In this book, Ayya Khema gives clear, practical instruction on meditation and techniques for overcoming conditioned mental habits, ideas, beliefs, and limited thinking patterns. Through these simple practices you will develop deeper insight, a sense of calm well-being, and a greater capacity to love and feel loved on a daily basis. She also includes an eloquent outline of the Buddhist path that can be understood and enjoyed by everybody.

Being Nobody Going Nowhere, Ayya Khema, Wisdom Publications, Paperback, 186 pp, $16.95

Ven. Ayya Khema was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1923. After leading an active life in the world--including marriage and children in America and adventure in South America, Asia and Australia--she turned seriously to spiritual practice in her forties. In 1979, she was ordained a Theravadin Buddhist nun, receiving the name khema, meaning "safety and security" (ayya means "sister"). Ayya Khema established a forest monastery near Sidney, Australia; a training center for nuns in Colombo, Sri Lanka; and Buddha-Haus, a meditation center in the Allgäu, Germany. Among her books are When the Iron Eagle Flies; Being Nobody, Going Nowhere; and Who is My Self?; and an autobiography, I Give You My Life. She passed away in 1997.

Foreword
Preface

1 MeditationWhy and How
2 Meditation Affects Our Lives
3 Calm and Insight
4 Four Friends

Loving-Kindness
Compassion
Sympathetic Joy
Equanimity

5 Loving-Kindness Meditation
6 Five Hindrances

Sensual Desire
Ill Will
Sloth and Torpor
Restlessness and Worry
Skeptical Doubt

7 Kamma and Rebirth

Kamma
Rebirth

8 The Discourse on Loving-Kindness

9 Four Kinds of Happiness

The Happiness of the Sense Contacts
Deva Happiness
The Happiness of Concentration
The Happiness of Insight

10 The Five Aggregates

The Body
Feeling
Perceptions
Mental Formations
Sense Consciousness

11 Ten Virtues

Generosity
Moral Conduct
Renunciation
Wisdom
Energy
Patience
Truth
Determination
Loving-Kindness and Equanimity

12 The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path

The Four Noble Truths
The Noble Eightfold Path

13 A New Beginning

Glossary
Index
About the Author