The Heroic Heart

Freeing ourselves from our habitual emotional patterns starts with taming the mind. Why is this so important? Because a wild mind tends to hurt others. Taming the mind is the way we can uncover our true nature and connect with those around us from a grounded place of self-awareness. Buddhists talk about realization and enlightenment a lot, but the true goal of Buddhism is to end pain and suffering. It is the cherishing of others that is the essence of the Buddhist path of bodhisattvas, spiritual heroes of compassion. Based on the classic fourteenth-century mind training text of Tibetan Buddhism called the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, this guidebook shares pithy advice on how to act as bodhisattvas in our everyday lives, enabling us to possess compassion in an authentic way. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, an exemplary spiritual teacher who spent over a dozen years meditating in the Himalayas and is one of the first Buddhist nuns to be ordained in the West, shares her reflections on this famous teaching and how to live a life of mindfulness and selflessness. --