Five Classic Meditations

By: Shinzen Young

Narrated by: Shinzen Young

Length: 1 hr

Publisher's summary

Meditation offers many benefits: increased self-discipline and concentration, new spiritual insights, compassion for other living beings. But there are so many forms of meditation, choosing one can be stressful! Examine five different meditations - Mantra, Vipassana, Loving Kindness, Karma Yoga, and Kabbalah - and decide which works best for you. Shinzen Young is an ordained Buddhist monk who's spent a lifetime studying Eastern cultures and is now the director of the Community Meditation Center of Los Angeles.

©1989 Shinzen Young (P)1989 Audio Renaissance Tapes, Inc. Cover Photograph by Anne Rippy, © TIB West

Worth your time.

I'm an experienced meditator and I found this worth my time. It helped me to consider how expansive karma yoga practice can become. This is a thumbnail sketch and bare beginners will require further instruction -- as the author notes. However, this is enough to get started and develop a practice for they who entirely lack experience. Further research and practice would remain necessary for beginners.

great for starting

I'm a noob. I found the meditation #1, 2 and 5 very useful. I will have to study 3 and 4, visspana and Mehta, from another source to understand the performance

Five How To's

This is a MUST HAVE for anyone who meditates or wants to! These are not guided meditations where the listener is passive to the speaker. The Honorable Shinzen Young presents FIVE METHODS of meditation which are easy to initially understand and which provide a lifetime of spiritual practice to those who will follow his guidelines. I was fortunate to receive this information first hand in a class with him in 1987 as part of my ministerial training. I have used his techniques, and have taught with his recording. DON'T MISS THIS ONE!

A little disappointed. Meditations were too short

Shinzen does some of my absolute favorite meditations. I was disappointed in these. If you do the math, it works out to about 20 minutes per meditation. It's closer to 15 minutes of explanation and 5 minutes of meditation if you're lucky. I usually find Shinzen to be very informative and I feel like there was a lot of potential info on each of these meditations left on the table. They must have been rushed or more likely limited by overall time for some reason. I don't know if this is gonna make any sense at all. But I view this book as more for informational purposes only as opposed to something you're gonna learn something from. This may help to point you in the direction of a meditation style you'd like to try. You won't find that actual meditation on here. He's capable of doing much much better.

Annoying background music

I always listen to the audio sample of each meditation book before I buy it, because I don't like gimmicky "mood" music playing in the background, as if I were at a spa for a facial. This one fooled me because the audio sample was from the lecture part of the book, which doesn't have the background music that plays during the guided meditations. It's a flute solo, like meditating with a whining mosquito in the room.