Zane Akers's Reviews > Everyday Zen: Love & Work

Picked up at a Friends of the Library book sale, pre-Covid, kind of on a lark. I let it sit on the bookshelf for a while but once I picked it up it got its hooks into me.

This is a collection of dharma talks on Zen by the American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck, each talk contained by two or three pages. It's not a book you want to read quickly; rather, you might read two or three talks and then stop to chew on them for a time. That, anyway, is the approach I took, and I found it fruitful, first, because attentively reading the talks uses up a good bit of mental energy, and second, because, like so much in Zen practice, this is stuff that is meant to be applied, so piecemealing it seems appropriate. It's a very good book, and though it does presuppose some knowledge of Zen practice (the talks are aimed at American students from the early 80s who had just a little experience of sitting zazen at Joko's center), it's not nearly enough to put off an interested reader. My only issues that kept me from giving "Everyday Zen" a 5-star rating were personal issues with the text that probably say more about me than the book: the talks are not as systematic in the presentation of information as I would like (because they're just individual talks), the discursive style is a little weird in print, though I can imagine Joko being pretty charismatic in person, and some traces of very un-Zen-like cynicism/grouchiness.

Caveats: I am not "really" a Zen practitioner--my experience with meditation comes from mindfulness for depression and anxiety treatment, as prescribed by Marsha Linehan's DBT training and my CBT therapist talking to me about John Kabat-Zinn. But this book has furthered my knowledge of certain phenomena of the mind that I encounter when I do mindfulness practice, in addition to deepening my resolve to continue with meditation as a tool to greater clarity and compassion in my life.