Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World

A luminous guide to navigating transition and impermanence rooted in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of bardo.

In a world where nothing lasts forever, how do we live? Life is perpetually, endlessly filled with change: new jobs and new loves, unfamiliar places and faces. And entwined in that change is loss: loss of what was or is, or what could have been. In the midst of this shifting landscape, Traveling in Bardo invites us to embrace impermanence in a powerful way, rooted in ancient wisdom.

Interweaving explorations of bardo in relation to marriage and friendship, parents and children, work and creativity with stories of her Tibetan ancestors and the Buddhist teachings on the fleeting nature of existence, Ann Tashi Slater illuminates what the teachings have to tell us in our contemporary lives. She relays vital wisdom from Tibetan culture, giving us a bold, new framework to navigate moments of change and live life fully.

During over forty years of writing and speaking about her Tibetan-American heritage and the relevance of Buddhism in Western society, Slater has come to see how Tibetan bardo views on impermanence can transform the way we live. In Tibetan belief, bardo is the interval between death and rebirth, as well as the intermediate state between birth and death. It also refers to liminal periods in life when the reality we know comes to an end. A time of great possibility, it offers us the opportunity to find happiness in an impermanent world.

Ann Tashi Slater has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, Tin House, Guernica, AGNI, Granta, and many others. Her work has been featured in Lit Hub and included in The Best American Essays. In her Darjeeling Journal column for Catapult, she writes about her Tibetan family history and bardo, and she blogged for the HuffPost about similar topics. She presents and teaches workshops at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, the Asia Society, and The American University of Paris, among others. She’s a regular speaker at NYC’s Rubin Museum of Art, which has a special focus on Tibetan culture; her highly popular Rubin presentations have been mentioned in The New York Times.