Call of the dakini : a memoir of a life lived / Barbara Lepani.

Foreword -- Dedication and appreciation -- About the author -- Introduction -- 1. The dakini calls -- 2. Across the colonial divide -- 3. Life in the third world -- 4. A new life in Australia -- 5. Perception and reality -- 6. I want you to dance -- 7. Encountering the Vajrayana -- 8. Guru yoga -- 9. Parallel perspectives -- 10. Wisdom journeys -- 11. Wise eldership -- 12. Times with Amnyi Trulchung Rinpoche -- 13. Retreat and its fruits -- 14. Towards regenerative living -- Footnote references.

Call of the Dakini, Barbara Lepani's memoir of her intellectual and spiritual journey through life traces how the 'dakini', the Buddhist feminine principle of dynamic awareness, has been calling to her throughout her life as an inner quest for meaning and wisdom.

From the confines of a Queensland childhood, her life journey takes her to the expansiveness of Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism by way of China's Cultural Revolution, and student activism to the Trobriand Islands and Papua New Guinea during its transition to self-government and independence.

While working professionally as a sociologist of science and technology, and contemplating the multiple challenges facing the world, her memoir reveals her personal journey through cross cultural relationships, as a mother and grandmother, and as student-practitioner of Buddhism, to the importance of First Nations Knowledge systems in bringing about an urgent 'revolution in consciousness'. Such a revolution provides a pathway from the hubris of the current philosophy of 'economism' and geo-political competition towards a new philosophy of regenerative living that is emerging as the zeitgeist for the 21st century.