Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With

Wakefulness is our natural state: enlightened, complete, perfect in wisdom and compassion. It’s not something outside ourselves that we need to attain or become. But it’s also true that some effort is required to get in touch with it—and that effort is what spiritual practice is about. Gaylon Ferguson highlights two essential aspects of the path of awakening: learning to trust that we are already naturally awake and committing to meditation practice. And he shows how each supports the other in our efforts to become fully who we are.

He begins by showing how to understand natural wakefulness in ourselves and how to gain confidence in it. Then he teaches the fundamentals of meditation and goes on to provide exercises and guided contemplations intended to help us experience innate wakefulness. Along the way, he shares selections from question-and-answer sessions with students from retreats that he's led that provide practical advice for manifesting awareness in daily life. Finally he shows how we can reinforce and support each other in wakefulness through community.

This long-awaited first book from this renowned meditation teacher is a complete introduction to meditation and the spiritual path—suitable for both beginners and seasoned practitioners as a source of inspiration and insight.

To learn more about the author, visit his website: shambhala.org/teachers/acharya/gferguson

Gaylon Ferguson is a faculty member in both Religious Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado. He is an acharya, or senior teacher, in the Shambhala International Buddhist community. After studying meditation and Buddhist philosophy with Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa in the 1970s and 1980s, Ferguson became a Fulbright Fellow to Nigeria and completed a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology at Stanford University. After several years of teaching cultural anthropology at the University of Washington, he became teacher-in-residence at Karme Choling Buddhist Retreat Center, through 2005, when he joined the faculty of Naropa University.