Wake Up to Your Life

Discovering the Buddhist Path to Attention

Ken McLeod (View Bio)
Hardcover: HarperSanFransisco, 2001; Paperback: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.

This book from the teacher of Unfettered Mind teaches anyone how to cultivate the power of mindfulness, or attention, to achieve spiritual awareness. Tibetan Buddhist practice involves dismantling personal egotism and learning how, first to see, and then to end, the self-destructive behaviors by which we live through patterned habits of reaction to our lives, and by which we make our lives a misery. WAKE UP TO YOUR LIFE is more than a practice manual—it introduces the reader to the profoundly moral and the compassionate roots of Tibetan Buddhism, which teaches the understanding of everyone's oneness with all of humanity in the comedy and the tragedy of life. Buddhism is an ancient, deep, and rigorous discipline grounded in meditation practice which is steadily gaining popularity in America among millions of people. This book, by one of the most important practitioners of the art in America, will bring you to its heart.

"WAKE UP TO YOUR LIFE presents a set of challenging and much-needed perspectives and practices." — Inquiring Mind

"Throughout this book's 450 pages, McLeod distills the nature and purpose of Buddhism to make it accessible for any newcomer without dumbing it down." — Yoga Journal

"The most detailed discussion that exists in describing exactly how to work emotional patterning which, as the Tibetans pointed out, is the major barrier to the realization of Mind." — Dan Jorgensen, meditation teacher

"McLeod's eminently practical manual goes straight to the heart of what Buddha taught." — Stephen Batchelor, author of BUDDHISM WITHOUT BELIEFS

"For anyone serious about developing a meditation practice, this book will be an invaluable guide." — Los Angeles Times

"A wake-up call to your true life." — Surya Das

"A good helpful, compassionate, necessary book, and more valuable than a whole library of volumes telling us what we want to hear." — Yoga Journal

"[McLeod] offers charming stories, unclouded prose, step-by-step meditations, charts and quotes.... A hefty how-to manual that could prove useful to a singer soul in the hinterlands or a sophisticated searcher in Los Angeles.... McLeod has illuminated the path for solitary individuals who want a long-lasting handbook to begin the journey toward wakefulness." — Publishers Weekly