Moore, Melissa, PhD

The Diamonds Within Us: Uncovering Brilliant Sanity Through Contemplative Psychology Moore, Melissa, PhD

Do you aspire to unlock the innate wisdom within you?

The Diamonds Within Us taps 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.

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

Read on to discover how to: Befriend yourself as you are, and stop trying to be someone you're notAccess the wisdom of emotions and learn how to work with difficult onesEmbody deep listening skills and resource yourself when working with othersAddress long-standing fears and challenges in relationshipsExplore the invisible forces of life and learn to synchronize with the magic
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