The Diamonds Within Us

Dr. Moore’s excellent book, The Diamond Within Us, is a crystallization of her many years of work as the creator and primary facilitator of Karuna Training, a program that instructs us how to befriend and love ourselves, and practice engaged compassion with others. Based on the principles of contemplative psychology, which integrates Eastern and Western psychologies, this book guides us step-by-step in the practice of meditation, revealing how we can embrace the experience of nowness—the timeless moment where we have immediate access to the truth of our experience. 

The good news is that by following the instructions in this book, we can discover that our minds are workable and that our emotions can provide an operating system to navigate our lives. Dr. Moore’s book offers explanations for how to cultivate authenticity in ourselves and how to be of service to others at a time when the world desperately needs compassion.

"The Diamonds Within Us" sparkles with personal experience, accessible practices, and an approach to psychology grounded in brilliant, unconditional health. In sharing her own lifelong journey through the inception and development of Contemplative Psychology, Melissa Moore also passes on the radical experiments incubated at Naropa University and expressed in Karuna Training, experiments now matured and weathered through decades of learning. 

Both rooted in a strong lineage and sensitive to the demands of our present, this book also gestures towards Contemplative Psychology's future as we face ecological loss, unconscious bias, and cultural fragmentation.

In "The Diamonds Within Us", Moore gives us a compelling and highly readable exposition of the inner workings of Contemplative Psychology. Drawing on her many years working in challenging clinical settings, devising curricula and teaching Karuna Training throughout Europe and North America, she develops here a rigorous yet highly compassionate and dignified alternative to more diagnostically-driven narratives around psychological suffering.

"The Diamonds Within Us" is a rich treasure trove of the exquisite depth [of understanding] of an embodied meditation practitioner and teacher of the [Buddhist] Contemplative Psychology tradition. 

Dr. Moore’s thorough step by step elucidation on the skandhas, emptiness, the Buddha Families, and transmutation are a complete transmission of Buddhist psychology and engages readers to mine their own exquisite goodness in the midst of personal and societal confusion. 

By making friends with ourselves as Dr. Moore advocates, we see that sparkling neurosis is our diamond in the rough!

Melissa Moore’s "The Diamonds Within Us" is a brilliant, colorful exploration of Contemplative Psychology and Karuna Training, two approaches close to my own heart. Through powerful personal honesty, examples and lessons from forty years of learning and teaching, Moore’s book delivers the pickaxe and polishing cloths we need to begin to dig out and shine our own jewels.

When so many of us are confronted daily by a deluge of divisive politics and strong emotions, the message of compassion in this book couldn't be more on point. Dr. Melissa Moore offers an empowering view of the mind and healing beyond pathology. 

Drawn from the wealth of the Buddhist Mahayana and Vajrayana tradition, The Diamonds Within Us is a treatise on the meaning of intrinsic health skillfully rendered for anyone seeking a direct path for working with pain.

This book is a jewel — a clear, erudite rendering of a complex but important topic with an accessible, inviting warmth. Dr. Moore’s decades of experience come across in her intimate, first-personal way of explaining topics like the felt experience of emptiness and the practice of “compassionate exchange” (the practice of being in relationship with the sacredness of everyday experience). 

This book is useful from an academic standpoint for its ecumenical expression of Tibetan Buddhist psychological principles, and I also find it useful from a personal standpoint of clarifying different aspects of what it means to be in a relationship with myself and to cultivate compassion. Definitely a worthwhile read!