Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist - One Woman's Spiritual Journey - Softcover

"Jan Willis's book is a compelling, beautiful, and informative guide for anyone interested in transformation. She skillfully weaves together her personal story and the Buddha's teaching, evoking the reality of walking a path to liberation."--Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness

"A truly uplifting book of personal empowerment and the triumph of human heart. This remarkable book touches upon themes that every genuine pilgrim - especially those who seek to integrate their cultural and religious heritage with newfound personal spiritual path - must address at some point in their journey."--Thupten Jinpa, founder of the Institute of Tibetan Classics, and personal translator for the Dalai Lama.

"Willis delivers a gripping, intimate account of her spiritual journey that will move anyone who is compelled by the examined life."--Publishers Weekly

"Willis is a philosopher with a bold agenda."--TIME

"Jan Willis's honest, lucid, mindful, and heartful account of her amazing life thus far, its struggles and woundings, its triumphs and joys, is certainly the roar of a lioness of truth-awakening, empowering, inspiring! Listen to it with pride and pleasure!"--Robert Thurman, author of Inner Revolution

"Intensely felt...highly personal...A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism."--Kirkus Reviews

"Willis writes frankly about family, race, spirituality, and finding grace among life's most difficult challenges. Dreaming Me is more honest and fascinating than anything I've read in a long time."--David Pesci, author of Amistad

"Destined for the same shelf as Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies and Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, this is a powerful memoir of a "Baptist Buddhist" who writes with courage, compassion, and forgiveness. This searching memoir is recommended for all collections."--Library Journal

Jan Willis is not Baptist or Buddhist. She is simply both. Dreaming Me is the story of her life, as a child growing up in the Jim Crow South, dealing with racism in an Ivy League college, and becoming involved with the Black Panther Party. But it wasn't until meeting Lama Yeshe, a Tibetan Buddhist monk living in the mountains of Nepal, that she realized who the real Jan Willis was, and how to make the most of the life she was living.