A Heart Full of Peace

This 110-page little book fits in a man's back pocket, but provides insight of much larger books. Goldstein writes in a very readable style. The book tackles subjects including love, compassion, peace, kindness, happiness, selflessness, mindfulness, and meditation. It's a light read full of wisdom and interesting quotes from a variety of sources. My favorites are "compassion is a verb" and "some of the worse things in my life never happened." I recommend this book to people who are interested in practicing spirituality and doing rather than just knowing. This is a great little book to spark interest into deeper thought processes. Buy it. You'll like it.

This small book offers a process for making Buddhist practices a part of your life. You can easily take it with you and dip into it regularly. Clearly written, it offers what the title suggests: a heart full of peace.

First, a disclaimer. Joseph Goldstein has been my meditation teacher since 1992. If he wasn't any good, I still wouldn't be practing. I am. This book is a revision of the Witt lectures which Joseph gave at Harvard, originally entitled "Transforming the Mind, Healing the World". The book is not just a reprint. There are some changes. The book is reorganized around some key concepts which are useful for a discursive reflection about one's own practice. These concepts are radical and wholly transformative. The revisions are towards the end of recognizing the importance of the key concepts. The most important of these concepts is peace. Rather than speak of Enlightenment, Joseph raises the bottom line of our practice and our current world situation-- the absence of peace. Peace is an active moral category in which the tension of a mind out of control, or mostly out of control, is healed. Peace is the ground in which healing arises and the ground or the clearing in which Enlightenment occurs. Peace speaks both to an internal state and a social state. Peace is the practical goal of a mature practice and the measure of its "success." Joseph argues that it is not possible to sincerely and accurately help others without peace. The ageold inner and outer dialectic of "reality" is addressed by saying that peace is worked on concurrently in both realms, i.e. inner and outer, and it is expressed through deeds which are genuinely reflective of lovingkindness. Several well known teachers are quoted in bold face type to underline the points made in these lectures. There are two kinds of "Dharma" books: those which speak to how to practice meditation and those which speak to the values which inform that practice. In that sense this book is a book about what others are calling the "core" values of daily practice. It is a book which is literally a portable Dharma talk and will serve one's practice well. I recommend it without reservation.