Tiny Buddha: Simple Wisdom for Life's Hard Questions (Feeling Good, Spiritual Health, New Age)

by Lori Deschene

Overview

Meaningful Answers to Hard Questions 

“Tiny Buddha is a moving and insightful synthesis of evocative stories and ancient wisdom applied to modern life. A great read!” — Jonathan Fields, author of Uncertainty

From the mind behind TinyBuddha.com, Lori Deschene brings us the latest edition of her guide to peace, purpose, joy, and more! Exploring the challenging questions we all have to answer for ourselves, Tiny Buddha can be your handbook to personal fulfillment.

You are in control of your purpose. Life has a way of giving us more questions than answers. And despite our many differences, we all ask ourselves the same things, starting with: Why am I here? Featuring varied perspectives from Twitter followers around the world, Tiny Buddha can help us choose the meaning behind our existence and find purpose in our pain, no matter how deep.

Uncertainty can be a good thing. Offering straightforward, practical advice and pieces of her own personal journey, author Lori Deschene breaks down hard yet revealing questions about life, love, happiness, and change. We may have very few concrete answers, but that means we each get to decide for ourselves what it all means and what happiness looks like for us. Let Tiny Buddha help you create and honor that vision.

Inside, you’ll find:

• The difference between searching for meaning versus creating it ourselves
• Empowering ways to answer the question “What is happiness?” and how to create it
• The importance of accepting your struggles without fully understanding the “why”
• How to find mental freedom by letting go of control

If you like self-help books or advice blogs, or if you enjoyed Living on Purpose, The Soul’s Human Experience, or The Tao of Influence, then you’ll love Tiny Buddha.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684811892
Publisher:	Mango Media
Publication date:	07/25/2023
Pages:	274
Sales rank:	619,557
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lori Deschene is the founder of Tiny Buddha, a multi-author blog that shares stories and insights from readers from all over the globe. She launched the site in 2009 as a community effort because she believes we all have something to teach and something to learn. Tinybuddha.com has grown into one of the most popular inspirational sites on the web, with 1 million monthly visitors. She is the author of Tiny Buddha: Simple Wisdom for Life's Hard Questions, Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself, and her work has appeared in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Shambhala Sun, and other publications.

Read an Excerpt

Nearly one thousand people responded when I began asking life’s hardest questions on Twitter, planning to create a collaborative book. As I read through their responses, I realized the answers fell into distinct categories of ideas. While there were occasionally responses that didn’t parallel anyone else’s, for the most part, the tweets grouped themselves into sections.

I didn’t influence the responses to fit an agenda; I shaped my exploration around the suggestions in the tweets. Just like friends of Tiny Buddha in all its forms have guided TinyBuddha.com, their insights form the backbone of this book. Since many of the tweets were quite similar, I chose a handful that aligned with each shared perspective. From there, I dug through the archives of my memories to weigh the ideas against my own experiences and then dived into books and articles that shed further light on these ideas.

Throughout each section, you’ll find a number of tips and exercises to help you take action on what you’ve read. Now, I never do exercises as I read a book—not even when an author writes, “I know you probably don’t usually do exercises in books, but please do these!” So I have a different suggestion for you: Highlight the ones that seem useful to you, and when you find yourself in a relevant situation in life, come back to them and take action then.

***

Happiness Is About Being Present

People are always telling each other to be mindful—to stop dwelling on the past and worrying about the future and instead dig into the moment with awareness and gratitude. Though mindfulness is one of the cornerstones of Buddhism and other spiritual disciplines, it’s not just gurus and yogis who recommend it. Business leaders suggest mindfulness as a means to access flow, that state when we’re in the zone, doing our best work without distracting mental chatter. Psychiatrists advocate mindfulness as a solution for anxiety, pain, and depression. And scientists continue to study the effects of mindfulness on the brain and body, noting a host of physical benefits.

Yet even equipped with all this expert advice and neurological research, most of us still live our days at the mercy of our thoughts. Studies show that the vast majority of them center on stresses, insecurities, fears, and judgments, directed at both the world around us and ourselves. We analyze things that happen, creating stories about what they mean. We hold on to things that happened before, hoping the memories will protect us from pain in the future. And perhaps most stressful, we analyze life as we go, judging, assessing, and generally drowning the moment with our internal observations and self-critique.

