It is easy to lose your way exploring how to benefit from Buddhist wisdom in the contemporary Western world. In this fresh and original work, Ken McLeod demystifies the essential teachings of Buddhism as he illuminates a path to living fully in the present. Writing without jargon or obscure terminology, he uses delightful stories from around the world to explain clearly and compellingly how we can utilize the practices of Buddhism to awaken to the full potential of our lives.
Most of us live behind a wall of illusion. Wake Up to Your Life gives us all the tools we need to "dismantle" that wall. Readers will learn to move out of the reactive patterns that create suffering and curb true freedom by using meditations and reflections that point the way to wisdom, awareness, compassion, and inner strength. Each meditation is described in detail and is accompanied by a lucid commentary on its meaning and value.
Using everyday language, stories, and examples accessible to westerners, Wake Up to Your Life presents the Buddha's original teachings separate from the cultural context of religious ritual and belief. Highlighted with quotes from thinkers as diverse as Mulla Nasrudin, Samuel Beckett, Yogi Berra, Albert Einstein, Kalu Rinpoche, James Baldwin, and Bob Dylan, this authoritative guide offers a warm and engaging approach to awakening our true self and walking the liberating path of mindful and compassionate living.

Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

Health, Fitness & Dieting

McLeod, Ken

Alternative Medicine

HarperSanFrancisco

The key to becoming fully alive and joyful is to develop our natural capacity for attention and to be fully present here and now. In this informative guidebook to practical Buddhism you discover:
<ul><li>How to live life with equanimity, loving-kindness, compassion, and joy</li></ul>
<ul><li>How to cut through obsessions with the external world, relationships, harmful emotions, pleasure and power, and self</li></ul>
<ul><li>Tried-and-true methods for cultivating active attention with your body and mind.</li></ul>

HarperOne

In this masterful translation and commentary on Tokmé Zongpo's Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, Ken McLeod shines the light of wisdom on the challenges of contemporary life and illuminates a path the modern reader can take to freedom, peace and understanding. Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva is one of the most revered and loved texts in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. While this text has been translated many times, Ken McLeod's plain and simple English beautifully reflects the simplicity and directness of the original Tibetan. McLeod's commentary is full of striking images, provocative questions and inspiring descriptions of what it means to be awake and present in your life. Practical instruction, brief and to the point, is found in each of the verse commentaries, providing straightforward responses to the question, "How do I practice this?" McLeod is clearly writing from his own experience. Yet, instead of anecdotes and personal history, he challenges the reader to engage various scenarios, and consider how compassion, clarity, presence and balance could take expression in his or her life. The book is divide into three parts. The first is an introduction to the text and to Tokmé Zongpo. The second is McLeod's translation of Tokmé Zongpo's Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. The third section is the main part of the book, a traditional verse-by-verse commentary. At 184 pages, Reflections on Silver River is a highly accessible introduction to Tibetan Buddhist practice as well as a valuable resource for the experienced practitioner, regardless of his or her tradition of training.

Reflections on Silver River

Religion & Spirituality

Buddhism

Unfettered Mind

18th century Tibetan mystic Jigmé Lingpa wrote a number of poems on the practice of Dzogchen, one of the great wisdom traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. In A Trackless Path renowned translator and teacher Ken McLeod offers a beautiful and evocative translation of one of these poems. Illumined by his own lucid commentary, McLeod makes this ancient poem relevant and accessible to today's seeker.The Jigmé Lingpa poem has three sections: how conceptual thinking corrupts deep contemplative practice; the timeless freedom of direct awareness (the Buddhist equivalent of gnosis in Christianity); and subtle errors one often makes in this practice and how to correct them. McLeod's book is likewise divided into three sections. The first is a thoughtful introduction to the text and McLeod's relationship with it; the second is his beautiful and evocative translation of Jigmé Lingpa's poem; the third and main part of the book is his verse-by-verse commentary through which he illuminates the meaning of the poem. McLeod is clearly writing (and writing clearly) for the seeker in today's world who is called to pursue the awareness that Jigmé Lingpa describes.McLeod's lucid practice-oriented commentary is enriched by the seamless interweaving of experiences from his own spiritual journey. What emerges is a picture of a person who felt a profound calling to pursue contemplative practice and the direct and personal ways he found to meet the challenges and he encountered. With great clarity, McLeod communicates the central theme of the poem - namely, that when you rest and do nothing, you find the wisdom of the ages present within you. This is a book for the practitioner of any contemplative tradition--Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism or non-dual awareness.

