Hello Friends, Last night was the first meeting of the fall session of this great spiritual book club I have joined. I met these lovely ladies through a womens networking group I am in called First Tuesday. It is a large group of women, but a smaller group met each season with a diffrent theme to have a book club. This season it is " A Buddhalicious Fall" and we are reading Thich Nat Han's Our Appointment with LIFE, and Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and our first book was Awakening Loving-Kindness by Pema Chodron


Not only do I get to meet with this great group, but it is so wonderful to be able to share our journey, a-ha moments, incites and struggles with this amazing book. I found myself drinking it all in, with what felt like new eyes. I have seen many of these ideas before, but this time, I guess, I was prepared to hear them. I feel like I have been introduced to a new teacher. I really connected to Pema's style and am resisting the urge to start her other works till after I read the next two books for this book club. I will let you know how it is going. I started this book on the airplane to Denver when we went to The Transformational Gate a few weeks ago. The parallels of the lessons here, with the growth I am experiencing through Network Care were constant and for those of you who have expressed a wish to have a better understanding of this care Barry and I are apart of, I recommend this book, to help explain what I feel I am not explaining as well as I would like to. To Clarify: this is NOT a book on Network care, it is a Buddhist study of awakening loving kindness in ones self, but the lessons of observation, truly feeling the muck and the fear and the pain and making friends with all of our perceived dark sides, finding balance, and observing our interpretation of reality, This is some of what I get out of care, and out of this amazing book.

Some jems from the book:

Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn't do any good to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we're doing.

and how about this

The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hang-ups,unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth.

I would love to hear from you if you do read it.TTFN