Store: Books
The following books are currently available from Springwater Center. To place your order, print and mail the Order Form to the Center with full payment.
Books by Toni Packer
The Silent Question: Meditating in the
Stillness of Not Knowing
Paperback: 208 pages. Shambhala Publications, 2007. $14.00.
In The Silent Question, Packer provides fresh insights on using the experiences of life that are raw, messy, painful, and sometimes full of laughter, to open a way to compassion. She urges us to let go of our thoughts and to sit "in the stillness of not knowing" in order to reflect upon the essential question of who we are. Packer encourages us to discover that life, energy, and insight come from the questioning, the looking, the listening.
The Wonder of Presence
Paperback: 170 pages. Shambhala Publications, 2002. $14.00.
In this compelling collection of talks, interviews, and letters, Toni Packer provides a comprehensive overview of meditative inquiry - a nondenominational approach that emphasizes the direct experience of the present moment. "The immense challenge for each one of us," Packer writes, "is can we live our lives, at least for moments at a time, in the wonder of presence that is the creative source of everything?" She shows how we can transform fear, anger, guilt, and attachment to our self-image through simple, direct awareness.
The Light of Discovery
Paperback: 126 pages. Charles E. Tuttle, 1995. $8.00.
To read this book is to encounter the essence of our lives and our everyday concerns. Toni Packer shines her gentle light on fear, compassion, impermanence, attraction, prejudice, enlightenment, and much more as she invites us into our own light of discovery. As she says, "In truth we are not separate from each other, or from the world, from the whole earth, the sun or moon or billions of stars, not separate from the entire universe. Listening silently in silent wonderment, without knowing anything, there is just one mysteriously palpitating aliveness."
The Light of Discovery
Hardcover: 125 pages. Charles E. Tuttle, 1995. $12.95.
The Work of This Moment
Paperback: 136 pages. Shambhala Publications, 1990, 2007. $14.00.
In this compelling collection of talks, essays, interviews, and letters, Toni Packer presents a radically simple and original approach to meditation free from religious authority, doctrine, symbolism, and ceremony. A former Zen teacher with an interest in Krishnamurti's work, Toni Packer goes beyond traditional religion and explores with the reader the root of human attachments and the source of suffering, opening the way to compassion.
Seeing
Without Knowing & What Is Meditative Inquiry?
Paperback: 91 pages. Springwater Center, 1995. (out of print)
A collection of letters and retreat talks that explore the
nature of listening, meditative inquiry and issues such as
authority, searching, pride, sorrow, and the wholeness of
seeing.
Books about Springwater Center
Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from
the Story of My Life
Paperback: 239 pages. Bell Tower, 1996. $14.00.
Born with only one hand, Joan Tollifson grows up feeling different, finds identity as a bisexual lesbian and a disability rights activist, but also sinks into drug addiction and alcoholism. She embraces Zen Buddhism and then a very bare-bones spirituality at Springwater Center that has no form. Joan spent five years on staff at Springwater Center, during which time Toni Packer encouraged her to abandon all answers and methods, to question all beliefs, and to explore the simplicity of present awareness.
Books with Sections by or about Toni Packer
Meetings with Remarkable
Women: Buddhist Teachers in America (Revised Edition)
By Lenore Friedman
Paperback: 353 pages. Shambhala Publications, 1987, 2000. $25.00.
This book celebrates the flowering of women in American Buddhism. Lenore Friedman set out to explore this phenomenon by interviewing some of the remarkable women who were teaching Buddhism in the United States. The seventeen women she writes about vary in background, personality, and form of teaching. Includes a section on Toni Packer.