Reading

Buddhism & Meditation

Since mid-2011, I really began to become more earnest in reading about Buddhism and meditation, though I had been curious about it and occasionally dipped a toe in here or there a handful of times before. As with psychology, I had spent many years resisting and rejecting it because of early negative experiences.

Regardless, I found my way there, first through one of Sharon Salzberg’s books, A Heart as Wide as the World. Though I am still very much at the beginning of what I think will be a much longer journey with Buddhism, I thought I’d write down some of the books that I’ve been reading and have kept off my main reading list, by and large.

I joke with my friends that I often have to go through an intense research phase whenever I take on a new project, a new stage of life, or a new anything. So my somewhat voracious appetite for books on this subject is reflected in this list, given that I’ve been exploring this for such a relatively short period of time. I’m still reading a handful of these as I type this.

• Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, Pema Chödrön (This is the one I’ll likely keep on my nightstand for a long time.)

• A Beginner’s Guide to Tibetan Buddhism: Notes from a Practitioner’s Journey, Bruce Newman (Bought this after skimming it on a break during a workshop at Tibet House in New York.)

• A Heart as Wide as the World, Sharon Salzberg (The first book that helped, after a lot of dabbling, begin to sink into the idea of this practice.)

• Buddha, Karen Armstrong

• Faith, Sharon Salzberg

• Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein

• Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, Sharon Salzberg

• Meditation in Action, Chogyam Trungpa (I have the pocket edition of this and I love it.)

• Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, Tara Brach (Sometimes hers claims of epiphanies and success seem a little overzealous, but the meditations and the ideas themselves were really great, I found.)

• Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation, Sharon Salzberg

• Teachings of the Buddha, edited by Jack Kornfield

• True Love, Thich Nhat Hanh

By Alexis

Alexis Clements is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, premiered in the fall of 2019 in New York City and has since screened around the US and internationally. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. Her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. In addition to her writing and filmmaking, she is currently serving on the Executive Board of CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), as a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and a co-founder of Little Rainbows, a queer story time for children and their caretakers.

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