Book review

The Best Meditations on the Planet by Dr. Martin Hart and Skye Alexander Fair Winds Press, 2011, 239 pages, $21.99 ISBN: 978-1-59233-459-9 There is much to be said about a book that, immediately on opening it, makes you want to drop everything and start meditating. Wow! With the sheer number of accessible options (100+ techniques), I’m sure everyone who picks up The Best Meditations on the Planet will find motivation. At a time when stress-related problems cost businesses hundreds of billions of dollars per year, the simple power of meditation now finds a welcome place in the mainstream. If you are someone who does not meditate, perhaps it’s due to one of the three most common obstacles: falling asleep during practice, having too many thoughts, or procrastination. Best Meditations on the Planet provides tips for dealing with these challenges plus a quick test to help learn visualization. Soon you’ll be turning the page to begin meditation. While reading, I was keen to try some of the techniques listed—but with so many temptations, where to begin? Thankfully, the meditations are grouped into categories to satisfy all areas of our lives that might need attention. In addition to those for relaxation and stress relief, there are meditations for physical and emotional healing, health, rejuvenation, longevity, improved concentration, memory, and mental clarity. The book stays clear of doctrine and offers simple, bare-bones techniques. Each method is about one page in length and comes with a short introduction about how and where it was developed and how to best benefit. There are also meditations for enhancing success and performance, improving relationships, increasing creativity and problem solving, attracting what we want in life, and healing the planet. Since The Best Meditations on the Planet arrived, I’ve been motivated to use techniques ranging from the meditation for lowering blood pressure to a practice that helps silence judgment for reducing relationship stress. Truth is, just reading through some meditations brought renewed awareness and feelings of well-being. This was an unexpected bonus. The book really does have something to offer all readers, including a surprising suggestion for “An Enjoyable Way to Stop Smoking”—a meditation that may well reduce the number of cigarettes you smoke and may even stop the habit altogether. It’s an unconventional, but seriously promising, technique.