Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of Essence Love [Hardcover]

Tsoknyi Rinpoche (Author), Eric Swanson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 3, 2012

In Open Heart, Open Mind, Tsoknyi Rinpoche—one of the most beloved of the contemporary generation of Tibetan Buddhist meditation masters—explains that a life free of fear, pain, insecurity, and doubt is not only possible, it’s our birthright. We long for peace, for the ability to love and be loved openly and freely, and for the confidence and clarity to meet the various challenges we face in our daily lives.

Within each of us resides a spark of unparalleled brilliance, an unlimited capacity for warmth, openness, and courage, which Rinpoche identifies as “essence love.” Timeless and imperishable, essence love is often layered over by patterns of behavior and belief that urge us to seek happiness in conditions or situations that never quite live up to their promise.

Drawing on rarely discussed teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, Rinpoche describes how such patterns evolve and offers a series of meditation exercises to help us unravel them and, in the process, reawaken an energy and exuberance that can not only bring lasting fulfillment to our lives but ultimately serve to enliven and inspire the entire world, as well.

With great humor, intelligence, and candor, Tsoknyi Rinpoche also details his own struggles to reconnect with essence love. Identified at an early age as the incarnation of a renowned Tibetan master and subjected to a rigorous monastic training, he ultimately renounced his vows, married, and is now the father of two daughters.
As he recounts his own efforts to strike a balance between the promptings of his heart and an obligation to preserve and protect the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, Rinpoche provides a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern life, and encourages each of us to rediscover the openness, fearlessness, and love that is the essence of our own life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Rinpoche’s infectious spiritual energy, enthusiasm and insight will still prove relevant for anyone with an open mind and a willingness to project peace and goodness inward and outward…Centered serenity from one of the greats.”--Kirkus

“Tsoknyi Rinpoche is a most wonderful teacher, warm-hearted, deep, honest and funny. This book captures his teachings and spirit beautifully, profound teachings offered in a kind, truly accessible and personal way.”
—Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart

“Designed both for people new to meditation and those with long experience, Open Heart, Open Mind is a treasure trove of wisdom and love.
 It is a book filled with practical exercises, personal anecdotes, humor, compassion, clarity, and an expansive view
of how we can each have a better life.”
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

“Tsoknyi Rinpoche has a unique way of integrating heartfelt wisdom, brilliant clarity and playfulness on the path to awakening.  In these lively and profound pages we feel the pleasure of being with Rinpoche as his delightful stories evoke a path of practical psychological insights and spiritual methods. Open Heart, Open Mind offers anyone who wants a more joyous life a masterful guide to greater meaning, a more spacious mind, and the spark of a kind love.
—Tara and Daniel Goleman, authors of Emotional Alchemy and Emotional Intelligence

“Tsoknyi Rinpoche's Open Heart, Open Mind is amazing in a number of ways.  Tsoknyi Rinpoche grew up in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. His family is full of meditation masters and their energy surrounded him from an early age.  Yet he is also interested in and experienced
with Western neuroses and Westerners' minds.  The result is a refreshing, invigorating, and stimulating work: one that has the power
to awaken that essence we all seek.”
—Mark Epstein, M.D., author of Thoughts without a Thinker and Going to Pieces without Falling Apart

“Tsoknyi Rinpoche is a rare gem—a teacher who combines a deep understanding of the Buddhist tradition with remarkable insight into the challenges we face in the modern world. In this book, he skilfully weaves together profound teachings on ‘essence love’ and the ‘subtle body’ with examples from everyday life to show how it is possible to overcome our fears and limitations, and ignite the boundless wisdom and compassion that we all have within us.”
—Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

About the Author

Born in 1966 in Nubri, Nepal, Tsoknyi Rinpoche is one of the most renowned teachers of Tibetan Buddhism trained outside of Tibet. Deeply versed in both the practical and philosophical disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism, he is beloved by students around the world for his accessible style, his generous and self-deprecating humor, and his deeply personal, compassionate insight into human nature. The married father of two daughters, Rinpoche nevertheless manages to balance family life with a demanding schedule of teaching around the world and overseeing two nunneries in Nepal, one of the largest nunneries in Tibet, and more than fifty practice centers and hermitages in the eastern region of Tibet. More information about Tsoknyi Rinpoche, his teachings, and his activities can be found at www.pundarika.org.

