I’ve long being intrigued by meditation, but I never tried it myself. I’ve heard it was useful to calm you down. It was said it provided some health benefits etc. What caused me at last to change my mind about it was the talk that Lex Fridman had with the historian Yuval Noah Harari in which Yuval mentioned that he meditated for two hours a day and had a one month long meditation retreat once a year.

One additional motivating factor for me was that I, as I think most of the people on Earth, can’t get no satisfaction as The Rolling Stones famously sang. And indeed it’s the case, if you think carefully about it. In this information age we are bombarded with lots of things that cause us to want to buy that thing or the other. Subscribe to that service, like Netflix or the other etc. It seems like a never ending story of addiction that gets worse from day to day. Then, what can be a way out of it you may ask? Well, one of them, apparently, is meditation.

It turns out that thinking about meditation as a tool to relax and get calm is not exactly what meditation is meant for. Though, it definitely can make you calm it’s a by product of meditation, but not the main purpose of doing it.

Since Yuval mentioned meditation in that talk I googled the best books on meditation and got a list of a number of books. Among them were two books in particular that resonated with me.

The first one was 10% Happier book by former ABC News journalist Dan Harris in which he described his path to meditation and how it played out for him. I bought a used copy of that book and found it interesting and useful.

The second book in that search list was the How To Meditate book by Pema Chodron a Tibetan Buddhist nun who is a teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, Canada. That book was unlike the 10% Happier and it had much more profound impact on me in comparison to Dan Harris’ book. If you’ll read it and it will resonate with you, then I think you’ll understand what I mean by profound impact.

Since then, I read a number of other books that Pema Chodron wrote and each one of them is a treasure chest of wisdom and provides practical advice on how to mediate, what meditation is all about and what meditation can do for you and for all humanity if we practice it wholeheartedly.