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Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World
A luminous guide to navigating transition and impermanence rooted in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of bardo
In a world where nothing lasts forever, how do we live? Life is perpetually, endlessly filled with new jobs and new loves, unfamiliar places and faces. And woven into that change is loss of what was or is or what could have been. In the midst of this shifting landscape, Traveling In Bardo invites readers to embrace impermanence in a powerful way, rooted in ancient wisdom.
Over the course of forty years of writing and speaking about her Tibetan-American heritage and the relevance of Buddhism in Western society, author Ann Tashi Slater came to see how Tibetan bardo views on impermanence can transform the way we live. In Tibetan belief, bardo is the intermediate stage between death and rebirth. It also refers to liminal periods in life when the reality we know comes to an end and, more broadly, it means the interval between birth and death.
Interweaving discussions of bardo in relation to marriage and friendship, parents and children, work and creativity with stories of Slater’s Tibetan ancestors and the Buddhist teachings on the transitory nature of existence, Traveling in Bardo explores what the bardo teachings have to tell us in the modern day, relaying vital wisdom from Tibetan culture, and offering readers a new framework to negotiate these inevitable moments of change and impermanence.
In a world where nothing lasts forever, how do we live? Life is perpetually, endlessly filled with new jobs and new loves, unfamiliar places and faces. And woven into that change is loss of what was or is or what could have been. In the midst of this shifting landscape, Traveling In Bardo invites readers to embrace impermanence in a powerful way, rooted in ancient wisdom.
Over the course of forty years of writing and speaking about her Tibetan-American heritage and the relevance of Buddhism in Western society, author Ann Tashi Slater came to see how Tibetan bardo views on impermanence can transform the way we live. In Tibetan belief, bardo is the intermediate stage between death and rebirth. It also refers to liminal periods in life when the reality we know comes to an end and, more broadly, it means the interval between birth and death.
Interweaving discussions of bardo in relation to marriage and friendship, parents and children, work and creativity with stories of Slater’s Tibetan ancestors and the Buddhist teachings on the transitory nature of existence, Traveling in Bardo explores what the bardo teachings have to tell us in the modern day, relaying vital wisdom from Tibetan culture, and offering readers a new framework to negotiate these inevitable moments of change and impermanence.
- GenresNonfiction
288 pages, Hardcover
Published September 9, 2025
17 people are currently reading
239 people want to read
About the author
Ann Tashi Slater
8 books11 followersAnn Tashi Slater is the author of Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World (Balance/Hachette). She has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Lit Hub, Oprah Daily, Catapult, Guernica, Tin House, Narrative, and Granta, among others, and her work has been included in The Best American Essays. She presents and teaches workshops at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, Asia Society, and The American University of Paris, and was a regular speaker at NYC's Rubin Museum of Art during the museum's 20-year run.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 30, 2025
This riveting, thought-provoking book came into my life a couple weeks after my grandmother had passed. Morality, life and death as complementary entities, allowing oneself to embrace liminal spaces - it felt like I was having a conversation with Tashi Slater the entire time. This piece was written beautifully, and I learned so much about the Tibetan Book of Death and other Buddhist teachings that I want to apply in my own life.
September 9, 2025
This thought-provoking book prompted me to reflect on my mortality and what’s important for me to prioritize. I don’t often think about leaving this world, but when the time comes will I have lived a full life? Will I wish I’d done more? Been a better human? Balanced the “need to dos” with my dreams?
Ann Tashi Slater weaves insights from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz’s version) within her book to show readers how we can transform our daily lives and embrace change.
Contemplative, inspiring, and hopeful—a must read!
Ann Tashi Slater weaves insights from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz’s version) within her book to show readers how we can transform our daily lives and embrace change.
Contemplative, inspiring, and hopeful—a must read!
November 24, 2025
Traveling in Bardo offers Tibetan wisdom by an author uniquely qualified to give it. Ann Tashi Slater has been writing about her distinguished Tibetan family for many years and many publications, and now brings her life story altogether to reflect with depth and honesty upon her complex background with its many teachable moments.
This is a multinational life story, a spiritually uplifting one at that, even though it deals with the topic of death in its manifestations, including the loss of a beloved dog.
Set in different periods of Ann's life in San Francisco, Tokyo and Dharamshala, for anyone who has lived between cultures and countries, the experience of love, loss and embracing change will resonate. I know it did for me.
The English translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, became the first and definitive Oxford University Press edition in English, published in 1927, and selling more than a million copies around the world.
