The Heart of Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience

By Durgananda

Book Overview

Reveals techniques for moving beyond troublesome thoughts, finding keys to unlock practices like mantra repetition, and learning how to troubleshoot your own meditation practice. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0911307974
• ISBN13: 9780911307979
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Siddha Yoga Publications
• Length: 396 Pages
• Weight: 1.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Incredibly helpful

I've been using this book as my meditation guidebook for about two years now. It has consistantly inspired me. My meditation practice has gone much deeper during this time, and I give a lot of the credit to the exercises and explanations in Sally Kempton's book. Ms Kempton (Swami Durgananda) writes from her own experience as a long-time meditator, and for me she was able to shed light on questions that I've not seen answered elsewhere. It also contains lovely quotes from great meditation masters of different traditions, and a great deal of well-presented knowledge from the texts of yoga and Kashmir Shaivism. This is a book to grow with, especially if you meditate in a kundalini-based tradition. i have never found a book that answered so many of my questions. Highly recommended.

An Important Voice Returns

Sally Kempton's pen hasn't lost its power since the days she wrote for Esquire and New York Magazine, and helped galvanize a generation. Now she's translated into the American idiom the understandings she's gleaned in three decades of inner exploration. I for one am very grateful to catch up with her again. Even if you don't have a Guru, and don't feel ready for one, it's great to feel the light of Kempton's intelligence and heart shining on these big questions, to hear her own personal take on time-honored strategies for plunging into the depths of Being. Once again, she's tapped into the zeitgeist.

Out of the Ordinary

This book takes meditation several steps farther than the usual 'how to', and offers one of the clearest guides I've seen to the subtle practices of kundalini energy-based meditation. As a longtime meditator, I've read many books that tell you how to get into meditation, but this is one of the first I've seen that tells you how to proceed once you're there. People who are used to the vipassana style of meditation or some of the yogic approaches will be surprised by the emphasis on feeling and inner energetic sensations that the author takes here. The chapter on mantra, for instance, goes beyond the usual approach to mantra as a device for thought control, to discuss the energetic aspects of mantra. The chapter on working with thoughts gives a process for accessing the energy behind negative emotions that I found particularly helpful. This is a great book for people who want to expand their meditation experience.

A Contemporary Classic

I am a poet and editor who has maintained a daily practice of meditation for over twenty years, during the course of which I have naturally read a number of books on meditation. Sally Kempton's "The Heart of Meditation" is quite simply the finest book on Eastern Meditation by a Western writer that I have yet encountered. The book is clearly the work of an author possesing a rigorous, wide-raging intellect, a generous heart, and uncommon common sense. "Heart" is both elegant in its overall structure and eloquently written, its clear and simple prose informed by a literary sensibility that makes it as compulsively readable as a good novel. It is both comprehensive and concise in conveying the intellectrual and metaphysical underpinnings of the Yoga of meditation, both inspiring and consistently practical in guiding the reader along pathways to a deeper meditative expereience. Fittingly, the book is also beautifully designed, its expansive and elegant format reflecting its content. I expect to be giving it this Christmas both to friends who have expressed an interest in beginning to meditate and to experienced practitioners. There is so much to be said about this book. For brevity's sake, I will mention three points in particular. First, this is not a book about how to feel better about yourself as a person, how to be more compassionate to your fellow man, how to tap the wellspring of your greativity, how to be more effective in the worplace etc. (though it is likely to induce any or allo of the above as side-effects!) As the author makes clear from the outset, this is a book about self-exploration, about how to access the deeper levels of consciousness and joyful awareness that our our birthright but that elude many of us, about how to expand our understanding of ourselves and of our world. It is a book by an experienced adventurer, herself for many years the disciple of two highly regarded Yoga masters, that invites the reader to go on a similar adventure, and is a book that is in many ways an adventure in itself. It is a book that is relentlessly focussed on the goal of life's adventure, the fulfillment of the Socratic injunction "know thyself". Secondly, this is a book rooted in the experience Of Yoga meditation that draws on the teachings of several prominent strains of the Hindu tradition. There are a number of excellent books by Western writers on the practice of Buddhist meditation, but none that I am aware of of comparative quality on Yoga meditation - until now. Though meditation is a universal phenomenon, there are very real differences in the approaches toward the practice of meditation emphasized by different schools. Kempton's book is rooted in the experience of Kundalini Yoga which uses a seker's inner energy, his or her innate divine effervescence, as a guide to a more profound experience of the self. Kempton expertly describes the often surprising "pathways" this energhy can take as it guodes the seeker within, a

A very inexpensive way to recieve such a wealth of teaching.

I have read many many books on meditation and have participated in meditation retreats, classes and discussions. True to other writings of Sally Kempton, this book is one of the easiest and most concise teaching of mediation I have read. Kempton's abundance of meditation experience combined with her skill as a writer and her ability to know what so many students of mediation and yoga are really looking for, make for a rare and precious combination in any teacher, let alone an author.I urge anyone interested in mediation to read this book, if you don't recieve one answer or tool you were looking for I would be very suprised.