Transformational festivals, from Burning Man to Lightning in a Bottle, Bhakti Fest, and Wanderlust, are massive events that attract thousands of participants to sites around the world. In this groundbreaking book, Amanda J. Lucia shows how these festivals operate as religious institutions for “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) communities. Whereas previous research into SBNR practices and New Age religion has not addressed the predominantly white makeup of these communities, White Utopias examines the complicated, often contradictory relationships with race at these events, presenting an engrossing ethnography of SBNR practices. Lucia contends that participants create temporary utopias through their shared commitments to spiritual growth and human connection. But they also participate in religious exoticism by adopting Indigenous and Indic spiritualities, a practice that ultimately renders them exclusive, white utopias. Focusing on yoga’s role in disseminating SBNR values, Lucia offers new ways of comprehending transformational festivals as significant cultural phenomena.

In this unprecedented book, contributors use Buddhist philosophical and contemplative traditions, both ancient and modern, and deploy critical philosophy of race, and critical whiteness studies, to address the proverbial elephant in the room - whiteness.

Short stories from a master of the form, this collection scrapes away superficial assumptions and brings to life a multitude of characters whose concerns have dominated post-1994 South Africa but are in many respects timeless; in particular, they probe the limitations of middle class norms and blinkered identities and grapple with the diverse experiences of the many millions living on the margins of privileged ghettoes. Mixing satire with brutal realism, Kolski Horwitz dissects South African society with a keen and insightful eye.

The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

Dzogchen Mahamudra and the Dynamic Awakening of Consciousness: the core practice, the highest approach to immediate enlightenment via the rapid path of Natural Mind Meditation, this text begins at the very beginning while aiming to take the path of Vision through all the stages of higher Development, culminating at the level of No More Seeking. The instruction is clearly based on ancient authoritative tradition, but now at long last taught by a skilled Western expert in the field of spiritual counseling, Buddhist psychotherapy and Mahamudra Meditation, thus making a book that is ideal for the Western reader. The context for this practice is set within the wider scope of human evolution, its sources in the Ancient Wisdom, and the Wisdom Teachings of the world's great religions.

Meditation techniques, including mindfulness, have become popular wellbeing practices and the scientific study of their effects has recently turned 50 years old. But how much do we know about them: what were they developed for and by whom? How similar or different are they, how effective can they be in changing our minds and biology, what are their social and ethical implications? The Oxford Handbook of Meditation is the most comprehensive volume published on meditation, written in accessible language by world-leading experts on the science and history of these techniques. It covers the development of meditation across the world and the varieties of its practices and experiences. It includes approaches from various disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and sociology and it explores its potential for therapeutic and social change, as well as unusual or negative effects. Edited by practitioner-researchers, this book is the ultimate guide for all interested in meditation, including teachers, clinicians, therapists, researchers, or anyone who would like to learn more about this topic.

Welcome to a master class in mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn is regarded as "one of the finest teachers of mindfulness you'll ever encounter" (Jack Kornfield). He has been teaching the tangible benefits of meditation in the mainstream for decades. Today, millions of people around the world have taken up a formal mindfulness meditation practice as part of their everyday lives. But what is meditation anyway? And why might it be worth trying? Or nurturing further if you already have practice? Meditation Is Not What You Think answers those questions. Originally published in 2005 as part of a larger book entitled Coming to Our Senses, it has been updated with a new foreword by the author and is even more relevant today. If you're curious as to why meditation is not for the "faint-hearted," how taking some time each day to drop into awareness can actually be a radical act of love, and why paying attention is so supremely important, consider this book an invitation to learn more -- from one of the pioneers of the worldwide mindfulness movement.