A book on meditation practice
A book on meditation practice
The good ones give you something to do early, rather than three hundred pages of preamble.
Tantra & Meditation
Meditation Books
The reading behind the practice.
A brief guide to reading in this area, where the quality range is extremely wide.
What a good book on this subject does
It gives you an actual practice to do, early, rather than three hundred pages of preamble. It is honest that progress is slow and unspectacular. It does not promise transformation, wealth or the disappearance of difficulty. And it distinguishes clearly between what the tradition holds and what has been demonstrated.
The two broad streams
Traditional texts and commentaries - the Yoga Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist and tantric material - which carry the depth and the context, and generally need a good commentary to be usable.
Secular and clinical writing - mindfulness-based stress reduction and the research literature - which is thinner philosophically and much clearer about evidence.
Reading one of each is more useful than reading five of either.
No amount of reading substitutes for sitting down. Ten minutes of practice teaches more than a chapter about practice.
The warning sign
Be cautious with any book, teacher or organisation that requires large payments for advanced access, discourages you from questioning, or isolates you from people outside it. Contemplative traditions are valuable; a few organisations built around them are not, and the pattern above is the reliable signal.
Products
Worth having
Picked to go with what you have just read. We only list ordinary, widely available things.