Eric Swanson is coauthor, with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, of the New York Times bestseller The Joy of Living and its follow-up volume, Joyful Wisdom. A graduate of Yale University and the Juilliard School, he is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction. After converting to Buddhism in 1995, he cowrote Karmapa, The Sacred Prophecy, a history of the Karma Kagyu lineage, and authored What the Lotus Said, a memoir.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; 1 edition (April 3, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307888207
• ISBN-13: 978-0307888204
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #42,608 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #23 in Books > History > Asia > Tibet

More About the Author

For over 21 years, Tsoknyi Rinpoche has been teaching students worldwide about the innermost nature of mind in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Rinpoche is one of those rare teachers whose lighthearted, yet illuminating style appeals to both beginners and advanced practitioners alike. He is truly a bridge between ancient wisdom and the modern mind.

His fresh insights into the western psyche have enabled him to teach and write in a way that touches our most profound awareness, using metaphors, stories and images that point directly to our everyday experience. He is widely recognized as a brilliant meditation teacher, is the author of three books, OPEN HEART, OPEN MIND, CAREFREE DIGNITY and FEARLESS SIMPLICITY, and has a keen interest in the ongoing dialogue between western research, especially in neuroscience, and Buddhist practitioners and scholars.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche's activity greatly contributes to the preservation of the Buddha Dharma in the East, while nurturing its growth in the West. His personal warmth and compassionate attention greatly enrich and enliven the depth of our learning experience. His dedication to teaching is based on his belief that the precious Buddha Dharma can bring peace and harmony to the world.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Cutting Through to the Heart of Awakening May 29, 2012

By John Makransky

Format:Hardcover

It is astounding how well Tsoknyi Rinpoche understands the cross-cultural dynamics at work when modern people try to internalize the deepest teachings of Buddhism, and how effectively he addresses those dynamics in his new book Open Heart, Open Mind.

Westerners live in a world dominated by science, instrumental rationality, and competition. Our eighteenth century Age of Reason taught us to put faith only in our thinking ("I think, therefore I am"), not to explore the fuller embodied awareness that Buddhism points us to. Many of us harbor the thought of ourselves as intrinsically unlovable, perhaps due to the socio-economic competition that ties our worth just to our current usefulness or success, instilling fear from a young age that we can never be reliably worthy of love.

Such socially conditioned anxiety and self-dislike, as Tsoknyi Rinpoche points out, becomes embedded in our minds and psycho-physical energies, inhibiting access to the heart of awakening, the recognition that oneself and all others are primordially pure, deeply worthy of love, and endowed with vast potential. Unless the ingrained patterns of our social conditioning are directly addressed (and Asian pedagogies were not designed to do so), we may be hindered from fuller access to the liberating power of the Dharma.

The brilliance of Tsoknyi Rinpoche's book lies in his crystal clarity on these dynamics, and the effectiveness of his methods for cutting through them to reawaken the innate spark of awareness and loving energy that is hidden in our being.

Rinpoche teaches through personal stories of struggles and inspirations, his own and others'. Told by a revered lama, his personal stories can be shockingly frank, yet are precisely targeted to show how our subconscious patterns of thought, feeling and energy can obstruct our potential, and to impart practices that gently heal and release those patterns. Rinpoche thereby transmits, in the most affectionate and gentle ways, the very heart of awakening from the Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions of Tibet.

