A guide to freeing yourself from self-induced suffering

- Provides contemplative practices and exercises to help you recognize how you cause your own suffering

- Explores the dynamics of the mind and how it sets the stage for distress

- Explains how mental states of suffering are created and how to control your mind to stop those thought patterns and assumptions

Most of us believe that suffering is inevitable. Stress, shame, depression, grief, loneliness, disappointment, the feeling that life is incomplete--every negative experience contributes to the emotional and psychological pain that impedes our ability to live happy, fulfilling lives. But what if most suffering could be avoided? Is there an antidote to inner turmoil that can be learned and applied to everyday life?

In this groundbreaking work, Peter Ralston reveals how to free yourself from mentally created suffering. He explains how most creatures don't experience suffering the way we do. They don't worry or fret, fear the future, or imagine they are somehow flawed or less than they should be. Exploring the dynamics of the mind that set the stage for distress and that get us into trouble, he explains how mental states of suffering are created, how to recognize when you cause them, and how to stop suffering-inducing thought patterns and beliefs.

Sharing contemplative practices and exercises to help you end your inner turmoil and foster growth, awareness, and freedom, Ralston provides an empowering way to create a more complete, powerful, and peaceful life experience.

For fans of Eckhart Tolle--a guide to mastering self-awareness through direct experience rather than old presumptions or harmful thought patterns

Through decades of martial arts and meditation practice, Peter Ralston discovered a curious and paradoxical fact: that true awareness arises from a state of not-knowing. Even the most sincere investigation of self and spirit, he says, is often sabotaged by our tendency to grab too quickly for answers and ideas as we retreat to the safety of the known.

This Hitchhiker's Guide to Awareness provides helpful guideposts along an experiential journey for those Western minds predisposed to wandering off to old habits, cherished presumptions, and a stubbornly solid sense of self. With ease and clarity, Ralston teaches readers how to become aware of the background patterns that they are usually too busy, stressed, or distracted to notice. The Book of Not Knowing points out the ways people get stuck in their lives and offers readers a way to make fresh choices about every aspect of their lives--from a place of awareness instead of autopilot.

A detailed guide to what it takes to master anything

- Explores in depth the foundational skills and operating principles that empower mastery, including accurate perceptive awareness and effective interaction

- Looks at how to control your mind and transform your perceptive experience so what you are experiencing aligns with what's actually occurring

- Presents a step-by-step breakdown of the principle of effective interaction and explains how to overcome the major obstacles to mastery

Becoming a master in a particular area is not tied solely to innate ability or talent nor to years of rote practice. As martial arts master and consciousness explorer Peter Ralston explains, the secret to mastery lies in accurate perceptive-awareness and effective interaction.

In this detailed guide to what it takes to master something, Ralston examines the powerful dynamics behind the art of mastery. He explores the foundational skills and operating principles that empower mastery, including the principle of effective interaction, the mind-body alignment principle, and creative intelligence. Examining reaction versus response, he looks at how to control your mind and transform your perceptive- awareness so that what you are experiencing aligns with what's actually occurring--the first step toward reaching your objectives. Sharing methods to overcome the major obstacles to mastery, he presents a step-by-step breakdown of the principle of effective interaction and explains how to adapt when the people or objects you're interacting with are working contrary to your goals, including in sports, business, warfare, politics, or any arena in which you've committed to pursuing mastery.

Revealing the elements that lead to masterful interactive skills, this guide shows how to do the work of personal transformation necessary to access mastery as a real, functional experience, providing an opportunity for deeper insights into yourself and life.

Peter Ralston responds to 150 questions about consciousness from a global spectrum of people striving to grasp the nature of their own selves

This illuminating collection of 150 questions and responses between Peter Ralston and a global spectrum of seekers provides a rare and nuanced look at the nature of consciousness and the path to understanding our true selves. Ralston is the author of the groundbreaking trilogy on the existential foundations of the human condition--The Book of Not Knowing, Pursuing Consciousness, and The Genius of Being. Here he has selected inquiries from more than two decades of question-and-answer exchanges with students as they work their way through his communications.

The mosaic of viewpoints from an astonishing diversity of real people at all levels of consciousness work yields a narrative that is intricate, wide-ranging, intimate, and emotionally honest. These dialogues expand our understanding of consciousness, test our assumptions, and interrogate the very process of inquiry.

A Zen-inspired physical education program for martial arts practitioners and anyone interested in mind-body transformation

Using simple, clear language to demystify the Zen mindset, Ralston draws on more than three decades of experience teaching students and apprentices worldwide who have applied his body-being approach.

More of a transformative guide than a specific list of exercises devoted to any particular physical approach, Zen Body-Being explains how to create a state of mental control, enhanced feeling-awareness, correct structural alignment, increased spatial acuity, and even a greater interactive presence.

Exercises are simple, often involving feeling-imagery and meditative awareness, which have a profound and sometimes instant effect. Areas of exploration include:

- Beginner's Body-Being
- Three aspects of body awareness
- Five principles for an effortlessly effective body
- Opening a door--five steps to transformation
- Fourteen points on structural alignment

Where similar guides teach readers what to do, this book teaches readers how to be.

Peter Ralston's exceptionally lucid trilogy on the nature of human consciousness culminates here in The Genius of Being, a book of deep contemplations on the unseen elements that create our world. The first volume, The Book of Not Knowing, garnered much praise as a comprehensive exploration of the depths of self and consciousness. The second volume, Pursuing Consciousness, clarifies the difference between enlightenment and self-transformation, and then pairs these two goals in a strikingly effective way. This third book is both shorter and more complex, taking us straight to the heart of the origins of our experience.

In a progression of illuminating assertions, Ralston shows us how human consciousness carves out distinctions from whatever is absolutely true. This dynamic not only generates both self and reality from nothing, it imbues them with the quality of objective truth. From the time we first distinguish between self and not-self as infants, we begin making a sequence of existential assumptions that result in the illusion that a self is some ethereal object within. This universally accepted assumption persists despite the failure of exhaustive investigations to locate this inner self.

This book is not for the faint of heart or the casual seeker, but contemplating the assertions here empowers you to personally and experientially grasp what is rarely even glimpsed: a profound consciousness of the genesis of human experience.

Every once in a while you find a high impact book. Something that awakens something deep within and lasts forever. This is the one. It is a book that you can pick up time and time again and always gets something new out of it, or something deeper than you. Cheng Hsin is the best introduction for beginners to the internal practice of fighting. It is a seminal work that draws on T'ai Chi Ch'uan, Aikido, and Pa Kua Chang and was written by the first Westerner ever to win the world championship in a full-contact martial arts tournament.