A Trackless Path

The Heart Sutra is the most widely known and widely recited scripture in Mahayana Buddhism. This exciting, trail-blazing, non-traditional commentary takes the reader right into the emptiness of all experience through a delightfully irreverent combination of wit, irony, prose and poetry. In the words of Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Without Beliefs, "Written in a voice that is neither pious nor academic, hectoring nor detached, An Arrow to the Heart is a fine example of the new wave in contemporary Buddhist writing. In its quietly relentless way, this pithy and unorthodox commentary to the Heart Sutra leaves you with nowhere to stand but right here." This second edition contains a new introduction by Peter Clothier, an internationally-known writer who specializes in writing about art and artists, McLeod's precise yet lucid translation of the Heart Sutra, and a line-by-line commentary on this enigmatic scripture. Each commentary starts with a short poem that raises questions or presents a series of images. The poem is followed by a short prose section that questions the text more deeply. A few interspersed notes provide information about the images, allusions, and references in the poetry and prose sections. The result is a kind of dance-a dance with words, ideas, images, quotations, and stories. Not infrequently the reader falls into a complete and unexpected stillness to dwell on a revealing line or a quotation, before being swept off again into a new direction. In this way McLeod realizes his aim-to elicit the experience of the sutra in the reader, rather than explain its meaning. In the words of one reader of the first edition, "What I love most about it is that it's not even a book, really - more the literary equivalent of yellowcake uranium, meant to blow the mind open to ultimate reality. This is book as verb, not noun - book as instigator of awareness."

An Arrow to the Heart: Second Edition

Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Driving Identities examines long-standing connections between popular music and the automotive industry and how this relationship has helped to construct and reflect various socio-cultural identities. It also challenges common assumptions regarding the divergences between industry and art, and reveals how music and sound are used to suture the putative divide between human and non-human. 
This book is a ground-breaking inquiry into the relationship between popular music and automobiles, and into the mutual aesthetic and stylistic influences that have historically left their mark on both industries. Shaped by new historicism and cultural criticism, and by methodologies adapted from gender, LGBTQ+, and African-American studies, it makes an important contribution to understanding the complex and interconnected nature of identity and cultural formation. In its interdisciplinary approach, melding aspects of ethnomusicology, sociology, sound studies, and business studies, it pushes musicological scholarship into a new consideration and awareness of the complexity of identity construction and of influences that inform our musical culture. 
The volume also provides analyses of the confluences and coactions of popular music and automotive products to highlight the mutual influences on their respective aesthetic and technical evolutions. 
Driving Identities is aimed at both academics and enthusiasts of automotive culture, popular music, and cultural studies in general. It is accompanied by an extensive online database appendix of car-themed pop recordings and sheet music, searchable by year, artist, and title.

Business & Money

Industries

Routledge

We are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Sports and popular music are synergistic agents in the construction of identity and community. They are often interconnected through common cross-marketing tactics and through influence on each other's performative strategies and stylistic content. Typically only studied as separate entities, popular music and sport cultures mutually 'play' off each other in exchanges of style, ideologies and forms. Posing unique challenges to notions of mind - body dualities, nationalism, class, gender, and racial codes and sexual orientation, Dr Ken McLeod illuminates the paradoxical and often conflicting relationships associated with these modes of leisure and entertainment and demonstrates that they are not culturally or ideologically distinct but are interconnected modes of contemporary social practice. Examples include how music is used to enhance sporting events, such as anthems, chants/cheers, and intermission entertainment, music that is used as an active part of the athletic event, and music that has been written about or that is associated with sports. There are also connections in the use of music in sports movies, television and video games and important, though critically under-acknowledged, similarities regarding spectatorship, practice and performance. Despite the scope of such confluences, the extraordinary impact of the interrelationship of music and sports on popular culture has remained little recognized. McLeod ties together several influential threads of popular culture and fills a significant void in our understanding of the construction and communication of identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Arts & Photography

Music

Driving Identitiesexamines long-standing connections between popular music and the automotive industry and how this relationship has helped to construct and reflect various socio-cultural identities. It also challenges common assumptions regarding the divergences between industry and art, and reveals how music and sound are used to suture the putative divide between human and non-human. This book is a ground-breaking inquiry into the relationship between popular music and automobiles, and into the mutual aesthetic and stylistic influences that have historically left their mark on both industries. Shaped by new historicism and cultural criticism, and by methodologies adapted from gender, LGBTQ+, and African-American studies, it makes an important contribution to understanding the complex and interconnected nature of identity and cultural formation. In its interdisciplinary approach, melding aspects of ethnomusicology, sociology, sound studies, and business studies, it pushes musicological scholarship into a new consideration and awareness of the complexity of identity construction and of influences that inform our musical culture. The volume also provides analyses of the confluences and coactions of popular music and automotive products to highlight the mutual influences on their respective aesthetic and technical evolutions. Driving Identitiesis aimed at both academics and enthusiasts of automotive culture, popular music, and cultural studies in general. It is accompanied by an extensive online database appendix of car-themed pop recordings and sheet music, searchable by year, artist, and title.

An Arrow to the Heart: A Commentary on the Heart Sutra

This exciting, trail-blazing non-traditional commentary on the Heart Sutra takes the reader right into the emptiness of all experience through a delightfully irreverent combination of wit, irony, prose, and poetry.

Trafford Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McLeod, Ken. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McLeod, Ken

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McLeod, Ken. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

Reflections on Silver River

A Trackless Path

An Arrow to the Heart: Second Edition

Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

We are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

We are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

An Arrow to the Heart: A Commentary on the Heart Sutra