Unplug: A Simple Guide to Meditation for Busy Skeptics and Modern Soul Seekers

Straight to the Point
I enjoyed Suze’s book Unplug. As someone who has practiced meditation on and off now for almost 5 years, I resonated with the journey that led Suze to meditation because it felt similar to my own. I spent 20+ years operating on stress hormones, coffee and a self imposed requirement that I be on my “A” game at all times. Although this was an effective way to build a successful career because it feeds into the American ethos involving the payoff associated with “hard work”, I was burned out and suffering from crushing anxiety after the birth of my daughter.Suze’s book does an amazing job of distilling the mountain of information surrounding meditation into the critical tenets of the practice in a secular, easy to explain way that has broad appeal. Some of the more surprising things I learned when reading the book was about the wealth of scientific research to support the practice. One of the most compelling things I learned reading Unplug is how a regular meditation practice can literally change the physical structure of your brain; increasing gray matter located in the frontal cortex and shrinking gray matter in the amygdala or emotional center of the brain.In another chapter, Suze quotes Laurie Cousins who notes that meditation has been shown to create resilience. I think many times in our daily lives we have a desire to do something at a certain level based on expectations we place on ourselves. At times, we are just unable to operate at that level. The frustration associated with this gap can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms designed to fool us into thinking we are creating additional time/space when really we are sinking further into overwhelm and punishing our bodies in the name of performance (see coffee, long hours and exhaustion above). However, meditation creates resilience and resilience increases performance in a healthy way that can expand our joy and change how we perceive the situation at hand.Thank you, Suze for writing this book and providing an easy to read guide on how to incorporate meditation into your daily routine – it’s a great read designed for the healthy skeptic in all of us.

Read this book from cover to cover in 4 days, reading it puts you in a meditative state
After reading Unplug: A Simple Guide to Meditation for Busy Skeptics and Modern Soul Seekers, the amount of information I’ve consumed is immeasurable. And the consumption rate was unlike anything I’ve ever consumed before. It was so mind-blowingly fascinating, I can openly admit, I read it it twice. There are too many things I’ve acquired from the readings that I’m drawn to, I’ve narrowed it down to the one’s that are the most important to me. Starting with an appreciation for the thoughts that creep back in during meditation, as opposed to feeling defeated when they do come in, I can literally feel the gap, and the separation from the thoughts, and identifying them, labeling them and filing them away, or like the davidji analogy says, throwing them in the trash icon on your computer screen. Furthermore, the scientific evidence found in Sara Lazars study, is astonishing, with the ability for the stillness, presentness, awareness, and silence during meditation to change ones brain chemistry by increasing grey matter in the prefrontal cortex and decreasing it in the amygdala, given that it is done as a daily practice. Lastly, “bad habits and addictions get left behind,” I resonate with this tremendously, since I’ve been meditating daily, I smoke substantially less cigarettes and am effortlessly more mindful about my eating. The benefits don’t take long before you can feel them, my anxious heart feels like it has a warm blanket giving it a hug, that is the magic.

Me encanto, es una guia practica para cualquier persona que quiere meditar. Hace que cualquier persona aun y con la vida más ocupada quiera tener el tiempo de desconectarse.

This is a revolutionary book teaching a revolutionary way of meditating, very doable, with a minimalistic and contemporary approach. Unplug world is a case history, definitely. Suze is the founder of the global Drop-in Meditation system. I’m impressed by the way Suze renamed some milestones of the meditation world, changing its slang, making it so simple and appealing, such as “mini-mental tornadoes” instead of “monkey mind”, “gap” instead of “awareness”, and, last but not least, “unplug” instead of “meditating”.This book gave me a lot of insights, anyway, my favorite is: meditation everywhere, literally. I always thought that having a meditation corner in my house was crucial for my practice. Anyways now I know that I can meditate everywhere, anytime, and without closing my eyes. This is life-changing. Like the STOP or the Starbucks meditations, a couple of minutes of real meditation that I can integrate in my days, far from the silence of my meditation corner, candles and palo santo. I can meditate in a cave on a mountain, and also like a contemporary woman while having my banana bread at Starbucks on the 5th.