Ann Tashi Slater, the great grand-daughter of the Tibetan official S.W. Laden La, who played a pivotal role in the book’s publication, reminds us that the teachings are as relevant today as a hundred years ago as we all grapple with “the art of living in an impermanent world.”
While I was nodding my head in agreement, underlining passages, putting exclamation marks in the margins, I never imagined that the day after I put the book down, I would be so rudely tested with the execution of a beloved tree by an irrational neighbor. Gone was my “poet in residence.” Knocking on my door was an achingly hard lesson in impermanence.
I kept in mind the lessons from Traveling in Bardo. Toward the end of the book, Ann sums up the power of adopting a mindset of accepting impermanence as a fact of life: “I think the enduring popularity of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is that it shows us how we can be artists of our lives and find the happiness we long for. This longing can be seen as a kind of age-old yearning for paradise, for a place of refuge in a world of uncertainty and change.”
I read Traveling in Bardo cover to cover on a long flight and Ann's way of writing is so intimate and welcoming, it's like sitting in a room and listening to a wise teacher who seeks to connect to us through experiences we all can nod our heads and say, yes, I've been there. Don't stop. Tell me more.
This is a multinational life story, a spiritually uplifting one at that, even though it deals with the topic of death in its manifestations, including the loss of a beloved dog.
Set in different periods of Ann's life in San Francisco, Tokyo and Dharamshala, for anyone who has lived between cultures and countries, the experience of love, loss and embracing change will resonate. I know it did for me.
The English translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, became the first and definitive Oxford University Press edition in English, published in 1927, and selling more than a million copies around the world.
Ann Tashi Slater, the great grand-daughter of the Tibetan official S.W. Laden La, who played a pivotal role in the book’s publication, reminds us that the teachings are as relevant today as a hundred years ago as we all grapple with “the art of living in an impermanent world.”
While I was nodding my head in agreement, underlining passages, putting exclamation marks in the margins, I never imagined that the day after I put the book down, I would be so rudely tested with the execution of a beloved tree by an irrational neighbor. Gone was my “poet in residence.” Knocking on my door was an achingly hard lesson in impermanence.
I kept in mind the lessons from Traveling in Bardo. Toward the end of the book, Ann sums up the power of adopting a mindset of accepting impermanence as a fact of life: “I think the enduring popularity of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is that it shows us how we can be artists of our lives and find the happiness we long for. This longing can be seen as a kind of age-old yearning for paradise, for a place of refuge in a world of uncertainty and change.”
I read Traveling in Bardo cover to cover on a long flight and Ann's way of writing is so intimate and welcoming, it's like sitting in a room and listening to a wise teacher who seeks to connect to us through experiences we all can nod our heads and say, yes, I've been there. Don't stop. Tell me more.
September 20, 2025
In a world where nothing lasts forever, how should we live?
Tashi Slater’s Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World explores the problem of impermanence in a story that braids the history of her own Tibetan family with the teachings of bardo, made famous by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book which the author's great-grandfather had a part in bringing to the west.
Living more than two decades in Japan, Slater sees this deep understanding of liminal spaces in the world around her. Bardo is not just something that happens after death, but stands as a metaphor for all the liminal spaces that surround us. In Japan, especially, where natural disasters seem a constant, people from very ancient times there have been attuned to ephemerality and the transitory nature of our lives.
I loved reading about her family and their understanding and practice of bardo teachings. But I also really enjoyed learning about her life in Japan and the way Japanese concepts of impermaance also shaped her thinking.
In perhaps the most harrowing story in the book, she recounts her own near-death experience when she falls ill with a rare sickness after a trip to Indonesia. Hovering in the hospital for weeks, delirious with fever, she is comforted by the teachings of her grandparents—seeing life as a blessing, she writes movingly of Proust, “who was asked by a newspaper what people would do if the cataclysm came, and he says that people would say, “Oh, I’m going to visit the new galleries of the Louvre, and I’m going to go to India, and I’m going to throw myself at the feet of Miss X.” And then the cataclysm doesn’t come, he says, and we fall back into our usual ways—we don’t go to India and we don’t throw ourselves at the feet of Miss X.”
In fully embracing our human fragility, we become more conscious of the time we have. And in that way in learning how to die, we learn how to live.
I read this book in two sittings. I simply could not put it down--but then after finishing could not get it out of my mind. It is a stunning nonfiction debut. One that I cannot recommend enough!
