Requesting book recs

[resonant]

If I wanted to try out meditation, can anyone recommend a good book to start with?

Bonus points if its way of approaching things is not too relentlessly visual; I do better with auditory 'images' than with visual ones.

Comments

[umbo]

My favorite intro is Buddhism without Beliefs by Stephen Bachelor, but if you're looking for an intro to mindfulness mediation, Thich Nhat Hanh's a great person to start with. He's got a ton of books out there, but Peace is Every Step or any of the other ones with "Peace" in the title would work! He's also written a few on the intersection between Christianity and Buddhism.

[beachlass]

Seconding the Thich Nhat Hanh rec.

[resonant]

I'll look for those -- thanks!

[mific]

Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of the initial developers of 'mindfulness meditation' and he's made several audiobooks - there's a link to some here and you could probably get them from many other on-line suppliers.

ETA: scroll down on that link page - there's quite a bit of info there.

[laurashapiro]

Seconding this rec. Full Catastrophe Living is my bible.

[resonant]

Thanks -- "mindfulness" sounds like the kind of thing I'm looking for.

[medeine]

I think the guided meditations put out by Meditation Oasis are a great entry point, and they're available as free podcasts on iTunes.

[resonant]

Ooh, free is a good price!

[rosaw]

I started meditation through Innerhealthstudio.com which has a variety of auditory meditation guides. Mostly I needed to RELAX and I found her voice and approach soothing. YMMV, of course. Many of her guided meditations are available free on itunes or as mp3s from her site. The only book I have used is a Guide to Taoist Meditation and it was relentlessly visual and based on a candle, which my cat wanted to overturn -- didn't really help with the meditation and relaxation. Good luck!

[resonant]

I'll look for those. I have cats, too, so I can easily imagine the difficulties with the candle!

[maire]

I have no book, but I wrote down all the stuff I could figure out about the meditations that work for me and how to do them, a few years back.

They're here: http://diaspora.gen.nz/~maire/Meditation/index.html

If you want to chat online at some point that fitted both our time zones about what you're trying to achieve, let me know. I'd be happy to talk with you.

[resonant]

Wow - you really put some work into that. I appreciate it.

I'm looking for focus, really -- sort of the opposite of the web-surfing state of mind, if you can imagine that.

[maire]

The thing with meditation is that it really does train you into being able to choose what your brain does better, but it doesn't do it by giving you skills to force it to focus -- it trains you into being better at recognising what your brain is doing and letting go of or dealing with the things that distract you from what you'd like to be doing.

[maire]

One thing I really did find immensely helpful was having people to talk with before and after meditating while I was learning, so you really would be welcome to chat online with me if there is a time we can both schedule in once or twice. It would probably be even better, though, if you can find people to meditate with (we're pack animals, so doing something together, even meditation, is a surprisingly effective way to get one's subconscious on board with the activity). I know it sounds silly: sitting in a room together and doing something solo like meditating, but it does help.

As far as quieting the voices in the head, the naming meditation is the main one I find useful. Repeated use tend to make them go entirely away for me (which is what it's designed for).

As I say on the website, it's not so much long sustained periods of meditating that usually work, but regular meditation every day, even for only quarter of an hour, can make a huge difference to how in control one is of one's thoughts.

[rydra_wong]

I second the recs for Thich Nhat Hanh or Jon Kabat-Zinn, but Pema Chodron is my favourite teacher, and she's done a number of audio books, including "How To Meditate" (which is a recording of a five-session meditation class).

You can buy it from Amazon etc., or as a download from iTunes or the producers Sounds True.

[resonant]

Thanks!

[norah]

Or, if you just need to sleep? I have a yoga "meditation" audio file that I manually stripped all the "dippy bits" out of that helps me fall asleep every night...

[resonant]

I'm not really looking for sleep help so much as focus, concentration, stilling the voices in the mind.