Everything Is Medicine

Tibetan wisdom and modern life meet in your own body, breath, and mind, turning the complexity and beauty of being human into a path of real healing and awakening. Being human hurts. We get sick, our minds race, hearts break, and yet somewhere inside we sense our life could unfold with more balance, more flow, and a clearer sense of purpose. Everything Is Medicine empowers you to live with this tension, instead of trying to escape it. Coauthored by Tibetan physician Dr. Nida Chenagtsang, Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, and meditation teacher Matteo Pistono, this book offers a grounded way to work with your body, breath, and mind as medicine you already carry. Drawing from Traditional Tibetan Medicine, Buddhist tantra, yoga, and meditation, the authors lead you through three interwoven levels of healing: Care for the body. Learn how your constitution and patterns of imbalance give rise to illness, and how to use diet and herbs, yoga and movement, sleep, massage, and at-home therapies to live in step with the seasons and your changing body. Remain resilient even as illness, aging, and loss arrive. Work with energy. Explore your subtle energetic anatomy and learn breathing, visualization, and mantra for healing to steady the nervous system, ease emotional storms, and meet desire, stress, and restlessness without being ruled by them. Protect your vitality, inner warmth, and joy, and explore lucid dreaming as part of a path of longevity, so your energy is not quietly worn down by the passing years. Open to your innate wisdom. Unveil the pristine awareness that has been with you through every high and low. Deep teachings on the nature of reality, guided meditations that cultivate joy, compassion, and love, and contemplations on death all point you back to the blissful clarity of your own mind, and show you how every experience, pleasant or painful, can serve the path of waking up. Everything Is Medicine does not promise a life without difficulty. It offers a way of meeting pain and pleasure, health and illness, gain, loss, and even your own death as the very conditions through which awakening unfolds. With a living wisdom lineage behind it, this book invites you to care for your body, open your heart, and trust the enlightened potential that has been here all along."