Customer Reviews

Pocket Guide to Meditation (Crossing Press Pocket Guides)

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This book provides clear guidance on your path to greater serenity through meditation and spirituality. It provides concise descriptions of spirituality, meditation, stages of soul development, Eight steps towards awakening, specific exercises to start your practice and much more. Definitely a book you should read if you want greater clarity and peace in your life. Highly recommended.

A wonderful guide to explore the classical practices of meditation in a very clear and understandable manner.A great resource for the beginner and advanced practioner alike.I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is on the journey to integrate more pause,reflection and spirituality into their life.

"What a great Pocket Guide To Meditation. This book should be given to everybody who enters a doctor's office, so they hopefully won't need to come back. The HMO's should underwrite this project; it would save them money, which is their bottom line." Larry Dossey

"Alan has taken a big subject and made it friendly, interesting, and useful for everyone. This is the perfect little book to carry around in purse or pocket for quick moments of inspiration." Lilias Folan, Host of PBS series, Lilias!

I came to meditation through yoga. I have a strong inclination to be judgmental, and I wanted to learn how to let go of that, or at least how to live with it more sanely. I've been practicing meditation for a couple of years; during good periods, I sit for 15-20 minutes a day, and during not so good periods I sit only a few times a week. I have used a technique I heard Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun, talk about: watching thoughts come, acknowledging them, and letting them go without judgment of whether they're good or bad.

Lately, I've been going through a not so good period and have found it hard to sit still. The reason I bought Pocket Guide to Meditation was to reignite my practice, to re-motivate myself to practice every day. Well, I'm sorry to say this book has not helped me at all with that. It alienated and discouraged me.

Two examples: first, this book defines meditation as a way to be more spiritual, to get in touch and merge with the divine. It is very inclusive in what it considers divine, and that's admirable. But I don't believe in the divine. I don't believe in a world beyond this one. I acknowledge that all living things are connected in a profound way, but I disagree with this book's argument that this connection has something supernatural about it. The book gives an alternate definition of meditation, as a means of achieving happiness. I think this creates an unreasonable and ultimately destructive expectation.

Second, this book insists that meditation, in order to be helpful, has to be practiced three hours a day, not necessarily all at once, it's true, but several sessions amounting more or less to that. That is so discouraging to me! I have trouble sitting 15 minutes, sometimes; and to think that I'm so far away from the "ideal" three hours makes me want not to sit at all. What's the point of sitting just for a very short interval, then? I want to believe that there is a point, though. I want to believe that baby steps are more useful to take than really big, unrealistic ones.

There are some helpful instructions in this book: on the importance of posture, and on trying to set aside, in your house, a place dedicated only to meditation. Aside from these, though, I can't find anything positive to say about this book.

Mr. Pritz has provided a beautiful book for those interested in pursuing their spirituality. His writing is clear and full of insights, based upon years of personal experience. This book is appropriate to those of all religious faiths. This book is a must for all of those wanting to learn more about meditation and how to develop their own personal spiritual practice.