Dr. Andrew Holecek has been traveling the spiritual path for his entire adult life and for the past twenty years has been a serious practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. Founder of the Forum of Living and Dying, he teaches seminars throughout the country on spiritual hardship and the Tibetan views of life, death, and beyond. Dr. Holecek is also the co-founder of the Himalayan Dental Relief Project, which serves impoverished children in five Asian countries. He is currently adjunct faculty at Naropa University and the Ngedon School of Buddhist Studies.

	Contents: The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardship into Joy
	Foreword by the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche	ix
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Introduction	1
	PART I: The First Turning	17
1.	The Power	19
2.	The Pain	29
3.	Necessary and Unnecessary Hardship	37
4.	Progress or Regress?	50
5.	Suffering or Pain?	66
6.	Always Practicing	75
7.	Repetition	82
8.	Put It in Perspective	92
	PART II: The Second Turning	103
9.	The Pain of Letting Go	105
10.	Fear is the Fare	116
11.	Spiritual Detox	126
12.	Ground Addiction II	137
13.	Emptiness	144
14.	The Mistake of the Ego	155
15.	Frustration by Design	168
16.	Working with the Skandhas	178
	PART III: The Third Turning	187
17.	The Art of Working with Emotions	191
18.	Applying the Four ARTS	208
19.	The Blessing and Curse of Deep Meditation	220
20.	The Origin of Confusion	232
21.	Hardship as Loss of the Feminine	244
	Bibliography	257
	Notes	263
	Index	171