Calm: No Matter What by Paul Wilson

Calm: No Matter What Reviews

• 
  Sarah Goedhart

  Listened to the audiobook which was a good short listen for an introduction into a meditation practise for everyday life. Loved the overall message of how simple meditation can be to implement & it’s huge benefits. But there was a lot of repetition & very much aimed towards the middle class workforce. However still learnt & taking away a lot from this!
• 
  Gisela

  I keep feeling that I should like or appreciate Paul Wilson's books more than I do. I love *what* he is saying but I sometimes feel his tone is a bit patronising and there seemed to be a fair bit of unnecessary repetition in this book. If you want an introduction to meditation, mindfulness and its benefits, David Michie's "Why Mindfulness is Better Than Chocolate" is a much better and more interesting read.
• 
  Nicki Kendall

  A guide to help restore your sense of calm no matter what life is throwing at you. This book contains some doable and helpful suggestions to help us all achieve a calmer mind and a true sense of inner peace no matter who or what tries to ruffle you. So much more than just a meditation guide. #calm #paulwilson #tea_sipping_bookworm #bookstagram #goodreads #amazon#kindle #litsy
• 
  Nora

  This is written for business people. I listened to the auditory book. The reader was very good. I feel it did not deliver on its promise. 3/4 is more or less why you want to stay calm. Why science supports this. I'm already sold. Just tell me how to get there. Maybe biz people are less likely to understand they don't want to alienate people but I rather doubt it.
• 
  Joseph

  Take home message:
  Focus your thoughts on the present. Let nothing rob your peace.
• 
  AJ

  Think in the present to stay calm not in the past or future. hmm ok
  
  meditation (which I think is another way of saying stay in the present not past or future)
  
  Meditation is fighting with your brain
  
  a good chunk of this book seems to be the author saying that here is a thing and we will talk about it later. I think a lot of that could have been rephrased or cut out all together.
  
  
• 
  Realini

  Calm: No Matter What by Paul Wilson
  Oh, what a lovely concept- if only I could apply it
  
  
  The author knows about equanimity, tranquility and calmness.
  He has sold over ten million books to show for it, albeit Dan Brown has sold much more and I am not convinced he is such an expert on codes and secrets.
  
  The big secret is to concentrate on the present.
  Regrets, remorse, negative thoughts originate from the past
  Worries belong to the future, with the various scenarios of what if.
  
  We need to enjoy the moment, as the only time we really live in.
  We don’t live in the past and certainly not in the future:
  
  - Carpe diem
  
  One way to achieve Calm No Matter What is through meditation.
  And research has proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that those who meditate have a better balanced and healthier life.
  
  Two experiments come to mind.
  
  In one, researchers have tried to see what the effect of a very loud, shotgun sound is on various people:
  
  - When human beings are startled, we raise our shoulders and close our eyes. Our blood vessels constrict, and our pulse quickens. The startle response is a well-documented phenomenon; one of the first studies to examine it was published in 1939, and there’s even an entire book on the subject.
  
  - An involuntary reaction to, say, a very loud noise is thought to be deeply primitive and impossible to overcome. Try to stifle it, and you will almost certainly fail.
  - Unless, perhaps, you’re a Buddhist monk with 40 years of experience in meditation like Matthieu Ricard. Born in France, a son of the philosopher Jean-François Revel, Ricard has a doctorate in cell genetics and serves as the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama.
  
  - Researchers decided to see if Ricard, with decades of meditation under his belt, would respond differently to being startled than those of us with decades of being generally anxious under our belts. They put him in a room and asked him to meditate. Then the researchers played a 115-decibel “burst of white noise,” equivalent in volume to a gunshot. It was loud.
  
  This is from the blog:
  http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator...
  And you can read more about it there.
  Actually, on that blog there is a slightly different version from the one I heard Professor Tal Ben-Shahar presenting:
  
  - Matthieu Ricard had almost no reaction, no muscle moved as opposed to other participants
  - And among others that were tested we find policemen, Secret Service agents who are used with gun fire
  - And the policemen and agents have reacted much more strongly than the famous Matthieu Ricard
  
  The second and last experiment I would like to mention in order to prove the case that mediation has a tremendous effect on the brain refers to placing meditators, Buddhist monks in machines that show the activity of their brain.
  The same Matthieu Ricard mentions these studies in his book- that I am currently reading- Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill:
  
  - Placed under MRI brain imaging, Tibetan monks have shown to experience far greater happiness and are more emotionally balanced than any 'average' person. Scientists can gauge happiness by the amount of activity in the frontal lobe related to positive emotions. (There's also a section of the brain related to negative emotion, and criticism, which remains relatively dormant.)
  
  You can find more about this at:
  http://www.theatlantic.com/health/arc...
  
  And an extract from there is:
  
  - Davidson and his colleagues ran a simple experiment on eight “long-term Buddhist practitioners” whose had spent an average of 34,000 hours in mental training. They asked the subjects to alternate between a meditative state and a neutral state in order to observe how the brain changed. One subject described his meditation as generating “a state in which love and compassion permeate the whole mind, with no other consideration, reasoning, or discursive thoughts.”
  
  - “When we did this, we noticed something remarkable,” Davidson said. “What we see are these high-amplitude gamma-oscillations in the brain, which are indicative of plasticity”—meaning that those brains were more capable of change, for example, in theory, of becoming more resilient
  
• 
  Any Length

  This could all have been reduced to the three minutes it took for Paul Wilson to explain how the method works and he could have left it to those who want what he has to offer to pick it up. Instead he made a whole book out of it and probably more money than the idea was worth.
  It all comes down to meditate, no matter what.
• 
  Choopie

  Stick to The Quiet.