Take Your Time: Finding Balance in a Hurried World

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Summary: Take Your Time--Quiet Your Mind and Enrich Your Life
Review: Read this book and you will discover some of the best ways to experience a more spiritual and selfless life. Sri Eknath Easwaran, the late founder of the Blue Mountain Center for Meditation in northern California, has developed an "eight-point program" of living, which includes daily meditation, reciting a mantram to bring balance to the mind, slowing down, putting others first, and other ways of enriching your life and the lives of those with whom you interact.

The author makes a point of emphasizing the distinction between slowing down and being lazy. There is a difference--we can slow our mind and still move quickly and efficiently. It's often when we try to do more than one thing at once that we run into problems with focus and concentration on the job at hand.

His suggestions, lively sense of humor and anecdotal style make this a highly readable and enjoyable book. I have found his suggestions to be quite effective in providing balance in my life and think that this small volume (and his other work) will be necessary reading in this day and age of road rage, school violence and unrestrained greed.

Other titles of Easwaran's are just as relevant--favorites of mine are Meditation (guide for learning to meditate), God Makes the Rivers to Flow (anthology of inspirational passages for meditation), The Compassionate Universe (ways of guarding the Earth for our children) and Conquest of Mind (expands on the eight-point program with new ways of considering it) and find them to be excellent as well. Another related title, bestseller The New Laurel's Kitchen Cookbook, was written by students and friends of Easwaran's, and originates from the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. (written by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders and Brian Ruppenthal.)