Books

BOOKS

We have six books available. They are collections of transcripts from guided meditations given by Dido in group sessions. They are workbooks; some have brief introductions; some no introduction. If you have questions about how to practise with these texts, contact Dido. 

The first four below are open to anyone.

Refuge Meditations                               Meditations on the Elements

Green Tara Introductory Meditations    Green Tara Meditations

This is a small introductory set of meditations                     A larger book for ongoing work with Green Tara. 

 

The following two are available only to those who have the empowerment to practise these deities.

White Tara Long Life Practice               Twenty-one Taras: the Four Wisdoms

 

 

BOOKS IN PROGRESS

 

 I presently have five books in process. The first, Storm-Weathering, is nearing completion.

 

 

Storm-Weathering 

Meditations for our Inner and Outer climate

Meditation is a precious jewel, an invaluable resource, for bad times and good times. The future we're heading into looks less comfortable than what we’ve been familiar with. Recession, climate change, peak oil... we’ll need resources to keep us steady and positive, and vision and inspiration, to create a sustainable life that’s better than what we have now. After all, who really wants to go on suffering the stresses of ‘modern’ life? 

 

In this workbook we practise meditation for two main purposes. First: to develop our resources of peace, happiness, strength, courage, hope, constructiveness; to deal kindly with despair hopelessness anger frustration and fear, and transform them to strength too. This is storm-weathering and sustainable happiness, for our inner climate. If you don’t want to include the second purpose, you can use this book just for this.

 

The second purpose, for those who want to work with it, goes like this: to create sustainable lifestyle, we need inner changes: are there other ways of being happy, beyond materialism and oil? what's most important to us in our life? what do we most value?  Living in accordance with what really counts, is what makes us happy. We need to build community, and develop vision about how our future might look, to sustain us, and be deeply satisfying. This is storm-weathering and sustainable happiness, for our outer climate. When we’ve delved within and discovered what we most value, we can build our sustainable communities based on that. 

 

This is a workbook, with guided meditations, based on Tibetan Buddhist tradition. You don't have to be buddhist to do them - you only need to love Nature. They're couched in imagery from Nature, because Nature speaks to just about everyone. 

 

It's a workbook because through meditation we embody our experience - not just think about things. We learn the skills of being in our strength, developing love, dealing with pain and confusion in a compassionate way. We treat ourself, and other people, more kindly, and experience directly our relationship to world and Nature. 

 

The meditations use Nature imagery, for the same two purposes. First, it’s a simple quick easy way to reach our heart. I and my friends and students have found it can work as deeply as the traditional forms and imagery of the meditations. The methods are the same.

 

Second, we need to connect with Nature, to develop a lifestyle in harmony with her. We need to feel our connection in our guts and heart, not just as an idea. 

 

As our inner climate transforms, we have a new basis for our outer life. The two go together. 

 

Our mind can become like a clear still pool, whose surface calmly reflects the goings-on of the world. When I sit by a pool in the NZ rain forest, I’m filled with love, for the beauty and magic of Nature, the vibrant life force that shines in the water, trees, rocks, mosses. When my mind feels like that in meditation, there’s bliss, like the texture of that limpid water, shining like the life force itself.  In this way, meditating on imagery from nature evokes our love, our feeling for the mystery and preciousness of life.

 

Nature evokes every conceivable feeling within us: rainstorms, shaggy cliffs, fields of flowers blooming in the desert, heat waves. It also evokes feelings when we see animals eating each other’s young, birds squabbling like irascible bad-tempered humans do; terns on the wing trying to grab each other’s catch and make off with it. Nature isn’t all a bed of roses - even roses have thorns, and wilt and die. 

