10% Happier

A lighthearted, fairly enjoyable introduction to meditation. Unfortunately, for an author who says he's trying to control his “ego” and “calm his monkey mind”, it all felt fairly narcissistic. This is book is more a book about Dan Harris, a memoir as it were, than a book about meditation as advertised.

I understand how Dan's approach could be helpful to some people. He is an American news anchor and, knowing nothing about TV news in the USA, I had never heard of him myself, but he may (at least according to Dan himself) be a fairly well-known figure there. He claims to be a meditation sceptic, someone who, perhaps, the general population could relate more to than Buddhist meditation teachers. However, I couldn't help feeling that his “scepticism” came more from a place of discomfort with feeling “uncool” and a distrust of spiritual people, than any scepticism over the actual practice itself. Indeed, as he points out later in the book himself, there isn't actually anything complicated about meditation, and surely it's pretty obvious if you spend regular time to yourself, questioning why you have got tied up in whirring thoughts and feelings, then you will start to feel better:

There's a reason why they call Buddhism “advanced common sense”; it's all about methodically confronting obvious-but-often-overlooked truths (everything changes, nothing fully satisfies) until something in you shifts.

Good read

I gave it four stars for the earnestness more than the depth of the insights. That being said, I found it to be overly autobiographical at times in ways that did not feel necessary. But overall a nice testimony. If it can help a stressed out New Yorker news anchor, it ought to help average joes.