Awakening Through Love: Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness

Drawing from the author's life as a father, professor, Buddhist, and Buddhist teacher — as well as on pop culture references from Bob Dylan to Harry Potter — Awakening Through Love is a welcoming guide to achieving the deepest well-being and joy. Rooted in Buddhism’s Dzogchen tradition, the book teaches strategies for realizing a life imbued with love through Buddhist methods for fostering genuine caring and appreciation for others. To help readers achieve this state, the author presents practices and meditations for gradual cultivation and direct insight. He also provides a moving presentation of the role of a teacher, or “benefactor,” in deepening one’s spiritual path. Part of the book’s effectiveness is that it uncovers universal elements in Buddhist ideas and practices and renders them usable for a general audience, with many references to the adaptability of these methods for use in conjunction with the traditions of other religions.

John Makransky is a professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology at Boston College and a teacher in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He is the co-founder and guiding teacher of the Foundation for Active Compassion, a Buddhist contemplative social service organization. A practitioner of Tibetan meditations of compassion and wisdom for four decades, John has pioneered new ways of making these accessible to people of all backgrounds and faiths.

Lama Surya Das is the bestselling author of several books including Awakening the Buddha Within. The founder and main teacher of the Dzogchen Foundation, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.