 

Yet mother nature embraces all this in her great ecosystem, where everything lives completely interdependent with everything else - including humans. Light and dark are all included. If you’re a small creature near the bottom of the food chain, you have thousands of babies, so after the birds have eaten most of them, enough still survive. Food chains are only a part of the system. Plants and creatures cooperate and help each other in a myriad ways, from trees providing fruit and safe places for birds to nest, to cleaner fish that eat the bugs from the teeth of fearsome predators. There’s a whole ecosystem of tiny bugs in healthy soil, providing nutrition for plants, and being fed by them.

 

Meditating on nature imagery helps us in so many ways: from imagining a calm pool to help us find peace, to embracing and working with the dark and difficult in our own life, to the ecosystems that provide the models for how we can live in harmony with nature. 

 
 
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The other four books are in various stages of development. Material from them is beginning to come out as articles. Below are not the finished titles, but give a rough guide to what the books look at.

 

Green Tara: meditations on a goddess

 

21 taras tackle climate change

 

Five dakinis

 

My autobiography as a Buddhist woman in this time

 

Ecofeminism, Buddhism, the Goddess, Permaculture, and our Future

 

 

 

 

RECOMMENDED READING

 

FEMINIST BUDDHIST BOOKLIST

 

PERSONAL STORIES

 

Being Bodies  

 

Buddhist women on the edge

 

Turning the Wheel: American women creating the New Buddhism

 

- these three have different women writing a chapter each about their own experiences. all lovely. 

 

Hidden Spring - Sandy Boucher 

- personal story about her cancer and meditation

 

Dreaming Me - and African American Woman's spiritual journey

Jan Willis 

 

Dancing in the Dharma - life of Ruth Denison, American teacher. by Sandy Boucher 

 

HISTORY AND MORE ACADEMIC

 

Buddhism after Patriarchy, Rita Gross

- history of women in Buddhism, and how women's wisdom can contribute to present day Western Buddhism 

 

Passionate Enlightenment, Miranda Shaw

- about the historical origins of tantra and how may of the teachers were women.

Buddhist Goddesses of India, Shaw

 

Dakini’s Warm Breath, Judith Simmer Brown

- about the feminine in Tibetan Buddhism

 

Meeting the Great Bliss Queen, Anne Klein

- the nature of the self. some people find this one academic. i think she’s planning a more approachable version. i loved it though.

 

Feminine Ground - ed Jan Willis - collection of articles 

 

Travellers in Space - June Campbell 

- about issues with the male-based establishment of Tibetan Buddhism. maybe good for a bit later on.

 

Fruitful Darkness, Joan Halifax. eco slant

 

BIOGRAPHIES OF TIBETAN WOMEN IN HISTORY - TIBETAN WORKS IN TRANSLATION

 

Women of Wisdom, Tsultrim Allione

 

biography of yeshe tsogyel - 

Skydancer tr keith dowman

Mother of Knowledge [tarthang tulku's group]

there's also another new translation

 

Machig's Complete Explanation - about Machig Labdron, who made the chod

 

Mandarava  - Lives and Liberation of Princess Mandarava

 

Lotus Born - life of Padmasambhava

 

MEDITATION

 

Feeding the Demons, Tsutlrim Allione - not a basic meditation book - on a particular theme

 

GODDESS/SHAMANIC ET AL

 

The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler

Eisler - other books on her website

 

Civilised Shamans, Samuel - about Tibetan Buddhism - shamanic, not goddess, but tangential - very good

 

The Myth of the Goddess - by two jungian women Ann Baring and Jules Cashford

 

Blood Relations - Chris Knight -  on the origins of culture being from menstruation.

 

Marija Gimbutas - goddesses and gods of old europe; the language of the goddess, et al

 

She who Changes, Carol Christ

 

Monica Sjoo, the Great Cosmic Mother, Norse Goddesses et al

 

In a Chariot Drawn by Lions, Asphodel Long

 

Women's Dictionary of Myths and Secrets - Barbara Walker

 

Lucy Goodison Moving Heaven and Earth 

Lucy Goodison ancient goddesses - this questions the goddess myth.

 

 


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