Awakening Love: Teachings and Practices to Cultivate a Limitless Heart

by Pema Chödrön

Awaken the Capacity to Love, the True Purpose of Our Lives

Have you ever wanted to love and connect with others more deeply … but felt that you could use a little help shedding the “emotional armor” and opening your heart?

With Awakening Love , Pema Chödrön invites you to start wherever you are, amid any and all of the challenges, frustrations, or fears you may be facing, and to use them as the starting place to awaken the natural and boundless capacity to give and receive love more fully.

This practice-centered program, recorded at Gampo Abbey, will teach you how to apply the insights of Buddhism’s Four Limitless Ones― lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity ―to even your most difficult obstacles.

Your Obstacles to the Open Heart Are Your Most Valuable Allies

Many students confess to Pema Chödrön that they cannot think of even one person to love during heart-centered meditation practice. This is what she tells

“What if you could open to that frustration, just for a moment, to discover not just where love is free flowing … but where it’s not ? That is how we all begin to uncover the soft spot within.”

Here, Pema Chödrön brings her unique blend of kitchen-table common sense, scholarship, and empathy to help you discover the eternal resilience and joy of your own tender, undefended, and genuine heart. Whether you’re in the midst of a challenging relationship, grief, or simply in need of heart-centered rejuvenation, Awakening Love provides you with the gentle step-by-step instructions needed to awaken the natural goodness within you.

Highlights

The Four Qualities or Limitless Ones, the roots of suffering, and expanding the capacity to love
• Seeing where we’re blocked and bringing lovingkindness to our biases and fears
• Aspiration practice, “not faking it,” unblocking the flow of love, and benefactors
• Changing our attitude toward pain, working with anger, compassionate abiding, tonglen , and “making friends with the hard stuff”
• Meditations and practices for receiving unconditional love, resting in natural awareness, cultivating gratitude and sympathetic joy, opening to the world, and more

Genres: Buddhism, Spirituality, Nonfiction, Self Help, Meditation

10 pages, Audio CD

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Ani Pema Chödrön (Deirdre Blomfield-Brown) is an American Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition, closely associated with the Kagyu school and the Shambhala lineage.

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, she 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 England at that time, and Ani Pema received her ordination from him.

Ani Pema first met her root guru, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1972. Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Trungpa, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987. At the request of the Sixteenth Karmapa, she received the full bikshuni ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong.

Ani Pema served as the director of the Karma Dzong, in Boulder, CO, until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche gave her explicit instructions on establishing this monastery for western monks and nuns.

Ani Pema currently teaches in the United States and Canada and plans for an increased amount of time in solitary retreat under the guidance of Venerable Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.

Reviews

[Caryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to the Audible version of this. Savored it slowly as if I was taking a 7 week retreat. Lovely.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s funny how a rating of a meditation book, makes me evaluate what is coming up for me. I found parts of this to be hard because the meditations felt like they were referencing things that felt random. Also most of this book was mediations.

[Mark Moloney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pema offers pithy insights on what it takes to awaken.

Bodhichitta is three things :
1 Loving kindness
2 Compassion
3 Rejoicing and equanimity

As relevant today as it was when it was recorded , Pema is a visionary and delivers a humorous take on Buddhist ideals.

[DianeK Klu]

Put on hold for now.

[Allie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding mix of teachings and meditation. Brain hacking at its finest. Calming, thoughtful, and enjoyable.

[Carrie LeAnne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love all of Pema Chodron's audiobooks. Her voice is so calming. The message is always spot on. The meditations are wonderful.

[Tina Panik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of breakthrough moments and teachings.

[Lisa Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful audiobook for cultivating a more joyful, peace-filled heart.

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best investments for this trying time

[Stacye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this as an audiobook. I listen to audiobooks in my car. At least 50% of the material in this book is guided meditation which would be great...if I was anywhere but my car. I did try to make the most of the LONG pauses while Pema and her followers went "inside". I told myself I could go inside, too, just not all the way inside. I attempted to focus on spirit. I even tried to imagine my "benefactors" surrounding me as Pema suggested. After a while, though, I gave up. The material in this book is worthwhile. The lectures, sparse though they may be, contained useful reminders. Perhaps I'll pick this up again sometime...like while laying on a beach, or resting on a dock, or maybe just sitting in my recliner.