Tashi Slater’s Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World explores the problem of impermanence in a story that braids the history of her own Tibetan family with the teachings of bardo, made famous by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book which the author's great-grandfather had a part in bringing to the west.
Living more than two decades in Japan, Slater sees this deep understanding of liminal spaces in the world around her. Bardo is not just something that happens after death, but stands as a metaphor for all the liminal spaces that surround us. In Japan, especially, where natural disasters seem a constant, people from very ancient times there have been attuned to ephemerality and the transitory nature of our lives.
I loved reading about her family and their understanding and practice of bardo teachings. But I also really enjoyed learning about her life in Japan and the way Japanese concepts of impermaance also shaped her thinking.
In perhaps the most harrowing story in the book, she recounts her own near-death experience when she falls ill with a rare sickness after a trip to Indonesia. Hovering in the hospital for weeks, delirious with fever, she is comforted by the teachings of her grandparents—seeing life as a blessing, she writes movingly of Proust, “who was asked by a newspaper what people would do if the cataclysm came, and he says that people would say, “Oh, I’m going to visit the new galleries of the Louvre, and I’m going to go to India, and I’m going to throw myself at the feet of Miss X.” And then the cataclysm doesn’t come, he says, and we fall back into our usual ways—we don’t go to India and we don’t throw ourselves at the feet of Miss X.”
In fully embracing our human fragility, we become more conscious of the time we have. And in that way in learning how to die, we learn how to live.
I read this book in two sittings. I simply could not put it down--but then after finishing could not get it out of my mind. It is a stunning nonfiction debut. One that I cannot recommend enough!
September 24, 2025
Amidst the evolving complications and chaos of contemporary life, Traveling in Bardo serves as a crucial reminder to turn inwards and find solid ground as we navigate constant change. Slater seamlessly integrates her storied heritage and complex identity with guiding bardo principles to chart a stirring exploration on navigating liminal spaces, accepting mortality, creating meaning, and embracing life to the fullest in this stunning debut.
Slater shares a wealth of deeply poignant stories from her life and the lives that came before hers to craft a book that reads like a conversation with a friend as she encourages readers to confront mortality with an open and steady mind. With artful prose and delicate attention to detail, she spirits readers through time and space to high mountaintop peaks, deep undersea currents, and her humble first home in Japan. In doing so, she makes what may have once been frightening and unknown, accessible and knowable.
This book is sobering, comforting, achingly raw with emotion at times, and speckled with humor and heart. By revealing her stories of joy, grief, and everything in between, Slater invites readers to walk alongside her through bardo and encourages readers to continue the journey long after turning the last page.
Slater shares a wealth of deeply poignant stories from her life and the lives that came before hers to craft a book that reads like a conversation with a friend as she encourages readers to confront mortality with an open and steady mind. With artful prose and delicate attention to detail, she spirits readers through time and space to high mountaintop peaks, deep undersea currents, and her humble first home in Japan. In doing so, she makes what may have once been frightening and unknown, accessible and knowable.
This book is sobering, comforting, achingly raw with emotion at times, and speckled with humor and heart. By revealing her stories of joy, grief, and everything in between, Slater invites readers to walk alongside her through bardo and encourages readers to continue the journey long after turning the last page.
September 20, 2025
An engaging and thought-provoking introduction to the concept of Bardo as presented in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Having read Lincoln in the Bardo some years back, I was vaguely familiar with the "between state" of the newly dead and the people who love them, but Ann Slater broadened my understanding.
All of us will die, and our lifespans are bardos between birth and death. How will we spend the "dash" between the dates on our tombstones? Will we live authentically in pursuit of our true selves, or be held back by our pasts?
I don't mean to imply that Traveling in Bardo is heavy or prescriptive. Weaving her fascinating life story in a colorful tapestry, the author shares the significant challenges she has faced, the bardos within the Bardo of her life, and opens up to reveal a daughter, a student, a parent, a patient, a person. Her style is conversational. Her anecdotes about her family are relatable and amusing.
I closed this book in a state of openness and calm, having learned enough to want to know more.
All of us will die, and our lifespans are bardos between birth and death. How will we spend the "dash" between the dates on our tombstones? Will we live authentically in pursuit of our true selves, or be held back by our pasts?
I don't mean to imply that Traveling in Bardo is heavy or prescriptive. Weaving her fascinating life story in a colorful tapestry, the author shares the significant challenges she has faced, the bardos within the Bardo of her life, and opens up to reveal a daughter, a student, a parent, a patient, a person. Her style is conversational. Her anecdotes about her family are relatable and amusing.
