Loving Life as It Is: A Buddhist Guide to Ultimate Happiness

by Chakung Jigme Wangdrak

Overview

Practical Buddhist wisdom and mindful methods for finding the silver lining in all circumstances—from a remarkable new voice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Chakung Jigme Wangdrak gives concrete advice on how to reorient your thinking when faced with the challenges, mess, and chaos that inevitably occur in life. By embracing pain and suffering, you can learn to see their roots, begin to work with them, and eventually let them go. This will create joy and ease, allowing you to fully savor happiness.

In clear language, Jigme Wangdrak conveys the steps, stages, and categories of mental exercises and methods that everyone—from beginner to experienced practitioner and non-Buddhists—can use to train their mind toward happiness:

• Take happiness and suffering as the path
• Cultivate courage, gratitude, and compassion
• Practice contentment (not complacency)
• Recognize outer and inner obstacles when faced with challenging situations
• Dispel self-grasping to reduce suffering 
• Develop patience and tolerance

A true Buddhist master and unique lineage holder, Jigme Wangdrak offers a roadmap to freedom with teachings that will benefit your spiritual practice and daily life—he shows you how to love your life as it already is!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780834845688
Publisher:	Shambhala
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200

About the Author

CHAKUNG JIGME WANGDRAK RINPOCHE was born in the Golok region of eastern Tibet as the fourth descendant of the nineteenth-century Buddhist master Dudjom Lingpa. At the age of fifteen, Jigme Wangdrak was recognized as the reincarnation of Rigzin Longsal Nyingpo. He studied Buddhist philosophy at Larung Gar Monastery with H. H. Khenchen Jigme Phuntsok. Jigme Wangdrak also received teachings from the well-known female teacher Dakini Kunzang Wangmo. In Tibet, Jigme Wangdrak published many revelatory writings from Dudjom Lingpa and an original woodblock edition of the Nyingma Gyudbum. Since 2011, he has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches to several Buddhist communities. He is spiritual director of the Abhaya Fellowship.

Editorial Reviews

04/22/2024

Happiness and suffering are not antithetical—they’re inextricably linked, according to this lucid English-language debut from Tibetan Buddhist teacher Wangdrak. Instead of spending one’s life avoiding pain, readers should harness the “power, energy, and spiritual growth” within suffering to make way for an “all-pervasive happiness” rooted in the mind’s “pure true nature,” and eschew the “grasping” that causes one to “shrink away from the totality of experiences.” Contending that the attachment to self is the root of suffering, Wangdrak offers guidance on cultivating gratitude, using meditation to receive positive and negative stimuli with equanimity, and practicing “tonglen,” wherein practitioners take on the suffering of others. Moving from meditation basics to thornier concepts such as making peace with physical illness, Wangdrak builds a convincing if challenging case for embracing pain as fuel for personal development and the source of a deeper contentment. Buddhists of all stripes will find value. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Desire, attachment, and turmoil have changed the collective consciousness of our world—Chakung Jigme Wangdrak welcomes readers to remember that incorporating our awareness of this when we meditate and engage in spiritual practice will contribute to our individual freedom, which ripples out into our collective freedom, creating a healing impact that is so urgent to the future of our world.”
—Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness

“Like crystal-clear deep water, this book is both inviting and profound. It comes from a true master, with helpful ideas and suggestions on each page. The writing is fresh and alive, full of heart, and always encouraging. It is a real gem.”
—Rick Hanson, author of Neurodharma

“Loving Life as It Is explains how skillfully meeting suffering is the direct path to the highest happiness. This book provides an excellent roadmap to navigate life’s ups and downs with wisdom and an open heart. A much-needed book for these times.” 
—James Baraz, author of Awakening Joy

“Chakung Jigme Wangdrak offers a wonderfully heartwarming expression of Tibetan Buddhism’s profound and gentle way of understanding and living this human life. To read the book is itself to rest in the luminous nature of mind, to be comforted and encouraged to love this life, with all its troubles and sorrows, as a life of joy and ease. The text gives you all you need for a robust spiritual life. Born, raised, and trained in rural Tibet, but now living in the West, Chakung Jigme Wangdrak reflects the charm and magic of the original tradition in a way the Western reader can appreciate.”
—Norman Fischer, author of When You Greet Me I Bow

“[A] lucid English-language debut from Tibetan Buddhist teacher Wangdrak. . . . Buddhists of all stripes will find value.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher