Dancing in the Dharma The Life and Teachings of Ruth Denison

"In the great movement of Buddhism to the West, Ruth Denison has been a pioneer. The first Buddhist teacher to lead an all-women's retreat and the first teacher to use movement and dance to train her students in mindfulness, Denison created a quintessentially female, body-centered way of teaching the Dharma. One of the first meditation instructors at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, she has taught extensively in the United States and Europe for thirty years, helping to establish meditation centers in Canada, Germany, and California. She still teaches at her own center in the Mojave Desert of California." "Capturing the unique charm of Denison's voice in vivid scenes and anecdotes, Sandy Boucher tells the gripping story of Ruth's youth in Nazi-dominated Germany and her struggle to survive the near-fatal abuses and privations that befell her after the war. After immigrating to California, Ruth met and married Henry Denison, a spiritual seeker and Vedanta devotee. Through the sixties and seventies they were active participants in the explorations of the counterculture, hosting parties attended by luminaries like Alan Watts, Aldous and Laura Huxley, and Timothy Leary, and traveling to Asia and Europe to study with the major spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. All this became a rich fertilizer for Ruth's later flowering as a Buddhist teacher in the eighties and nineties, which Boucher examines from Ruth's hesitant first formal meditation retreats, through controversy, to her ripening into a mature, wise, and yet always unpredictable teacher."--BOOK JACKET.Boucher, Sandy is the author of 'Dancing in the Dharma The Life and Teachings of Ruth Denison', published 2005 under ISBN 9780807073186 and ISBN 0807073180.