the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Dzogchen, the book guides the reader through the gradual steps in transformation of the practitioner’s mind and brain on the path to advanced states of balance, genuine happiness and wellbeing. Dusana Dorjee explains how the mind training is grounded in philosophical and experiential exploration of the notions of happiness and human potential, and how it refines attention skills and cultivates emotional balance in training of mindfulness, meta-awareness and development of healthy emotions. The book outlines how the practitioner can explore subtle aspects of conscious experience in order to recognize the nature of the mind and reality. At each of the steps on the path the book provides novel insights into similarities and differences between Buddhist accounts and current psychological and neuroscientific theories and evidence. Throughout the book the author skilfully combines Buddhist psychology and Western scientific research with examples of meditation practices, highlighting the ultimately practical nature of Buddhist mind training. Mind, Brain and the Path to Happiness is an important book for health professionals and educators who teach or apply mindfulness and meditation-based techniques in their work, as well as for researchers and students investigating these techniques both in a clinical context and in the emerging field of contemplative science.
Excellence and the highest levels of performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games have always been an object of fascination to both scientists and lay people. Only during the last 20 years have scientists studied these levels of performance in the laboratory in order to identify their mediating mechanisms. Contrary to the common belief that innate talents are the critical factors for exceptional performance, investigators have found that acquired skills, knowledge, and physiological adaptations in response to intense practice are the primary mechanisms, mediating the highest levels of performance. This is the first and only book to examine how elite performers effect their exceptional accomplishments. The world's leading researchers on expert performance and creative achievement review theories and recent findings from many different domains of expertise on how experts optimize improvement in their performance and eventually attain excellence. Elite performers are shown to have engaged in deliberate-practice activities specifically designed to improve their performance from an early age. By age 20 they have often accumulated over 10,000 hours of practice! The essential elements of deliberate practice, such as specific goals to improve performance, successive refinement through repetition, feedback and instruction, are explicated for different domains. Although the content of practice tasks will necessarily differ from domain to domain, investigators have found invariant characteristics for the optimal duration of practice sessions, maximal amounts of daily practice, the length of intense preparation (around 10 years), and ages of peak performance. Some of the book's chapters extend the review to the acquisition of everyday-life skills such as reading, to the performance of teams of experts, and to the development of creative achievement, geniuses, and artistic child prodigies. The book concludes with commentaries by several outstanding scientists in psychology, education, and history of science who discuss the generalizability of presented ideas and raise issues for future issues. EXTRA COPY...It could be said that striving for excellence is what characterizes humanity, or perhaps what characterizes humanity at its best. Why do so few individuals ever reach the highest levels when so many start out on the Road to Excellence? In this book, the world's foremost researchers of expert performance in domains as diverse as sports, medicine, chess, and the arts explore the similarities and differences in the extended and strenuous Road to Excellence taken by the successful individuals in each domain. Their findings will intrigue and inspire readers who are themselves driven to achieve or who simply want to better understand the processes involved.
