DREAMING ME: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, One Woman's Spiritual Journey, by Jan Willis

DREAMING ME: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, One Woman's Spiritual Journey

by Jan Willis

Jan Willis grew up Baptist in the segregated South, studied at Cornell University, and got involved with the Civil Rights movement and the Black Panther Party. Her extraordinary journey then led her to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal where she met the great teacher Lama Yeshe and with the help of his guidance, found the real Jan Willis, the one who could recognize the best of what life gave her and make something lasting and transformative from it.

Willis would become the first African American scholar-practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism in America. Today, she’s a professor of religion at Wesleyan, and a truly esteemed member of the Buddhist community.

Dreaming Me is the story of how she got there, and how she got there whole.

Jan Willis is a professor at Wesleyan University and the first African American scholar-practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism in America. In addition to earning a master’s degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, she has studied with Tibetan Buddhist masters in India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the United States for more than four decades and has taught courses in Buddhism for thirty-five years.