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darumachan's review against another edition
slow-paced
1.5
I picked this up because I use the Calm meditation app, and Brach's meditations have been some of my favorites.
The good: Each chapter has a key term or concept that is directly relevant to a meditation practice, and likewise, each chapter concludes with one or more suggestions for guided meditation. I definitely noticed some overlap with Brach's meditations on Calm, as well as the meaningful influence she has had as a teacher and mentor on Tamara Levitt. But in the end, the chapters go into each topic in more depth and add to the meditations, so the app and the book do work together well.
The frustrating: The book was published in 2003, and has not aged well. Brach relates many (MANY) of her own personal experiences throughout, and I've come away with a fairly ambivalent image of her as self-congratulatory, white-savior-ish, heedless of cultural appropriation, thoughtlessly generalizing "Asian" as a monolithic culture, and entirely unaware of (or unconcerned with) the issues of systemic racism that any BIPOC living in the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century might face. I preface all of that with the original publication date because I recognize that these social issues were not as forefront in the minds of most white writers in the 90s and early 2000s. But... it has been 2 decades, and if there is truly as much continuity between the teachings in the book and the core principles that she continues to teach in contemporary media (apps and podcasts, etc.), then it is worth her time to come back and create a 2nd edition of this book.
**Also, a note about the audiobook-- it is straight up a copy from the original made for a CD -- to the extent that halfway through the book, there is a break that says "This is the end of the CD but not the audiobook; continue on the next disc." In fact, let's just call this technical goof a metaphor for the problems with her tone and social awareness -- it's just coming to us directly from the previous century with no updates whatsoever.
The bad: Besides the topical introduction and concluding meditation, each chapter was little more than a series of anecdotes that were intended to illustrate the problem and how she solves them. There was the occasional lesson-tale from the teachings of the Buddha, which have been clearly used as illustrative anecdotes for millennia, and those were the most useful and least problematic. Besides that, I did not find anything really useful in these anecdotes and in many cases, they did not ring even remotely true. First, there are her own personal life experiences, and the first few seemed genuine in their rawness, but after a while the way she characterized her "learning self" against her "accepting self" started to feel exaggerated and unbelievable (either that or she really does frequently shift seamlessly from "screaming" at her family members to connecting deeply with her colleagues at meditation retreats? I'm not sure which is more troubling). Then, there are the examples of her friends and clients, and fine, this is standard fare for books like this, but their situations were so extreme, Brach's advice so profound and moving, and their resulting transformations so sudden and life-altering, that it all rang false, or at least highly simplified and condescending both to the subject and to the reader. Most egregious were the anonymous and generic "real-life stories" -- the priest comforting a woman on her deathbed -- or literally her describing the equivalent of a New Yorker cartoon in order to illustrate a point, but doing so as if it were a story that had actually happened -- essentially early versions of the clunky internet memes that are trying so hard to teach a lesson but are completely and transparently fabricated.
The downright problematic: More ranting about the anecdotes, but this is important -- every time I picked up the book, I came away feeling quite triggered because of how casually she would use horrific and extreme situations to embellish these ridiculous anecdotes. In her personal life stories: the miscarriage of her first pregnancy; mental and emotional abuse in a cult-like religious group; growing up with abusive and addicted parents; losing a beloved pet to terminal illness. The anecdotes about her friends and clients involved trauma like sexual abuse of a minor, other types of physical and emotional abuse by parents and/or partners, severe cases of religious bigotry, eating disorders, grieving, illness, and addiction. Again, the meme-type anecdotes are the worst because she blithely embellishes them with extreme and sensationally traumatic details like "holocaust survivors" and "heroine addicts" and people wasting away with any number of severe and terminal illnesses (there were at least two instances of "emaciated faces" looking up from hospital beds).
Finally, the language she uses is just careless and problematic -- casual racism, cultural appropriation, fatphobia, addiction, and food restriction. Again, probably more an issue of the book not aging well, but all the more reason to update it as a new edition that reflects the actual concerns and values of our society.
