Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life [Hardcover]

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2005

For the first time ever, revered spiritual leader Sakyong Mipham brings the lessons of the ancient Shambhala warriors and rulers to the Western world and shows us how to live our lives with confidence.


Most of us are living in a haze—sometimes helping others, sometimes helping ourselves, sometimes happy, sometimes sad. We don’t feel in control of our own lives. The ancient teachings of Shambhala rulership show us that we all have the ability to rule our own world and live with confidence. To do this, we need to use our daily lives to be strong, as opposed to aggressive, and to act with wisdom and compassion. This may sound difficult, but when we begin to mix this ancient wisdom of rulership into our everyday life, we have both spiritual and worldly success. We don’t need to abandon our life and become an ascetic or a monk in order to gain confidence and achieve this success. We can live in the world as a ruler no matter what we are doing.
—from Ruling Your World

You’re stuck in the airport security line, late for a flight. The line isn’t moving. You’re angry at the security personnel for taking so long, you’re irritated at the other passengers for having so much stuff, you’re mad at your boss for sending you on this trip in the first place. By the time you get to your gate you’re angry, deflated, and exhausted. Then someone cuts in front of you in the line to board and you snap. “There’s a line, you know!” Is that really you, standing in an airport, yelling at a stranger, emotions raging?

It happens to most of us more than we’d like to admit. In an instant, our lives seem out of control and overwhelming. It’s always something, isn’t it? But what if you could approach every part of your life—from the smallest decisions to life’s biggest setbacks—with total confidence, clarity, and control?

According to Sakyong Mipham, we all have that power. The secret is simple: If you just stop thinking about yourself all the time, happiness and confidence will come naturally. It sounds absurd and, what’s more, impossible. But in Ruling Your World, Sakyong Mipham shares ancient secrets on how to take control of our lives and be successful while cultivating compassion for others and confidence in our own intelligence and goodness. The key to this well-being lies in the ancient strategies of the warrior kings and queens of Shambhala.

The kingdom of Shambhala was an enlightened kingdom of benevolent kings and queens and fiercely trained warriors. No one knows for sure whether this kingdom was real or mythical, but there are ancient guidebooks to this land and practical instructions for creating a Shambhala in your own world, bringing peace, purpose, and perspective into your life and environment.

Sakyong Mipham, the descendant of a warrior king, has inherited these teachings and gives us the lessons and myths of the great rulers and warriors of Shambhala. He makes these teachings relevant to our twenty-first-century lives in a fresh and witty voice and helps us all to realize our potential for power and control in a seemingly uncontrollable world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is a wonderful book with teachings to read, reread, practice, and embody.” —Sharon Salzberg, bestselling author of Lovingkindness and Faith

“Sakyong Mipham offers inspirational vision—as well as practical guidelines—for enormously enriching our individual lives in a way that benefits others as well. Highly recommended for the honest and straightforward purity of the teaching and its immediate application in—and beyond—our everyday lives.”

—Ken Wilber, author of The Simple Feeling of Being

About the Author

the leader of Shambhala, a worldwide network of meditation and retreat centers. He’s also an avid marathon runner and golfer, he frequently retreats to study at a Tibetan monastery in India, and he writes a regular column in the Shambhala Sun. He is the son of Chögyam Trungpa, who was instrumental in establishing Tibetan Buddhism in the West. The author of the bestselling Turning the Mind Into an Ally, Sakyong Mipham was named one of the thirty global visionaries of our time by Planet magazine. He spends his time teaching all over the world, using his unique blend of Eastern and Western perspectives to the benefit of his students in North and South America, Europe, and Asia.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Crown Archetype (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767920651
• ISBN-13: 978-0767920650
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 0.8 x 5.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #347,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Selfless self-help, February 13, 2006

By 

The Review Revolution (janariess.typepad.com) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life (Hardcover)

Mipham, the worldwide leader of Shambhala and the son of the late Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa (who wouldn't love to be a fly on the wall in that house?) argues that people need to examine the me-centered spirituality of their lives:

We think, "Will this food make me happy?" "Will this movie make me happy?" "Will this person make me happy?" . . . . Occasionally when I meet with meditation students, their questions show that they are approaching even spiritual practice as a way of making themselves happy. Is my yoga, my tai chi, my meditation making "me" feel better? They are simply using a new guise to perpetuate the old habit of putting themselves first." (pp 11-12)

