Buddhist Meditation for Beginners

By: Jack Kornfield

Narrated by: Jack Kornfield

Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Known for bringing Insight Meditation to the West and for his many best-selling books, including A Path With Heart, Jack Kornfield now offers a collection of his most popular teachings with Buddhist Mediation for Beginners. This specifically designed gift set includes four complete audio learning courses:

• Meditation for Beginners. A comprehensive introduction to the practice of Vispassana ("Insight") Meditation to cultivate a profound inner calm and awaken to the truth. Includes four complete meditations.
• The Beginner's Guide to Buddhism. Jack Kornfield illuminates Buddhism's most essential teachings, and how they make it possible to overcome challenging mental states, such as fear, confusion, and anger.
• Meditations of the Heart. Step-by-step meditations cast light on Buddhism's cornerstone, the Four Noble Truths. These meditations take less than 10 minutes each to practice, yet will take you to the heart of essential Buddhist teachings on opening to the truth, forgiveness, fearlessness, and more.
• The Beginner's Guide to Forgiveness. Drawing from his background in meditation and psychology, Jack Kornfield reveals the path to forgiveness and the way out of our pain.

©2006 Jack Kornfield, Ph.D.

Inspiring, instructive, nice story, but repetitive

Would you listen to Buddhist Meditation for Beginners again? Why?

Same story are repeated, throughout the 6 chapters. Still it is helping to understand concepts. Kornfield is interesting to listen to. He is also really funny. Good sense of humor. The format was not as expected, this can explain the repetivness.

Would you be willing to try another book from Jack Kornfield? Why or why not?

For sure

What about Jack Kornfield’s performance did you like?

Yes, i have a lot of respect for the man.

Repeat, repeat

This book is disappointing because it a jumble of lectures/seminars/talks, some of which are repeated almost verbatim!

The content is interesting and informative-once. But hearing the same anecdote three times becomes tedious.

I love this audio book!!!!!!!

Jack Kornfield's voice has a very soothing quality.
I highly recommend this book. I have been meditating for awhile on my own, but this book has brought me to a whole new level of calm, and quieted all the noise in my head. <3

Great starter

As a new Buddhist I found Jack's style of teaching phenomenal. He really made it easy to pick up and taught concepts, not monastical practices. Very easy to pop in the headphones and follow along on some of his guided meditations. Must read for anyone interested in meditation!

Very very good

I have listened to the book about then times in a row. I learned a lot from his book. And now I found out he is my friends cousin haha. they call him Jackie...too funny. Anyway, very very well down lecture.

A good way to get started meditating

This collection includes the following shorter works: Meditation for Beginners, The Beginner's Guide to Buddhism, The Beginner's Guide to Forgiveness, and Meditations of the Heart. Each of the six 'sessions' is a class from the author (two of the shorter items have two sessions each.) Each session contains meditation and Buddhist teaching. You will hear some of the same stories/jokes/topics more than once, though never within the same program. I found I didn't really mind, as I was intending to do the meditations multiple times each anyway.

I would have preferred it if the chapter divisions had allowed separate access to the meditations and teaching (since I anticipate doing the meditations more than once.)

There is some ambient room noise, but it is pretty minimal. I didn't find it distracting.

Overall, I as a person just getting familiar with meditation, I really got a lot out of it, and would recommend it to others.

Great intro for beginners

Great intro to Buddhist meditation with accessible & helpful information from a down to eart teacher.

one of the best

this book is one of the best i have found so far. give very good information on meditation

Some good stuff but audio needs editing

There are some helpful meditation pointers here although Jack Kornfield is a little too New Age for my taste.

Technically there is a problem with the editing of this audio book. Towards the end, whole sections are word-for-word, story-for-story, joke-for-joke repeats from earlier sections. Perhaps an error happened when the CD version was converted to digital download format.

Thoughtful wisdom, and sparkling charm

Kornfield delivers the essential ideas of Buddhism with delightful freshness. He teaches the principles and recounts stories with a voice that is at once soothing and captivating.
It's a good introduction to the ideology, delivered in a playful, honest tone that embodies it's spirit.

It's also an ideal book for going to sleep. There's no particular narrative to keep your attention. You can start it and stop it anywhere. And Kornfield's voice is like a lullaby.