CREATIVITY, SPIRITUALITY & MAKING A BUCK

A friendly, funny, practical guide for creatives and entrepreneurs, written by David Nichtern, a four-time Emmy award-winning and two-time Grammy-nominated composer-guitarist-producer who has worked with Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, Lana Del Rey, and Krishna Das, among many others. Also a beloved and highly regarded Buddhist teacher, David teaches readers how to integrate their creative process with their spiritual practice and livelihood.

“How do I make a living doing what I love?”
“Am I a sellout as an artist if I want to be successful?”
“How do I integrate my spiritual principles with the art of running a business? And actually, um, how do I run a business?”

Wondering how to reconcile your calling with your need to make a living wage, or what to do once your art starts selling, or how to achieve success in your field, or what it even means to be successful? David Nichtern offers his lived, learned experience as an entrepreneur, musician, and Buddhist teacher to first help you figure out what “success” means to you and then show you how to get there. He offers advice on the creative process and principles of business and ethics—everything from “listen to the muse!” to “protect your intellectual property!”—and provides mindfulness exercises to help you integrate inspiration and aspiration, vocation and avocation—to go from surviving to thriving.

Whether you’re a baker trying to grow from the farmer’s market to a brick-and-mortar or a CEO exploring how taking care of your employees can be the same as taking care of your business—if you’re trying to align your spiritual, creative, and financial pursuits and discover what it means to truly live well, this book is for you.

AWAKENING FROM THE DAYDREAM: REIMAGINING THE BUDDHA’S WHEEL OF LIFE

The Wheel of Life is a Buddhist allegorical painting dating back to ancient India. The painting describes how our sense of self and our life in this world take shape, portraying how we think, how we act, how we feel, and how we manifest our own personal reality. The Wheel of Life also illustrates how karma works in our lives—how we get trapped in confusing, painful, and repetitive patterns, and how we can liberate ourselves from those patterns.

The goal of this book is to present these ancient teachings in more contemporary language, with imagery more immediately recognizable to modern readers. The illustration of the Wheel used in the book depicts modern people in contemporary settings to convey the psychological tone of each of the six realms. This approach is very much in keeping with how David Nichtern learned about the six realms from his teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.