Western Meditation

Sit down for twenty minutes. Think whatever you like. Just don’t move.

Most of us have tried meditation at least once. We were told to empty our minds and let our thoughts drift past like clouds. They didn’t. We decided we were bad at it, and gave up.

Western Meditation offers the opposite. In the West’s old tradition, to meditate meant to reflect, to think something over. You don’t stop your thoughts. You follow each one to its end. Keep your body still and the mind follows. Somewhere in those twenty minutes, the noise runs out and the quiet arrives on its own.

It is an old idea that we simply misplaced. Socrates once stood still for a day and a night with a thought he would not give up. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, wrote notes to himself in army camps on the Danube. We know them as the Meditations. Seneca went over his day in the dark. Monks and Quakers knew the habit too. So did Einstein at the patent office, and a president who went fishing to escape to his own thoughts.

Plus what modern research says about thoughts that won’t leave you alone, and exactly how to sit.

Warm, witty and practical. A small book for anyone who has given up on meditation, and the perfect gift for the person who would never buy one for himself.