If Emmy Award-winner Peter Coyote’s debut collection represents the culmination of a half-century’s devotion to writing poetry, his second functions as a true encore: triumphant and raw. Thumb to Thumb… and Yet presents eighty-plus years of living — the countercultural adventures, the journey from Zen Buddhist discipleship to priesthood, marriage and divorce, a public career in entertainment, and the private work and rewards of parenthood — not as a retrospective but as a perpetua...

• Shares a series of mindfulness techniques and improv exercises with masks to suppress the ego, calm the mind, and allow spontaneous playfulness and spaciousness to arise from your deepest nature• Draws on Buddhist philosophy to describe how and why the exercises work• Woven throughout with a lighthearted parable of an overweight and out-of-work Lone Ranger and Tonto who meet Buddha and experience spiritual awakeningSharing a series of mindfulness techniques and ac...

In-depth, intense, insightful.For more than a decade, radical science fiction author and activist journalist Terry Bisson interviewed some of the most provocative and outspoken authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anarchism, sexuality, creativity, and the future of humanity itself—no topic was taboo. Bisson's prankster spirit also shone through as he quizzed his subjects about what cars they drove, played free association games, and created an atmos...

“A quietly uplifting, practical view of Buddhism.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review• Shows how Zen offers a creative problem-solving mechanism and moral guide ideal for the stresses and problems of daily life• Shares the author’s secular, vernacular interpretations of the Four Noble Truths, the Three Treasures, the Eightfold Path, and other fundamental Buddhist ideasDuring the nearly 3,000 years since the Buddha lived, his teachings have spre...

Tools and anecdotes to reframe aging from the bestselling author of Work as a Spiritual Practice and Aging as a Spiritual Practice.Aging is a journey: a decades-long adventure of new opportunities and surprises. For many men, the decline in virility and power that accompanies age can be a tough pill to swallow. When these fall away, how do we make sense of who we are? What does it mean to be a man?Drawing from research, interviews, and per...

Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the Sixties to psychedelic spirituality and beyond. Written over several decades, these poems read as a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.

Growing up in the suburbs of Boston and raised on secular Judaism, Cocoa Puffs, and Gilligan’s Island, Peter Bebergal was barely in his teens when the ancient desire to finding higher spiritual meaning in the universe struck. Already schooled in mysticism by way of comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, and Carlos Castaneda, he turned to hallucinogens, convinced they would provide a path to illumination.Was this profound desire for God—a god he believed that could only be appreh...

With poems from spiritual teachers to jazz musicians, from the monastery to the street, What Book!? brings together a boad range of verse, expressions of living in an awakened way. " A poet once located poetry as somewhere before or after words take place. Mindfulness is the practice of finding that realm, dwelling there, and cultivating the ability to live completely in the present, deeply aware and appreciative of life." - from the author's Preface. "This enigmatically titled an...

"The rainman gave me two curesAnd he said, 'Just jump right in.'The one was Texas MedicineAnd the other was railroad gin.And like a fool I mixed themAnd they strangled up my mindNow people just get uglierAnd I have no sense of time."—Bob Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"The guiding metaphor in Peter Coyote's new spiritual autobiography is drawn from a line in an early Bob Dylan song. For Coyote, the ...

In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen–year ride through the heart of the counterculture—a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self–imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist–anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re–creation of the natio...

In this collection of inspirational writings, novice and experienced practitioners are treated to four key works that rank high in the Zen canon: 101 Zen Stories recounts actual experiences with Zen that span five centuries. The Gateless Gate is a 13th-century collection of mind problems used in the practice of Zen. Ten Bulls is a 12th-century commentary on the stages of awareness that lead to enlightenment. Centering is a 4,000-year-old teaching from In...

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.So begins this most beloved of all American Zen works. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen as to completely miss what it's all about. In the years since its original publication, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind has become one of the great modern Zen classics. Suzuki Roshi presents the basics of Zen in a w...