Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

by Ken McLeod

Book Overview

The key to becoming fully alive and joyful is to develop our natural capacity for attention and to be fully present here and now. In this informative guidebook to practical Buddhism you discover: How to live life with equanimity, loving-kindness, compassion, and joy How to cut through obsessions with the external world, relationships, harmful emotions, pleasure and power, and self Tried-and-true methods for cultivating active attention with your body...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062516817
• ISBN13: 9780062516817
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: HarperOne
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A wealth of knowledge, 447 pages whew, difficult to get through.

Sorry to be Gloomy Gus but, this book I believe could be better with about 200 pages cut out of it. Ken Mcleod's breadth of knowledge is large, he uses many examples and anecdotal stories to explain all things, and that is the problem. If your are looking for a book about Buddhist Wisdom and Buddhist meditation practice that explains Buddhist principles and is simple to read and follow, this book is not for you IMHO. There are so many excellent Buddhist Wisdom/Meditation books to choose from that are better.

THE JOURNEY A LIFETIME !

Mcleod's book on meditation is the most inspiring book on working Buddhism I have read. Meditation is the single most important aspect of self-actualization available. Knowing ourself is truely the key to wisdom and ethical behavior. Trying to "white knuckle" ethics, and teach oneself wisdom / understanding never works. We cannot understand what we haven't experienced. Meditation takes intellectual understanding and turns it into emotional understanding. This leads to wisdom and changes in our behavior (ethics). Ken Mcleod makes working meditation methods understandable, and presents the path to emotional understanding in a clear and concise manner. This book would take many lifetimes to complete. I have purchased many Buddhist books in the past and have never written a review on one before. However, this book is worthy of even my praise. A true lifesaver. OUTSTANDING !

Western World Work Text for Buddhism

Ken McLeod has, in my opinion, written the first work-text book on the Western approach to Tibetian Buddhism. He has presented the practices in clear, direct language, making them understandable and available to anyone interested in the path of awakening. There is no cultural overlay to obscure the teachings or confuse their purpose.There are many fine books about Buddhism, but the actual "how to" laid out in the precise order it should be studied and practiced has been missing. Now we have it in "Wake up to Your Life". I encourage anyone with more than a passing interest in Buddhism to get this book. You will use it for the rest of your life.

Intense, thorough

This is without a doubt one of the most thorough discussions of Tibetian Buddhist mind training practices that I've ever encountered. But it is not an easy book to read and I would not recommend it to a person just beginning to explore Tibetian Buddhism -- read Pema Chodron first. (Not that Pema is "light," but her writing is friendly and conversational.) However, if you're is ready for something that will take you deeper into the practice, this is a wonderful and illuminating book. It is long (almost 500 pages), it is intense, you won't breeze through it, but it is worth it.

"Cracking the egg of ignorance."

This is not only a how-to-meditate guide, but a "wake-up" call about why we should meditate. "The path described here does not promise quick results," Buddhist teacher, Ken McLeod writes. "It consists of taking apart, brick by brick, the wall that prevents us from knowing who we are. To dismantle that wall is the work of a lifetime" (p. 16). Just as the Buddhist path "is the path of attention" (p. 29), reading this meditation guide is an exercise in attention. Read his book "carefully and slowly when you are clear and awake" (p. 18), McLeod recommends.We arrive at Buddhist practice, McLeod observes, "because of a feeling of separation, emtiness, or lack of presence in life" (p. 43). McLeod's practice guide demonstrates that Buddhism may be viewed as "a collection of methods for waking up" from our confusion (p. xi). "To live authentically," McLeod writes, "we have to stop trying to avoid suffering and death by looking for meaning. We have to enter the mystery of life itself" (p. x). Following an excellent introduction to Buddhist dharma, McLeod then offers a series of east-to-follow guided meditations on cultivating attention (Chapter 3), confronting "the cold breath of death" (p. 108; Chapter 4), equanimity (pp. 259-268), loving-kindness (pp. 268-275), compassion (pp. 276-285), and tonglen taking-and-sending (pp. 314-352), among others.Whether you are Buddhist or not, if you are interested in entering the mysteries of life, McLeod's book will become a well-travelled path on your bookshelf.G. Merritt

Review of Ken McLeod's "Wake Up To Your Life"

Originally published in the Northwest Dharma News www.nwdharma.orgHundreds of books on Buddhism have been published in recent years, but Wake Up To Your Life, a new book by Ken McLeod, is one of the first systematic curricula written by a Westerner thoroughly trained in traditional Tibetan ways. With deep insight, clear instructions, and entertaining stories, McLeod has given us a comprehensive manual for a lifetime of spiritual work.Wake Up To Your Life begins as many books do, introducing the context and motivations for practicing meditation, and covering basic topics such as the four noble truths, the three disciplines of morality, meditation, and understanding, and the cultivation of mindfulness. It continues with contemplations on death and impermanence, karma, reactive emotions, and the four immeasurables, and ends with difficult practices for mind training, insight, and direct awareness. McLeod breaks new ground from beginning to end. For example, the differences and synergies between mindfulness, awareness, and attention are clearly delineated, and active attention ("volitional, stable, and inclusive") is the central principle. That has practical implications, one of which is that ethical behavior becomes primarily a natural expression of attention, rather than a set of rules dictated by an authority or tradition.Wake Up To Your Life is especially valuable in making explicit what has been hidden from or confusing to many practitioners. Those who have struggled to practice with insufficient instruction will benefit from McLeod's pragmatic approach. For example, he makes clear the important differences between the purpose, methods, effects, and results of meditation practice. Thus the meditator who has been instructed to "open your mind" or "be centered" will learn that being open and feeling centered (as well as distraction, clarity, sleepiness, and euphoria) are effects of meditation, and not methods. The book is packed with tools for choosing and working with a teacher, for cutting through confusion and self-deception, and for discriminating between genuine insight and passing mental states and energy surges.Those who have been bewildered by Tibetan visualization and contemplative practices will see how they are rooted in basic Buddhist principles, and those who have been confused or put off by cosmology and deity practices will find clear explanations and a sensible approach. We see how the six realms are the worlds projected by our reactive emotions, and how an understanding of the five elements and five dakinis can help us transform the energies of our reactive emotions into pristine awareness. The chapter on karma is a significant contribution to our understanding of meditation and of psychology. Detailed analysis of how our beliefs, reactive emotions, and habituated behaviors create and perpetuate the suffering in our lives is integrated with practical exercises for dismantling the components of those beliefs and behavioral patterns