Dreaming Me: An African-American Woman's Buddist Journey Book

From an Alabama mining camp to India, from the Baptist church to Tibetan monasteries in Nepal, Dreaming Me is the account of how one woman realized her dreams against all odds.The black section of an Alabama mining camp in the 1950s and 1960s is not where you might expect to find a budding Indo-Tibetan scholar, the first American woman and the first African American to become so. Jan Willis's journey from the Jim Crow south to Wesleyan University is a moving tale of spiritual exploration and a profound healing of the rage and low self-esteem that are the legacy of racism.The civil rights movement was in full swing during Jan's teenage years, when she and her family marched with Martin Luther King in Birmingham, and when she later became one of eight black students to attend Cornell University. As with so many others of her time, Jan was constantly faced with the dilemma of how to win the struggle for freedom. She participated in the takeover of an academic building at Cornell, and she was actively recruited by the Black Panthers. But a trip to India, and her relationship with a Tibetan spiritual master, would set her firmly on the path to peace-both outward and inward.Three decades as a student of Tibetan Buddhism gave Willis the structure and support to transform her life by helping her to confront the old wounds and to discover a well of confidence and joy we all share.Read More