Kathleen McDonald

Robina Courtin

Provides an introductory guide to meditation and its techniques, including what to do with the mind, how to sit, visualizations, and traditional practices.

A Practical Guide

How to Meditate

Deepen your meditation by diving into the practices of the lamrim—the stages of the path to enlightenment. Buddhist tradition tells us that enlightenment is possible for each and every one of us. It’s actually the best thing we can do for others and for the world, but also the best thing we can do for ourselves, because it means being free from all misery, pain, depression, dissatisfaction, and negative emotions, and abiding forever in peace, joy, love, and compassion. What could be more wonderful than that? Kathleen McDonald (Sangye Khadro), a Western nun with decades of experience and author of the bestselling book How to Meditate, guides us through the next step in our meditation practice: the transformative meditations on the Tibetan lamrim stages to enlightenment. She helps us see that the whole purpose of meditation is to transform our mind in a constructive way. For this to happen, we need to become so thoroughly familiar with the lamrim topics that they become our natural way of thinking and living our life. This warm and encouraging guide takes us through meditations on these lamrim topics, such as: - impermanence - refuge - karma - the four noble truths - bodhichitta - the six perfections: giving, ethics, patience, joyous effort, concentration, and wisdom How to Meditate on the Stages of the Path offers practical advice, support, and step-by-step guidance on how to meditate on the stages of the path to enlightenment that will transform the practice of new meditators and seasoned practitioners alike.

A Guide to Lamrim

How to Meditate on the Stages of the Path

This collection of essays searches for how history and literature translate into filmic texts that then reflect the time and place of the translation. Major motion pictures as well as television movies and series are the sites of this exploration. The opening essay surveys what films tell us it means to be set in a medieval time, while the second looks at one of the most powerful movie studios since the earliest days of movie-making, Walt Disney Studios. The second section investigates classic Americana by delving specifically into the hegemonic power of Walt Disney Studios, by considering the union between the American pastime of baseball and the great white way of Broadway, and by discovering the constantly morphing relationship of the icons of the Wild West. Section three looks at characters living outside of roles considered socially appropriate in their world: vampire slayers, mobsters, and those with multiple personalities. The fourth section studies how present-day mores of power and beauty control revisions of historically-based stories through issues of vengeance, race, sexuality, and the notion of beauty itself. The final section takes up the question of what it means to historicize the present moment, and analyzes the current period via a very popular and long-running show’s depiction of sexuality as accepted or rejected within a paradigm that appears not merely to tolerate, but actively to promote, deviance. The last essay questions the very concepts of time and history themselves. The articles do not reach one conclusion regarding this topic, but instead provide a variety of perspectives which help to theorize the issue for the discerning reader.

Kathleen McDonald

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