Embodied Awakening

Vajrayana Buddhism is best known for its deities: peaceful and wrathful figures made of light, mantras recited by millions, and elaborate practice texts. From the outside, it looks like a lot of ritual and metaphysics. From the inside, deity yoga is one of the most direct methods ever devised for discovering that everything you admire in a Buddha is already present in your own mind. Embodied Awakening follows the arc of a practitioner’s life rather than the sections of a practice manual.

Drawing on the spiritual biographies of Milarepa, Yeshe Tsogyal, Shabkar, and modern adepts, along with more than thirty years of her own practice, Yudron Wangmo traces the path through five stages: the moment the ordinary script of your life breaks; finding an authentic teacher and crossing the threshold of empowerment; the daily work of visualization and mantra; the upheavals that practice stirs up and the difference between a passing glimpse and stable realization; and the return to ordinary life, and eventually through death and rebirth, as a changed person.

Written for lay practitioners juggling jobs and relationships who feel drawn to the depths of this path, the book puts the doubts of people who did not grow up Buddhist right out on the table. Why deities, in a religion with no creator god? Why does practice sometimes make life harder before it makes it better? Yudron Wangmo is clear that deity yoga cannot be learned from a book alone. This is a companion for the road, meant to be read alongside the guidance of a living teacher. Embodied Awakening is a volume in The Awakening Library, a collection of Dharma books for Vajrayana practitioners that includes Clearing the Way to Awakening.