System 13

Title: The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness [amazon]
Author: Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Publisher: Harmony (March 6, 2007)
Pages: 288
Book Number: 7

What’s this 52 Books in 52 Weeks thing about?

This was quite a bit of a change from the last book I read, Awakening the Buddha Within. While both are concerned with Buddhism and meditation, whereas the first book took more of a religious take on the two topics, this one had more of a scientific bent to it, which I really appreciated. Furthermore, The Joy of Living focuses almost exclusively on meditation in Buddhism. In this book, there was no discussion of the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, etc.

It was a nice change of pace to read about the scientific view of meditation. A variety of studies have been done, and while there’s still a lot of work to be done, in short: it’s been found that practicing meditation causes more activity in the left prefrontal lobe of the brain, which has been associated with feelings of pleasure and calmness. It also causes less cortisol to be released into your body, while ramping up the amount of dopamine that is released.

The explanations on how to do the different types of meditations were quite good, the best I’ve read, in fact. The author went over a lot of the issues and doubts a practitioner is all but bound to encounter as he or she meditates, which I found even more helpful than the “how to” bits. His touching of these issues made me feel a bit better about problems I’ve been having with my meditation.

As mentioned by one of the starred reviews at amazon.com, the book really is a “fresh breath from the meditation room.” I have only scratched the surface of what’s available in the world of Buddhist books, but out of the ones I have read, this stands out as the most unique. While others I’ve read covered more about the “beliefs” of Buddhism, this one is by far the most practical one, guiding the new meditator in the right direction.

As a “wow factor” aside, a barrage of tests were run on the author of the book, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, to measure activity in his brain, via the use of a fMRI. Apparently during the tests, the scientists thought something was wrong with their equipment: in some areas of the subject’s brain, particularly areas that are associated with happiness, there was 800% more activity than normal. After checking things over, they found that nothing was wrong with the equipment. He has since been given the nickname of “the happiest man on earth.”