How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind

"When something is bothering you — a person is bugging you, a situation is irritating you, or physical pain is bothering you — you must work with your mind, and that is done through meditation. Working with our mind is the only means through which we'll actually begin to feel happy and contented with the world that we live in."

--Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön is treasured around the world for her unique ability to transmit teachings and practices that bring peace, understanding, and compassion into our lives. With How to Meditate, the American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun presents her first book exploring in-depth what she considers the essentials for a lifelong practice.

More and more people are beginning to recognize a profound inner longing for authenticity, connection, and aliveness. Meditation, Pema explains, gives us a golden key to address this yearning. This step-by-step guide shows readers how to honestly meet and openly relate with the mind, embrace the fullness of our experience, and live in a wholehearted way as we discover:

• The basics of meditation, from getting settled and the six points of posture to working with your breath and cultivating an attitude of unconditional friendliness
• The Seven Delights — how moments of difficulty can become doorways to awakening and love
• Shamatha (or calm abiding), the art of stabilizing the mind to remain present with whatever arises
• Thoughts and emotions as "sheer delight"-instead of obstacles-in meditation

"I think ultimately why we practice is so that we can become completely loving people, and this is what the world needs," writes Pema Chödrön. How to Meditate is a long-overdue book from this wise teacher to assist each one of us in this virtuous goal.

Ani Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, in New York City. She attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught as an elementary school teacher for many years in both New Mexico and California. Pema has two children and three grandchildren.

While in her mid-thirties, Ani Pema traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she studied for several years. She became a novice nun in 1974 while studying with Lama Chime in London. His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to Scotland at that time, and Ani Pema received her ordination from him.