In the book's first pages, Tsoknyi Rinpoche describes the fear of falling he felt in Malaysia years ago when stepping onto a transparent glass bridge between skyscrapers. "Paralyzing fear is not, perhaps, the response one might expect" from a Tibetan lama, he admits. Yet by sharing his fears with us, he helps enter us into the same deep process of healing that he underwent. The key is kindness and respect for every aspect of our being: "Working with patterns [like fear] requires great kindness and gentleness: the same qualities parents apply when they comfort children crying in the dark.... I stepped for a third time onto the bridge, ... acknowledging the fear and letting it come up within an open, comforting embrace instead of trying to push it away. With each step I gained more confidence. The tight knot of physical sensations, emotions and thoughts began to loosen."

To be present to our emotions with such gentleness and respect shows us how to be present to others caught in similar patterns (compassion) while drawing our minds toward the View of Dzogchen and Mahamudra (wisdom) that embraces everything in its openness, clarity and warmth.

A practical problem for modern people is the inner blockage we may experience as we try to open to awakening qualities in the nature of our minds. Purely intellectual, cognitive training is not enough, for it leaves untouched the energetic and emotional knots imprinted by years of conditioned reaction in our fast paced lives. Rinpoche provides new access to the practice of subtle energy from Tibetan tantric tradition that helps us release, from the inside, our psycho-physical barriers to awakening.

The journey unfolds as layers of habitual fear learned from our youth gradually unwind to reveal the child-like freedom and wonder with which we were born: "In the process [of my Tibetan lama training,] I learned something quite startling. The youthful freedom I longed for was no different than the freedom of heart that the Buddha ... had taught. The discipline of my training was aimed at helping people work with their patterns, to embrace them with the same warmth, openness, and curiosity with which most of us approached the various phenomena we encountered as very young children. "

As Rinpoche shares many further stories, fresh ways of imparting Buddhist teachings, and simple meditations, we discover that what needs healing in us is what needs healing in others, that the inner wisdom, openness and warmth that does this healing is our deepest identity, and that all of our experiences and relationships can become the means to express that identity. Tsoknyi Rinpoche is not merely giving us methods of self-healing, but returning us to our deepest being, Buddhahood, by showing us how to let all that hides it gently fall away.

John Makransky
Associate Professor of Buddhism, Boston College

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartfelt Wisdom for Seasoned Practitioners and Newbies Alike April 4, 2012

By Voracious Reader

Format:Hardcover

Tsoknyi Rinpoche distills wisdom from his many years of study with some of the greatest meditation masters of our time. He also brings his unique experience as a Rinpoche who is also a husband and father. He understands what it means to balance family, work, and spiritual practice. His writing is accessible and funny, full of deep insight into core Buddhist teachings. I earmarked all the meditation exercises (there are many!) and will come back to them often. So simple and profound. A refreshing addition to the very best books on Buddhism and meditation, by a teacher who believes we can all become "virtuosos in the art of living."

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Skillful Teaching & Writing April 5, 2012

By Bill Gallagher

Format:Hardcover

What could be more important than increasing the amount of love and openness we experience and pass on to others. This is the focus of Tsoknyi Rinpoche's Open Heart, Open Mind. Written with a humility that makes his words resonate and helped by the skillful writing of Eric Swanson (co-author/ghost writer of The Joy of Living) who has a way with words that makes the pages go down easy.

At the age of eight, the Nepalese-born Tsoknyi Rinpoche was marked as the reincarnation of a well known Tibetan meditation master. By twelve, he started the rigorous training Tibetan monks under go. Later he renounced his vows, marrying and becoming a family man. After writing about his training in the monastery and life as a global teacher, he encourages us to realize we can all be "virtuosos" -- able to "recognize within ourselves an astonishing capacity for brilliance, kindness, generosity, and courage." And we can help develop these qualities in everyone. At the heart of this practice is "essence love" which is "unconditional kindness, gentleness, and affection born of openness."

In Open Heart, Open Mind Tsoknyi gives us stories, teachings and exercises directed to developing essence love and other spiritual qualities. Opening with a story about his fear crossing a bridge, he builds on that analogy through out the book, gently trying to help us cross our own bridges from reactive patterns to greater openness and love.