Book Review: "Wherever You Go, There You Are", by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Over the past two weeks, I've been reading about meditation and mindfulness practice. I had planned to discuss this topic in parallel with my progress on "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy", but I fell all the way back down and I hadn't had a chance to devote time to climb back up.

This book is interesting because there are no chapters. It's a series of mini-lectures that weave into one story. The book itself does feel like one large session of mindfulness practice, starting from the decision to do it all the way to the final breath.

Mindfulness is hard. I've found middling improvement since my days at Duke, if I had any at all. If anything, my practices might have declined in quality. I think too much during them. I don't really concentrate, despite my attempts to. Yet I don't think this is really indicative of anything; during one session, the voice-over quoted a 90-year-old man, who when asked why he kept meditating, replied "I think after all this time, I'm beginning to see some improvement". He's probably just being humble, but this is likely going to be a long journey.

If you do have questions about mindfulness, this is a pretty good read. I also recommend Calm, an app you can find in the App Store, that has daily meditation practice. I saw Adrian Rosebrock of PyImageSearch recommend it in one of his blog posts, and it's been worth the money.