Awakening Love: Teachings and Practices to Cultivate a Limitless Heart

Awaken the Capacity to Love, the True Purpose of Our Lives
Have you ever wanted to love and connect with others more deeply ... but felt that you could use a little help shedding the "emotional armor" and opening your heart?
With Awakening Love, Pema Chödrön invites you to start wherever you are, amid any and all of the challenges, frustrations, or fears you may be facing, and to use them as the starting place to awaken the natural and boundless capacity to give and receive love more fully.
This practice-centered program, recorded at Gampo Abbey, will teach you how to apply the insights of Buddhism's Four Limitless Ones-lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity-to even your most difficult obstacles.
Your Obstacles to the Open Heart Are Your Most Valuable Allies
Many students confess to Pema Chödrön that they cannot think of even one person to love during heart-centered meditation practice. This is what she tells them:
"What if you could open to that frustration, just for a moment, to discover not just where love is free flowing ... but where it's not? That is how we all begin to uncover the soft spot within."
Here, Pema Chödrön brings her unique blend of kitchen-table common sense, scholarship, and empathy to help you discover the eternal resilience and joy of your own tender, undefended, and genuine heart. Whether you're in the midst of a challenging relationship, grief, or simply in need of heart-centered rejuvenation, Awakening Love provides you with the gentle step-by-step instructions needed to awaken the natural goodness within you.
Highlights
The Four Qualities or Limitless Ones, the roots of suffering, and expanding the capacity to love
. Seeing where we're blocked and bringing lovingkindness to our biases and fears
. Aspiration practice, "not faking it," unblocking the flow of love, and benefactors
. Changing our attitude toward pain, working with anger, compassionate abiding, tonglen, and "making friends with the hard stuff"
. Meditations and practices for receiving unconditional love, resting in natural awareness, cultivating gratitude and sympathetic joy, opening to the world, and more

Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, in New York City. She attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught as an elementary school teacher for many years in both New Mexico and California. Pema has two children and three grandchildren.
While in her mid-thirties, Pema traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she studied for several years. She became a novice nun in 1974 while studying with Lama Chime in London. His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to England at that time, and Pema received her ordination from him.
Pema first met her root teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1972. Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Rinpoche, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987. At the request of the Sixteenth Karmapa, she received the full monastic ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong.
Pema served as the director of Karma Dzong, in Boulder, until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche asked her to work towards the establishment of a monastery for western monks and nuns.
Pema currently teaches in the United States and Canada and plans for an increased amount of time in solitary retreat under the guidance of Venerable Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.
Pema is interested in helping establish the monastic tradition in the West, as well in continuing her work with Buddhists of all traditions, sharing ideas and teachings. She has written several books: The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are, When Things Fall Apart, The Places that Scare You, No Time to Lose, Practicing Peace in Times of War, and most recently, Smile at Fear.
For more information, visit pemachodronfoundation.org.