The Art of Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard

• Print Length: 308 pages
• Atlantic Books (September 1, 2011)
• Kindle Edition
• Read from December 17, 2013 to January 15, 2014

— This is a curious book, because it mingles scientific approaches with Buddhism philosophy. It was actually my first contact with a book related to Buddhism. My main reason to pick up this book was that it brings some findings on the effects of meditation in our brains.

The chapters about meditation and inner peace were enlightening to me. This book has made me start a persistent meditation routine. I was amazed at how the practice of meditation can result in significant changes on monks’ brains who meditate for long periods daily. It brings information about the methods of meditation and also the fundamentals of Buddhism. There are examples of these fundamentals being used in cognitive therapies as a way to deal with anger:

“Buddhism takes a different position. It stresses enhanced awareness of the formation of thoughts, which allows for the immediate identification of an angry thought as it arises, and for its deconstruction the next instant, the way a picture drawn on the surface of water melts away as it is sketched. We repeat the same process with the next thought, and so on. So we need to work on our thoughts one by one, analyzing the way they emerge and evolve and gradually learning to free them as they arise, defusing the chain reactions that allow thoughts to invade the mind. This method, which presents some similarities with those developed in the West in the cognitive therapies of Aaron Beck and the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program of Jon Kabat-Zinn, is essentially centered on the present moment.”