Overview
How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind was first published in 2013 by Sounds True.
Written by Pema Chödrön, one of the most widely read Western teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, the book presents what she considers the essential foundations of a lifelong meditation practice. It is structured as a practical guide rather than a philosophical treatise, covering seated meditation technique, working with thoughts and emotions, and developing a sustainable relationship with one’s own mind.
The tone is accessible and direct, aimed at both complete beginners and those who have struggled to establish a consistent practice. The book draws on Chödrön’s decades of teaching experience within the Shambhala Buddhist tradition.
Book Review
I had read perhaps a dozen meditation books before this one. Maybe more — I stopped counting. Each of them explained the theory clearly enough. Sit. Breathe. Notice your thoughts. Let them pass. Return to the breath. The instructions were always the same, and I always understood them. Understanding was never the problem.
The problem was sitting down and actually doing it.
I can’t say exactly what was different about Pema Chödrön’s How to Meditate. That’s a slightly unsatisfying thing to admit in a review, but it’s the honest answer. Something in the way she writes about the mind — not as something to be managed or defeated, but as something to be befriended — shifted something in me. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind, and that phrase, which could easily sound like a self-help cliché, turns out to be precisely what the book delivers.
What Chödrön does, and does well, is refuse to make meditation aspirational. There is no promise of transformation, no gradient of enlightenment to climb. Instead, she is remarkably frank about what meditation actually feels like, especially at the beginning. You sit down. Your mind immediately produces a shopping list, a grievance from three years ago, and a low-grade anxiety about something you said at a dinner party. You are supposed to be observing all of this with equanimity. You are, in fact, annoyed.
She calls this “the monkey mind,” and rather than suggesting you suppress it or wait for it to pass, she essentially says: this is the practice. The thoughts are not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. They are the material you’re working with. That reframe — so simple, so obvious once stated — is what finally made sitting still feel possible rather than an elaborate form of failure. (I wrote about my struggles with the monkey mind in this blog post.)
The book is structured as a progression: it begins with the basics of posture and breath, moves into working with thoughts and emotions, and gradually introduces more nuanced concepts such as compassion and openness. Chödrön’s background as a Tibetan Buddhist nun is present throughout, but she wears her tradition lightly. The terminology remains accessible, and the spiritual dimension never overwhelms the practical. This is a book you can use.
I do think the later chapters are somewhat less grounded than the first half. As the book moves from technique into broader ideas about the quality of awareness, it occasionally becomes more abstract in ways that felt harder to bring directly into practice. The early sections have an almost instructional clarity — sit here, do this, expect that — that gives way to something slightly more elusive. That’s not entirely a criticism; some of those concepts may simply require more time to settle. But the shift is noticeable.
What stayed with me most, though, was the gentleness of the approach. Not gentleness in the sense of being soft or avoiding difficulty — Chödrön is clear-eyed about how uncomfortable it can be to sit with one’s own mind — but in the sense of not making the whole enterprise feel like something you could fail at. And that, for me at least, was what all those previous books had inadvertently done. They had turned meditation into a test. This one turned it into a practice. The difference, it turns out, is enormous.
I mentioned this book briefly in a post about the Medito app — which I’d been using as a companion to my morning practice — but it deserved more than a paragraph. If you’ve tried meditation before and found yourself drifting away after a week, or if you’ve read the instructions a hundred times and still feel like you’re missing something, this is the book I’d hand you.
Pema Chödrön (b. 1936) is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun and one of the most widely read Western teachers of Tibetan Buddhism. She is the author of numerous books, including When Things Fall Apart and The Places That Scare You, and served as a senior teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, Canada.
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