Dancing in the Dharma
Subtitle: The Life and Teachings of Ruth Denison
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: April 15, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780807073186
Subjects: Religious life; Women; Religion; Buddhism; Biography / Autobiography; United States; Spiritual biography; Religious; Buddhism - General; Religion / Buddhism; Biography; Buddhist women; Denison, Ruth
First sentence: On this April morning of 2003, in the high desert, I expected the beginning of summer's crushing heat.
Description: Delving into Denison"s dramatic and sometimes tragic past, Boucher examines the life of this beloved and controversial teacher to try to understand what shaped her and informed her teaching. In the great movement of Buddhism to the West, Ruth Denison pioneered and innovated with her own quintessentially female and unique way of teaching the Dharma. She was the first Buddhist teacher to lead an all-women"s retreat and the first teacher to use movement and dance to train her students in mindfulness. As Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, remembers, "The wisdom, and the emptiness side of things, were very clear in her. She expressed all that very, very well." Catching the unique charm of Ruth"s voice in vivid scenes and anecdotes, Boucher tells the gripping story of Ruth"s youth in Nazi-dominated Germany, her years in Hollywood in the sixties and seventies as a participant in the counterculture, her world travels to study with the major spiritual teachers of the twentieth century in Asia and Europe, and her flowering as a Buddhist teacher. Along the way, Boucher also addresses the hard question of how to continue to learn from a spiritual teacher while responding to that teacher"s complex.