In about 1980, I started getting familiar with the benefits of deliberate relaxation for 10 minutes a day, as described in Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response." Benson always refers to sitting still and focusing one's attention on one's breath, a spoken, chanted or mentally repeated word or phrase as the elicitation of the body's relaxation response. I still feel that the book is an excellent one for getting into a relaxation/meditation practice. Having just reviewed it for this post, I am still impressed by the scope, directness, and simplicity of the presentation.
For quite a while, I felt that the book was the best single, inexpensive, succinct introduction to practicing what I now call meditation. When I asked myself, what author seemed to be the most help in understanding how to meditate and why one should, I thought of the Benson book but gradually, I came to feel that Jack Kornfield was more helpful. Two other names that loomed large are Jon Kabat-Zinn and Daniel J. Siegel. Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist who found meditation very helpful personally and successfully introduced the practice into treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital for cancer patients dealing with pain, exhaustion of all treatment possibilities and coming death. Siegel is a psychiatrist especially interested in children and is the main support of the actress Goldie Hawn's foundation and work to find ways for children to benefit from meditation.
Jack Kornfield has several excellent books but the one that shocked me the most was "Bringing Home the Dharma", the story of his training in Eastern countries and founding centers in the US to assist people in learning and applying meditation practices. The most striking thing I read in the book was that Kornfield experienced several Eastern meditation masters who were expert and experienced but still lived cramped, grumpy, unhappy lives. I feel now that meditation can be very helpful, may be the most helpful thing I know for knowing one's self and facing one's feelings and isssues but is not a cure-all and is not guaranteed to magically make everything peachy.
Now, I have a new nomination for an excellent, clear and useful book. It is "Search Inside Yourself" by Chade-Meng Tan. Meditative practice is excellent for increasing mindfulness, the ability to notice what subject or target one is giving attention to and providing the chance to question whether one is attending to what is best at the time. After developing such mindfulness, it becomes easier to see and feel the life situations of others in a truly empathetic, compassionate way. This book by a Chinese-American Google engineer does a fine job of explaining the way to more compassion while simultaneously being open with others about one's feelings and fears. He notes that the most common reason for failing to give oneself the benefits of meditation is the mistaken belief that one should be able to keep attention on the target without interruption. People often take wandering attention as a sign that they are not meditating while the truth is that noticing one's attention has strayed and returning it to the target is the golden moment, the time of benefit, which trains the mind into awareness of itself.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
