Kamla K. Kapur

An inspiring guide to embracing your mortality and living a fulfilled life Presenting a clarion call to the aging to awaken before they die, Kamla K. Kapur explores how we can become warriors on the spiritual path in order to embrace and prepare for the truth of our mortality and the ultimate triumph of conscious living and dying. Set in both California and India, Kapur shares her inner adventure to navigate the hazardous battlefield of aging with the aid of spiritual guides that pilot her to safety and offer hard-won wisdom on the art of resting, happiness, and letting go. Revealing the arc of her own self-discovery, she examines her own shadows, fears, anxieties, and regrets, decluttering her mind of disempowering thoughts and reframing and co-creating her reality with the powerful tool of unconditional self-love. Drawing on stories from all traditions, Kapur demonstrates the power of self-examination, vigilance, and intentionality to have a successful old age and offers strategies, tools, and ways of thinking to ensure mental, physical, and spiritual strength to meet aging’s challenges and transform from the people we once were to the ones we are becoming on the penultimate stage of earthly life. Encouraging readers to proceed on their own journeys of awakening, Kapur describes how to confront, express, and embrace your darkness, consciously and honestly, to move forward into the ever greater wholeness of being that incorporates our animal, human, and divine nature. She shows how to make the final course of an ardent, empowered, and courageous journey into God’s heart, revealing how the privilege of aging is to fully experience this precious, painful life and to achieve vitality, satisfaction, and joy in the life we are fortunate to still have.

From the author of The Singing Guru and Rumi: Tales to Live By comes the second book in the Sikh Founder series about Bhai Lehna's journey from being Guru Nanak's constant disciple to becoming Guru Angad, the second Sikh Guru. Into the Great Heart carries forward and concludes the stories of Guru Nanak and Bhai Mardana, his favorite minstrel, from the first volume of the Sikh Founder Series, The Singing Guru. History, legend, and fiction merge to populate this book with fascinating personalities from Sikh history. Pivotal to this narrative are forgotten female luminaries such as Guru Nanak's wife, Mata Sulakhni, his sister, Bebe Nanaki, Bhai Lehna's wife, Khivi, and daughter, Amro. Brought to the foreground, their wisdom and insights as they overcome obstacles to spiritual growth embody the basic tenets of Sikhism in everyday living. They enhance Guru Nanak and Bhai Lehna's tale with their diverse approach to life. Filled with captivating characters that enrich the tapestry of this compelling narrative, Into the Great Heart is a must-read for anyone who loves a rich story about human nature in its search for spiritual awareness.

RADHA SINGS is a lyrical, narrative and dramatic series of erotic love poems from the feministic perspective of Radha, the female counterpart of the archetypical love couple of Indian mythology, Radha and Krishna. The Radha in these poems is an empowered modern woman unabashedly in touch with her own sexual, emotional and spiritual needs. Spiritually is but a continuum of her carnality. These poems move from the shifting complexity and range of modern romantic love, its ecstasies and conflicts, highs and lows, to a love of the divine. Through suffering and separation, Radha undergoes the highest transformation: becoming the object that she worships, a marriage that obliterates the distinction between subject and object.

From the best-selling author of Ganesha Goes to Lunch and Rumi’s Tales from the Silk Road comes an original novel about the life and travels of Guru Nanak, a musician, enlightened thinker, and one of the most beloved figures in Eastern spirituality. In this fascinating book, Kamla K. Kapur weaves together facts, legends, folktales, myths, and over forty of Guru Nanak’s poems—preserved in the Sikh holy book, the Granth Sahib—to form this captivating depiction of the leader’s life. From being seduced by deadly women to almost getting eaten by cannibals, the exciting account presented in The Singing Guru includes moral tales without being proselytizing. Factual details are intermingled with fantasy to produce a symbolic portrait in which humor and imagination combine to convey a profound and entertaining spiritual narrative.

King Kubera was the greediest man in the world. Hated and feared by many, he schemed to win the love of the beautiful goddess Parvati . . . but learned an important lesson when he invited her elephant-headed son Ganesha over for lunch one day . . . So goes one of the many delightful tales in this decidedly grown-up book of traditional Indian stories, retold for the modern reader. Author Kamla Kapur is well known in her native India as a poet and playwright, and her connection to these age-old stories is the reverent yet individualistic one we might expect from someone whose introduction tells of her hometown, where naked, dreadlocked holy men speed about on motorbikes. To collect these stories, Kapur relied on ancient sacred texts, modern scholarship, and chance encounters with interesting people who just happened to know a really good one about this time that Vishnu sank into the ocean, was incarnated as a pig, and had a really wonderful time. Like myths around the world, these are teaching stories that offer both a window into a fascinating culture that has endured for thousands of years, and a code for living that can be applied to the modern world.