The Heart of Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience [Paperback]

Swami Durgananda (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 28, 2002

This guide to the inner being reveals techniques for moving beyond troublesome thoughts, finding keys to unlock practices like mantra repetition, and learning how to troubleshoot your own meditation practice.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Swami Durgananda has studied and taught under the guidance of Siddha Yoga meditation master Gurumayi Chidvilasananda for the last two decades, offering courses and workshops in meditation and yoga philosophy all over the world. In 2002, she became a lay teacher under her given name, Sally Kempton.

Product Details

• Paperback: 396 pages
• Publisher: Siddha Yoga Publications (January 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0911307974
• ISBN-13: 978-0911307979
• Product Dimensions: 0.4 x 0.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #598,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Voice Returns, January 24, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Heart of Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience (Paperback)

Sally Kempton's pen hasn't lost its power since the days she wrote for Esquire and New York Magazine, and helped galvanize a generation. Now she's translated into the American idiom the understandings she's gleaned in three decades of inner exploration. I for one am very grateful to catch up with her again. Even if you don't have a Guru, and don't feel ready for one, it's great to feel the light of Kempton's intelligence and heart shining on these big questions, to hear her own personal take on time-honored strategies for plunging into the depths of Being. Once again, she's tapped into the zeitgeist.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly helpful, April 21, 2005

By 

Milly Rosen (Santa Barbara, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heart of Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience (Paperback)

I've been using this book as my meditation guidebook for about two years now. It has consistantly inspired me. My meditation practice has gone much deeper during this time, and I give a lot of the credit to the exercises and explanations in Sally Kempton's book. Ms Kempton (Swami Durgananda) writes from her own experience as a long-time meditator, and for me she was able to shed light on questions that I've not seen answered elsewhere. It also contains lovely quotes from great meditation masters of different traditions, and a great deal of well-presented knowledge from the texts of yoga and Kashmir Shaivism. This is a book to grow with, especially if you meditate in a kundalini-based tradition. i have never found a book that answered so many of my questions. Highly recommended.

36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Contemporary Classic, November 23, 2002

By 

George Franklin. (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heart of Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience (Paperback)

I am a poet and editor who has maintained a daily practice of meditation for over twenty years, during the course of which I have naturally read a number of books on meditation. Sally Kempton's "The Heart of Meditation" is quite simply the finest book on Eastern Meditation by a Western writer that I have yet encountered.
The book is clearly the work of an author possesing
a rigorous, wide-raging intellect, a generous heart, and uncommon common sense. "Heart" is both elegant in its overall structure and eloquently written, its clear and simple prose informed by a literary sensibility that makes it as compulsively readable as a good novel. It is both comprehensive and concise in conveying the intellectrual and metaphysical underpinnings of the Yoga of meditation, both inspiring and consistently practical in guiding the reader along pathways to a deeper meditative expereience.
Fittingly, the book is also beautifully designed, its expansive and elegant format reflecting its content. I expect to be giving it this Christmas both to friends who have expressed an interest in beginning to meditate and to experienced practitioners.
There is so much to be said about this book. For brevity's sake, I will mention three points in particular.
First, this is not a book about how to feel better about yourself as a person, how to be more compassionate to your fellow man, how to tap the wellspring of your greativity,
how to be more effective in the worplace etc. (though it is likely to induce any or allo of the above as side-effects!) As the author makes clear from the outset, this is a book about self-exploration, about how to access the deeper levels of consciousness and joyful awareness that our our birthright but that elude many of us, about how to expand our understanding of ourselves and of our world. It is a book by an experienced adventurer, herself for many years the disciple of two highly regarded Yoga masters, that invites the reader to go on a similar adventure, and is a book that is in many ways an adventure in itself. It is a book that is relentlessly focussed on the goal of life's adventure, the fulfillment of the Socratic injunction "know thyself".
Secondly, this is a book rooted in the experience Of Yoga meditation that draws on the teachings of several prominent strains of the Hindu tradition. There are a number of excellent books by Western writers on the practice of Buddhist meditation, but none that I am aware of of comparative quality on Yoga meditation - until now. Though meditation is a universal phenomenon, there are very real differences in the approaches toward the practice of meditation emphasized by different schools. Kempton's book is rooted in the experience of Kundalini Yoga which uses a seker's inner energy, his or her innate divine effervescence, as a guide to a more profound experience of the self. Kempton expertly describes the often surprising "pathways" this energhy can take as it guodes the seeker within, and provides the context through which we can understand ther variegated subtle inner realms they can lead us through (and beyond).
Finally, and most importantly, the book provides an extaordinary wealth of information about how we can become creative and "unstuck" in our meditation practice. Let me give just one example. Early in the book Kempton points out that people have different characteristic styles of processing information - she mentions the visual, the auditory,the kinesthetic, and the conceptual-schematic as examples. Depensing upon one's predominant styles some routes to deep meditation will be more easier and more effective than others. Through reading this book I realized that I major in the kinesthetic and minor in the auditory. Most of my mefditative experiences have involved sensing energy in different subtle centerts in the body, particularly the heart and throat, the seat of love and imaginative insight; mantra repetition has intensified these sensations. This book has helped me to value my own style of meditation, which is particularly well suited to my work as a poet. It provides a wide range of techniques, some drawn scriptural tradition and others drawn from the author's experience and experimentation, that will enable any meditator to discover and focus upon what techniques work best for him or her. Some of these techniques have had a major impact on my own practice.
In sum, I believe that this book amply deserves to become a classic modern text on the theory and practice of meditation. I truly hope it will find its way to the many readers who willl surely benefit from it.