The Diamonds Within Us

Uncovering Brilliant Sanity Through Contemplative Psychology

By: Melissa Moore

Narrated by: Melissa Moore

Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

Do you aspire to unlock the innate wisdom within you?

The Diamonds Within Us taps into the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and applies them to the modern woes of everyday life. Author Melissa Moore, PhD, brings her three decades of expertise and leadership in Karuna training to her debut book, revealing how to resource yourself and integrate your experiences to live a more empowered life. 

In these minutes, you'll learn the basic tenets and practices that empower Karuna graduates to skillfully work with their minds, emotions, and unique style of wisdom. 

Listen in to discover how to: 

• Befriend yourself as you are, and stop trying to be someone you're not 
• Access the wisdom of emotions and learn how to work with difficult ones
• Embody deep listening skills and resource yourself when working with others
• Address long-standing fears and challenges in relationships
• Explore the invisible forces of life and learn to synchronize with the magic

©2022 Melissa Moore (P)2022 Melissa Moore

Critic reviews

"The Diamonds Within Us sparkles with personal experience, accessible practices, and an approach to psychology grounded in brilliant, unconditional health. In sharing her own lifelong journey through the inception and development of Contemplative Psychology, Melissa Moore also passes on the radical experiments incubated at Naropa University and expressed in Karuna Training, experiments now matured and weathered through decades of learning. Both rooted in a strong lineage and sensitive to the demands of our present, this book also gestures toward Contemplative Psychology's future as we face ecological loss, unconscious bias, and cultural fragmentation." (Adam Lobel, PhD)

"The Diamonds Within Us is a rich treasure trove of the exquisite depth of understanding of an embodied meditation practitioner and teacher of the [Buddhist] Contemplative Psychology tradition. Dr. Moore’s thorough step-by-step elucidations on the skandhas, emptiness, the Buddha Families, and transmutation are a complete transmission of Buddhist psychology and engages readers to mine their own exquisite goodness in the midst of personal and societal confusion. By making friends with ourselves, as Dr. Moore advocates, we see that sparkling neurosis is our diamond in the rough!" (Janneli Chapin, assistant professor, Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology Program, Naropa University) 

"Dr. Moore’s excellent book, The Diamonds Within Us, is a crystallization of her many years of work as the creator and primary facilitator of Karuna Training, a program that instructs us how to befriend and love ourselves and practice engaged compassion with others. This book guides us step-by-step in the practice of meditation, revealing how we can embrace the experience of nowness, the timeless moment where we have immediate access to the truth of our experience. The good news is that by following the instructions in this book, we can discover that our minds are workable and that our emotions can provide an operating system to navigate our lives. Dr. Moore’s book offers explanations for how to cultivate authenticity in ourselves and how to be of service to others at a time when the world desperately needs compassion." (Ira Rechtshaffer, PhD, author of Mindfulness and Madness: Money, Food, Sex, and the Sacred) 

What Is Contemplative Psychology?

The Diamonds Within Us is a tour of contemplative psychology. If you are familiar with the work of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, you will recognize the thoroughgoing, unsparing and unprecedented account of human mind from the Trungpa canon. A mix of classic Tibetan Buddhism and visionary insights of Trungpa’s own, this material continues to enthrall and entrance devotees, much as the man himself did when he was with us.

For those readers not familiar with Trungpa’s works, Melissa Moore is uniquely qualified to give them to us, having lived and digested these teachings since her young adulthood. She is a senior, empowered teacher in Trungpa Rinpoche’s line.

Following on from the direct transmission of Buddhist topics such as the eight kinds of consciousness, the five Buddha families, relative and absolute truth, emptiness, etc., you will find Ms. Moore’s elucidation of the nature and substance of emotions. For this you will need the Buddhist background, for without it, basic notions of contemplative psychology will sound like pie in the sky. ‘Intrinsic health’ and ‘nonjudgmental awareness’ or ‘basic sanity’ would seem unavailable outside the context of Buddhist understanding. Here the application of these radical and challenging Buddhist views defines human healing while side-stepping the entire vocabulary, assumptions, and practices of mainstream psychotherapy.

The later chapters take a deep dive into mindfulness of emotions, going far beyond where many current uses of mindfulness take us. This book is a unique offering in how it applies Buddhist logic to the problem of psychological suffering in a modern context. Where else would you find a statement such as “Contemplative Psychology is a path of retraining ourselves to not make things up in our minds, but to rest in not knowing and learn to tolerate the intensity of the discomfort. We train to go toward emotional energy and open to it for the wisdom that is innate within the messiness of the feelings.”

The Diamonds Within Us taps into the centuries-old wisdom of Buddhism and joins it with contemporary understandings of isolation, shame, guilt, power, and the needs of individuals in modern society. The resultant methodology is invaluable.
Eileen Malloy

brilliant!

did not want to turn it off when I had something that needed tending to...