Writing Yourself Awake: Meditation and Creativity (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780991473007)

Kimberley Snow, Ph.D. is uniquely qualified to author Writing Yourself Awake. After graduate school and teaching literature and writing at University of California, Santa Barbara, she moved to a Tibetan Retreat Center in Northern California where for the next six years she studied Buddhist psychology, edited dharma books, and also worked as a chef. These experiences are described in her memoir, In Buddha's Kitchen: Cooking, Being Cooked and Other Adventures in a Retreat Center (Shambhala). Returning to Santa Barbara, she began teaching workshops which increasingly involved combining writing and dharma. She found that writing is a natural way for Western students to integrate both the insights and the messy stuff that comes up during meditation. In the late 2000s, during the five years she worked as Program Director for Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness, founded by long-time mediation teacher B. Alan Wallace, she helped to write the manual for Cultivating Emotional Balance, a program HH Dalai Lama had requested to be created in order to alleviate emotional suffering. In related workshops, feedback from participants led her to add poetry, playwriting and fiction to the journaling component as an effective means of expressing the emotional core. For the past four years, she and a local therapist have taught an offshoot of the CEB training called Cultivating Emotional Balance through Mindfulness which includes a strong writing component combined with meditation and contemplation. These exercises and techniques have been incorporated into Writing Yourself Awake. Kimberley Snow grew up in Greenwood, SC, and has since lived in a number of places including North Dakota and North Carolina where she was a researcher for J.B. Rhine at Duke University's Department of Parapsychology. Her play, Multiple, won first prize in Jacksonville University's 17th Annual Playwriting Contest. Dragon Soup & Other Intense Sensations, a play about restaurant life, was produced in a restaurant which served the same meal to the audience as the one being prepared in the play. It Changes, her novel about Chef Savannah and a poet named Leo Stein, was published by World Parade Books in late 2011. Her other books include Writing Yourself Home (Conari) and Keys to the Open Gate (Conari). She lives in Santa Barbara, CA where she leads workshops and retreats on a range of dharma topics, most of which combine writing and meditation.