I closed this book in a state of openness and calm, having learned enough to want to know more.
October 26, 2025
Without being verbose and boring I want to just tell everyone that Ann's book is a labour of love.. Love of her family elders.. Love of her heritage.. Love of life.. And how ancient Tibetan wisdom is so true for all of us seekers and the world at large. The fact that she is an Army kid having grown up at bases all over the world makes me so much relate sympathize and relate to her.. But having been a fourth generation Army kid.. I can really understand that it's a changing world.... And that Ann's Dad was American army really drives in the fact that in spite of all the so called differences .. Cultures.. People.. And life is the same for all of us.. My mum is 90 and an Army wife.. Her anxiety for the upcoming change in her universe has been allayed to a great extent by reading Bardo.. Thanks❤🙏 Ann
October 13, 2025
It's a beautifully written text, skillfully interweaving the role of impermanence in life with Tibetan Buddhism and personal memoir. Life's reality of death is a central theme enveloped in Tibetan traditions and philosophy and evoked as an organizing structure for the decades covered in the narrative. As the story progresses, it's necessary to self-reflect on specific histories and lessons and remind oneself about the nature of the impermanent world and one's place therein. It's a rewarding read about bardo and how helpful it is in life's journey.
October 22, 2025
I wanted a little more out of this book, but still enjoyed it. A story that stands out is of a monk who is being chased by a tiger towards a cliff. She holds onto a vine. There are tigers above her and tigers below her. There is a mouse eating at the vine she’s holding. Then she notices there are strawberries on the vine. She eats them and enjoys them.
September 26, 2025
4.5 🌟 rounded up
I've studied a little bit of Buddhist philosophy, but not the concept of bardo, which is the state between death and rebirth. Ann Tashi Slater introduces this concept, with stories of family, loss, love, and the very nature of existence. I found it fascinating and helpful in dealing with grief.
Recommended for anyone interested in the Buddhist tradition of bardo.
Thank you to NetGalley & Grand Central Publishing for the ARC.
I've studied a little bit of Buddhist philosophy, but not the concept of bardo, which is the state between death and rebirth. Ann Tashi Slater introduces this concept, with stories of family, loss, love, and the very nature of existence. I found it fascinating and helpful in dealing with grief.
Recommended for anyone interested in the Buddhist tradition of bardo.
Thank you to NetGalley & Grand Central Publishing for the ARC.
November 1, 2025
a lovely read and welcome reminder that life is short and that change is the only constant. a lot of this resonated / put words to feelings and mindsets i try to espouse; personally i believe strongly in the teachings described here and accepting life as bardo !!!
November 30, 2025
This took a while to read, but glad I finished it.
I found the last 1/4 was where the magic happened for me.
I found the last 1/4 was where the magic happened for me.
January 14, 2026
Glimpses into other worlds
I loved this book! Highlights were hearing about the grandmother’s colorful life in Darjeeling, the Buddhist death rites and Buddhist philosophy, the author’s childhood in the US and then adult life in Japan. The beautiful writing, vivid detail, and the author’s thoughtful reflections made this book magical.
I read this for a book group, and it generated an excellent discussion-recommend for a group!
I loved this book! Highlights were hearing about the grandmother’s colorful life in Darjeeling, the Buddhist death rites and Buddhist philosophy, the author’s childhood in the US and then adult life in Japan. The beautiful writing, vivid detail, and the author’s thoughtful reflections made this book magical.
I read this for a book group, and it generated an excellent discussion-recommend for a group!
November 23, 2025
The author has distilled a great deal of mystery and complexity concerning Tibetan Buddhism to a readable understanding of the compassion and focus necessary to navigate our current world. Drawing on her family's history (great grand-daughter of Laden La who helped bring The Tibetan Book of the Dead to the western world), a long study of the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan for this book), and her own life experiences, Ann Tashi Slater has given us a book that presents an easien r access to teachings that seemed beyond the scope of an average reader. I found her examples and explanations quite striking and pointed and feel she has encouraged her audience to a point they too can practice these Buddhist teachings in their daily lives.
Ken Winkler, author
Pilgrim of the Clear Light: The Biography of Dr. Walter Evans-Wentz
Ken Winkler, author
Pilgrim of the Clear Light: The Biography of Dr. Walter Evans-Wentz
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews