Meditation Saved My Life is a moving first-person account of the mind’s innate healing abilities. In 2003, Tibetan lama Phakyab Rinpoche was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured by Chinese officials bent on uprooting Tibet’s indigenous religion. Although Rinpoche escaped his captors and fled to New York, his ordeal left him with life-threatening injuries, including gangrene of the ankle. At Bellevue Hospital, doctors gave Rinpoche a shocking choice: accept leg amputation or risk a slow, painful death. However, an inner voice prompted him to try a non-western cure — meditation. Rinpoche began an intensive yoga routine that included thousands of hours of meditation, and against all scientific logic, his injuries gradually healed. As his mentor the Dalai Lama told him, “You have within you wisdom that will give you the strength to heal.” In Meditation Saved My Life, Rinpoche shows us that we all have great healing powers that lie dormant within us.

Phakyab Rinpoché is a ranking lama and a highly renowned practitioner in the Gelugpa order of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1994, Rinpoche was recognized by the Dalai Lama to be the eighth reincarnation of the Phakyab Rinpoche, a venerated Buddhist teacher and healer who first awoke in the 11th century. He is instrumental in the development of international research protocols on therapeutic benefits of meditation.

Rinpoche founded Menla Thödol Ling, "The Garden of Medicine Buddha," a center dedicated to the study and teaching of internal meditation sciences located outside of Paris. He teaches regularly at centers in Europe, the U.S., Asia, & South America; and speaks frequently around the world.

phakyabrinpoche.org

Sofia Stril-Rever studied Sanskrit from an Indian pandit at the University of Sarnath and was introduced in the Tibetan Kirti monastery to tantric meditation. She is the French biographer of the Dalai Lama, and the co-author of his international bestseller My Spiritual Journey (Harper One, 2011).