Mindfulness can seem like an overwhelming proposition because we often don’t embrace mindfulness mindfully. At least I didn’t. When I first learned about meditation, yoga, and absorbing myself in the moment, particularly after I experienced how good it felt, I wondered if it was possible to maintain that permanently. Was it really a sustainable practice? Would I ever completely silence the voice in my head? In other words, could I get really good at being mindful? Could I learn to be in the present moment forever, so that tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, I would be living a fully present life? As the eternal queen of irony, I didn’t realize that thinking about tomorrow’s mindfulness completely defeats the purpose.

Trying to be mindful is one of the biggest obstacles to being mindful. When you try to be mindful, you analyze your actions, judge yourself for having thoughts instead of letting them pass, and question whether you’re actually being mindful or if perhaps you’re just going through the motions. When you are mindful, you stop thinking about what you’re doing and thinking and use that energy instead to become fully conscious of your surroundings. The big difference is whether you become aware of your thoughts and then think about that awareness, or if you learn to quiet your thoughts and fully experience awareness.

You probably know where I’m going with this. This is the section where I could go into an advanced explanation of meditation, exploring the different styles and traditions and encouraging you to develop a disciplined practice that involves at least an hour a day of sitting in stillness. But I can’t do that in good conscience because I don’t do that. I am not a perfect meditator, and allowing myself not to be has been a powerful decision. I engage in deep-breathing exercises every morning, and I practice yoga regularly—sometimes more regularly than others. Sometimes I take long, slow afternoon walks, syncing my steps with my breaths, and sometimes I don’t. That’s what works for me, and that’s what I’m willing to sustain. By not approaching meditation as a rigid, all-or-nothing proposition, I increase my odds of consistently doing the things that ground me in the moment—and accordingly, enhance my access to mindfulness.

We don’t all have to run out and get the same cushion, or any cushion at all. We don’t have to spend time in an ashram à la Eat Pray Love and gut ourselves, exploring every layer of resistance in a controlled group environment. We don’t have to fast, or take vows of silence, or learn to balance on one foot, or learn the ancient art of tai chi, or start drinking loose-leaf tea while sitting cross-legged. These are all things we can do, and it might be smart to adopt some of these suggestions. But all that really matters is that we do something—whatever makes sense to each of us individually—to foster present-moment awareness.

Even immersing yourself in an activity you love can be meditative. Much in the same way that tai chi and yoga connect breath and movement, when jogging, dancing, or even crocheting, getting lost in those repetitive motions can be a meditative practice. If the end goal is to minimize negative, judging thoughts in order to experience the world with less resistance, the means is to quiet your thoughts on the whole. Any day you make the active choice to create a sense of inner calm, you increase your odds of noticing and experiencing all the beauty the world has to offer.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Pain
Meaning
Change
Fate
Happiness
Love
Money
Possibilities
Control

Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index of Names

Editorial Reviews

How can we find happiness and peace—right now, right here? In her engaging, thought-provoking book Tiny Buddha, Lori Deschene explores this enormous question to help readers grapple with challenges like money, love, pain, control, and meaning, in order to find greater happiness.” —Gretchen Rubin; author of The Happiness Project

“Few people in our time have more passionately or more creatively applied wisdom teachings to a new digital generation than Lori Deschene. I am continually inspired by her writing, and also by her sincere dedication to learning, growth, and wisdom. I feel tremendously fortunate to have had the chance to get to know her work through Tiny Buddha, and to know her as a person. Both embody the same essential truths.” —Soren Gordhamer, founder and author of Wisdom 2.0

“There's nothing tiny about the extra-large dose of awesome stuffed into Lori's writing. Read it and feel good about the world.” —Neil Parischa, founder and author of 1000 Awesome Things and The Book of Awesome

“Lori Deschene doesn't claim to be anybody's guru. But it's that lack of pretense and her total candor—how she tells her own often-wild story without flinching—that is so magnetic, inviting a sense of ease with our own wrinkles, too, and fostering a sense of personal possibility. As she asks: Are you ready to be free?” —Margaret Roach, author of And I Shall Have Some Peace There

From the Publisher

"Lori has shifted the energy of the Internet with her loving daily posts and now she is sharing more with the world through her incredible book!" —Gabrielle Bernstein, author of The Universe Has Your Back

Reviews