Dreaming Me

Download or read book Dreaming Me written by Jan Willis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When this book first came out, Publishers Weekly's glowing review ended with the following statement: "With a whisper to Oprah, Jan Willis could be the first African-American Buddhist feminist guru to be embraced by reading groups across America". PW wasn't the only one who noticed. Time magazine named her one of the top spiritual innovators of the new millennium. Newsweek wrote her up, too. Really, the list goes on and on. Luckily, Dreaming Me is now coming out in a new, revised and updated edition. The subtitle should give you an idea of what's in this modern favourite, and you'll notice that it's not a matter of either/or. Willis is not Baptist "or" Buddhist. She's both. Dreaming Me is a book about reconciling what's made us, so that we can be at peace with what we are. Willis came up Baptist in the segregated South, went to Cornell, and got involved with the Black Panther Party. What happens next seems like a disconnect, but it's not: she went to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, met the great teacher Lama Yeshe and with his guidance, found the real Jan Willis, the one who could recognize the best of what life gave her and make something lasting and transformative from it. Willis would become the first African American scholar-practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism in America. Today, she's a professor of religion at Wesleyan, and a truly esteemed member of the Buddhist teaching community. Dreaming Me is the story of how she got there, and got there whole.