How to Meditate: A Guide to Self-Discovery
Price: $4.95
- ISBN13: 9780316880626
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
How to Meditate: A Guide to Self-Discovery
Product Description
“This simple, straightforward, yet powerful guide can help you-just as it has already helped hundreds of thousands of readers since its initial publication twenty-five years ago-reap the profound rewards of meditation. Outlining an easy-to-follow and realistic approach that enables you to bring meditation effortlessly into your life, no matter how great the demands on your time, How to Meditate is an unrivaled source of inspiration and practical instruction for anyone seeking inner peace, relief from stress, and increased self-knowledge.”Amazon.com Review
Meditation “is an ageless human experience that has been discovered and explored and used in every period and every culture that we know about,” writes Lawrence LeShan, a psychotherapist and scholar. LeShan discusses the psychological and physiological effects of meditation, why meditation has these effects, and different types (or “paths”) of meditation. To get the feel of it, he suggests starting with 15 minutes of breath counting–harder than it sounds. “The road of meditation is not an easy one,” says LeShan. “The first shock of surprise comes when we realize how undisciplined our mind really is; how it refuses to do the bidding of our will.” He gives detailed instructions for several meditations of different types and guidelines for choosing a program and a teacher. This is not a snappy “five minutes to perfect meditations” or a promise of “read this book, achieve instant peace.” Rather, How to Meditate is a serious, thoughtful book. “In this most serious area–inner development–we are interested in evolution, which is stable, rather than revolution, which is not,” says LeShan. You will see changes, he promises, but gradually. This is the new edition of the classic that has been teaching people to meditate since 1974. How wonderful that How to Meditate has been reissued, giving another generation the benefit of LeShan’s work and guidance. –Joan Price
How to Meditate: A Guide to Self-Discovery
I didn’t learn how to meditate from this book.
The material the cover of the book is made out is just distgusting. I barely can stand to hold this book in my hands.
Horrible.
To its credit, I must say this was the first book that inspired me because a few days before purchasing, an inner voice in me told me to return back to the store I saw it at and buy it.
Can’t say I was all that disappointed and in fact at least one or more of the techniques are helpful. However, one statement certainly turned out quite inaccurate in my own case. He states or at least implies that meditation goes hand in hand with being a good businessman. Well, if THAT were the case I wouldn’t have lost money in the stock market some ten years after I commenced the practice! Nor would I have also lost in a business venture I had with someone where I got in over my head since I didn’t grasp just how speculative the venture turned out.
Well, I bought the book because of all the 5 stars reviews and I was disappointed. I feel it is a little outdated because a lot has happened since it was first written (`70s) and New Age beliefs, whatever opinion we hold, have made all of us more aware of the spiritual quest and its many practices. I felt as if Shehan did not dare really expose his personal beliefs although there are hints that he is a Christian. There are valuable insights on the traps in the meditative practice and I appreciated his serious insistence on them. I did not quite share his clear-cut criticism of non-proven notions like prana or vibrations,… but he is a honest writer and goes on saying that great men have assured us they were real and their opinion ought to be respected. I wish he would have taken a stronger stand on this one. IS IT or IS IT NOT ? The way he talks about “scientifically proven facts” is quite outdated too. Good presentation of the schools of meditation. On the HOW (which is the title of the book), there is a lot missing I think and I am not an expert. I think it must have been an very good book at the times but would need to be re-edited and maybe revised. If you have meditated before, you might want to look for a more comprehensive book. I think you can live without this one.
My reaction to this book was the eventual impetus to just go out and purchase other books on meditation because the style and approach of the author were so irksome to me. I bought it because of the simple eloquence of the cover and the title, and I think I did read the first page when I was in the store. It looked straightforward, and I did indeed want to learn simply “how to meditate”, being a beginner. (I subsequently learned that there are actually a few books called “how to meditate”.)
I felt it was important to write a review because there seem to be so many positive ones, and it seems a book that may work for some, but for some like me, it’s a real turn-off, although fortunately for me I just resolved to look for other meditation books (I’ve been using the “Getting in the Gap” meditation most extensively, and been trying to read a couple other books). There are a few reasons I wanted to learn how to meditate… one of them being the hope of maybe experiencing moments of deep insight or contact with something mystical or angelic, and at one point the author actually more or less actually discourages this aspect of meditation. He specifically refers to the possibility of these types of experiences during meditation, saying that you can just basically ignore it and keep going with the meditation, because these aren’t the important part of meditation. It would seem to me if you had a mystical experience during meditation it would be something important enough to pay attention to, whether “real” or not.
This annoyed me, but my disagreement with that view was not so much the problem, as the consistent authoritarian and absolute style of his teachings on meditation. He seemed so focused on the shoulds and shouldn’ts of the whole discipline, which to me in a way is sort of going against the whole notion of meditation, and it made me put the book down. I did his first breathing exercise, which was fine, and I tried to go on with the book, but the style of his teaching was too much for me. It was annoying because the cover looks so elegant and zen-like and then what was inside, to me, seemed at odds with that.
Basically, if an an air of finality in an instructive book on meditation doesn’t appeal to you, then you may want to read-before-you-buy. Because of my frustration with it, I was only able to get 15 pages or so into it, so I can’t say much to the teachings of the book, only the way in which it was presented.
Please note the number 2 cd was missing. I received two number 3 cd .
Could you please mail me the missing cd ( the number 2 cd).
Thank you