He offers practical suggestions on how to change this habit, beginning with the realization that change will occur slowly and that we should begin by simply aiming for a ten percent transformation: to be ten percent more compassionate, ten percent less selfish, ten percent more aware of the karmic consequences of our anger. Subsequent chapters discuss four ways to instill compassion for a lifetime: we must strive to for the discernment of the tiger, the delight of the lion, the equanimity or the garuda, and the playful wisdom of the dragon. (And in case you're wondering, a garuda is a mythical bird that hatches fully developed. Who knew?)

I found this book genuinely helpful, and that's saying something. I'm not very forgiving of pop spirituality and the self-help genre. But Mipham is wise and unafraid to call a spade a spade. He's not out to flatter his readers or tell them how to live longer or feel invincible or win friends or influence people. He's a realist, and he only wants to prepare them for the inevitable: death is coming.

Cheerful, eh? But ultimately, I only want to read books that tell it to me straight. So I leave you with this paragraph from the book, striking for its utter lack of romanticism:

Contemplating worldly gain and loss reveals that we spend part of our life trying to get it together, and the other part watching it fall apart. As soon as we have time-"I have a whole hour free"-we are losing it. As soon as we make a friend, we're losing him. As soon as we have fame, it becomes tinged with notoriety. As soon as we have wealth, we're losing it. Looking for something new to gain helps us forget to look but a few seconds back at the last thing that we lost. Fabricating this chain of desire is how we keep ourselves in samsara [the cycle of desire and suffering]. We are using instability to try to make stability. We're investing in hope and fear, banking on denial of a simple truth: all the pleasure the world can offer eventually turns to pain. Everything we gain is subject to loss. Why do we put all that effort into gain when, in the end, we are going to lose it? (p 124)

A damn good question. Because of such realism and candor, this book will probably sell about a tenth of the copies that it should. --Jana Riess

A longer version of this review was posted on December 14, 2005 to The Review Revolution (janariess.typepad.com).

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Depth and Precision, December 25, 2005

By 

J.F. "Jonathan" (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life (Hardcover)

If his father's books are like a Molotov Cocktail, capable of blowing your mind with extraordinary skillful language and profound insight into the specific character of the Western mind, then Mipham's books provide the in-depth and serious settling into the teachings and practices that were introduced a generation before.

Although his father's approach was effective in causing many to suddenly wake up and change course, Mipham provides the patient, applied, and deep transmission that we need to stay the course and follow the path with skill and precision. Mipham's spiritual tradition also place emphasis on applying these principals in our homes and communities, that the living wisdom be applied to society. Here his discussion of the dignities is far more powerful than a new-age "Have power over your life, Now!" story. It is the basis around which ensure that out lives enrich and support those around us.

This text is perhaps the more profound and detailed discussion of the dignities of the warriorship in the modern world that is available to a general audience. It is beautifully written, extremely personal and direct, patient and disciplined.

One of the finest texts available by a living teacher. Until recently people reviewing his work or attending a public program would refer to him as a "Young Lama" as if people this young couldn't be this wise. Some of the "Young Lama" image may fade now that he has married and turned 40, but the wisdom and percision keep getting deeper.

53 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mipham is the Man, October 25, 2005

By 

Sol "Sol" (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life (Hardcover)

I'm not really sure what it is because when you look at this man he doesn't have a lot in common with me. In his first book, his analogies for meditation are about horseback riding and golfing, and I don't really know many people who actually do those things. In this book, he talks about living our lives like a king/queen and I don't believe in monarchy. On the surface, this book looks like it's written for a self-help crowd, and I hate books that look like that. So on the surface, this wouldn't be the book for me.

Except that his words connect with my mind. They interface and form new pathways of thinking about things. They leave me to contemplate new depths of meaning for years after the fact. And they help me be a better person. So you could say I'm a fan. It's not so much that this is a really good book to read once, although it is. It's about the way these teachings begin to sink in when you make them your own. Sakyong Mipham has done that and it's clear and inspiring to witness. If you can ever do a meditation program with him, you'd be a lucky one.