The good: Each chapter has a key term or concept that is directly relevant to a meditation practice, and likewise, each chapter concludes with one or more suggestions for guided meditation. I definitely noticed some overlap with Brach's meditations on Calm, as well as the meaningful influence she has had as a teacher and mentor on Tamara Levitt. But in the end, the chapters go into each topic in more depth and add to the meditations, so the app and the book do work together well.
The frustrating: The book was published in 2003, and has not aged well. Brach relates many (MANY) of her own personal experiences throughout, and I've come away with a fairly ambivalent image of her as self-congratulatory, white-savior-ish, heedless of cultural appropriation, thoughtlessly generalizing "Asian" as a monolithic culture, and entirely unaware of (or unconcerned with) the issues of systemic racism that any BIPOC living in the U.S. at the turn of the 21st century might face. I preface all of that with the original publication date because I recognize that these social issues were not as forefront in the minds of most white writers in the 90s and early 2000s. But... it has been 2 decades, and if there is truly as much continuity between the teachings in the book and the core principles that she continues to teach in contemporary media (apps and podcasts, etc.), then it is worth her time to come back and create a 2nd edition of this book.
**Also, a note about the audiobook-- it is straight up a copy from the original made for a CD -- to the extent that halfway through the book, there is a break that says "This is the end of the CD but not the audiobook; continue on the next disc." In fact, let's just call this technical goof a metaphor for the problems with her tone and social awareness -- it's just coming to us directly from the previous century with no updates whatsoever.
The bad: Besides the topical introduction and concluding meditation, each chapter was little more than a series of anecdotes that were intended to illustrate the problem and how she solves them. There was the occasional lesson-tale from the teachings of the Buddha, which have been clearly used as illustrative anecdotes for millennia, and those were the most useful and least problematic. Besides that, I did not find anything really useful in these anecdotes and in many cases, they did not ring even remotely true. First, there are her own personal life experiences, and the first few seemed genuine in their rawness, but after a while the way she characterized her "learning self" against her "accepting self" started to feel exaggerated and unbelievable (either that or she really does frequently shift seamlessly from "screaming" at her family members to connecting deeply with her colleagues at meditation retreats? I'm not sure which is more troubling). Then, there are the examples of her friends and clients, and fine, this is standard fare for books like this, but their situations were so extreme, Brach's advice so profound and moving, and their resulting transformations so sudden and life-altering, that it all rang false, or at least highly simplified and condescending both to the subject and to the reader. Most egregious were the anonymous and generic "real-life stories" -- the priest comforting a woman on her deathbed -- or literally her describing the equivalent of a New Yorker cartoon in order to illustrate a point, but doing so as if it were a story that had actually happened -- essentially early versions of the clunky internet memes that are trying so hard to teach a lesson but are completely and transparently fabricated.
The downright problematic: More ranting about the anecdotes, but this is important -- every time I picked up the book, I came away feeling quite triggered because of how casually she would use horrific and extreme situations to embellish these ridiculous anecdotes. In her personal life stories: the miscarriage of her first pregnancy; mental and emotional abuse in a cult-like religious group; growing up with abusive and addicted parents; losing a beloved pet to terminal illness. The anecdotes about her friends and clients involved trauma like sexual abuse of a minor, other types of physical and emotional abuse by parents and/or partners, severe cases of religious bigotry, eating disorders, grieving, illness, and addiction. Again, the meme-type anecdotes are the worst because she blithely embellishes them with extreme and sensationally traumatic details like "holocaust survivors" and "heroine addicts" and people wasting away with any number of severe and terminal illnesses (there were at least two instances of "emaciated faces" looking up from hospital beds).
Finally, the language she uses is just careless and problematic -- casual racism, cultural appropriation, fatphobia, addiction, and food restriction. Again, probably more an issue of the book not aging well, but all the more reason to update it as a new edition that reflects the actual concerns and values of our society.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Cultural appropriation, Cancer, Toxic relationship, Medical trauma, Grief, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Sexual violence, Miscarriage, Fatphobia, Death of parent, Colonisation, Bullying, Terminal illness, Eating disorder, Alcoholism, Addiction, Ableism, Animal death, Drug abuse, Suicide attempt, Abandonment, Suicidal thoughts, Sexual assault, Rape, Medical content, Infertility, Religious bigotry, Drug use, Chronic illness, Body shaming, and Emotional abuse
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