Monthly Book Review – Ramesh Monocha – Silence Your Mind

Meditation has been something that's interested me since my teens years, with all the well known benefits to one's health and well being that a regular meditation practice is supposed to bring, who wouldn't be at least a little interested?

That being said, I've still not really found a meditation practice that I feel is “for me” and really suites me as a person. So I find myself on a continuing journey to discover the right style for me. After all, there are probably as many different forms of meditation as there are species of trees, so the journey to find the right one can be a long process.

Ramesh Monocha's book Silence Your Mind is all about a version of meditation known as Sahaja Yoga. He discusses this form of meditation and how it's apparently one of the best known ways to reach a state of “mental silence” as he refers to it. Let's look at what we'll be going into in more detail regarding this book review, you can skip to any particular section that interests you if you don't to read it straight through.

An Introduction To Sahaja Yoga

Sahaja Yoga is the name of both the “religious movement”, and the meditation technique that this particular group focus on. It's been around since around 1970, and was founded by Nirmala Srivastava. It's a Hindu based style of meditation practice and involves silently focusing on certain affirmations in tandem with using certain hand positions around various areas of the body. I guess in this way it's a little similar to the recently very popular Emotional Freedom Technique, which has taken off in the past 10-15 years as a therapeutic tool (When it comes to EFT, I still have my doubts about its effectiveness, but it apparently works for many).

Whilst there's a lot more about the Sahaja Yoga “following” that we could go into, the book primarily focuses on the technique and the benefits of using it, and is quite scientific in its approach, as we'll discuss in more detail further on in the review.

Book Layout 

Here's an image of the Table of Contents for this book. (I had to use my own camera, as it wasn't possible to get a screenshot in this case unfortunately).

IMAGE OF CONTENTS PAGES HERE

A Quick Discussion On Sahaja Yoga And Mental Silence?

According to Monocha, mental silence is a state in which thoughts go silent, and one is more tuned into a state similar to flow, of which much has been written in the past 10 years or so, and was first popularised by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book of the same name (Flow AMZ link). Monocha states throughout this book that from their research it appears that Sahaja meditation is more successful at producing this state of mental silence than other types of meditation, and the research and controlled trials that him and his associates ran over the years confirms this.

Probably the easiest way to describe the state of mental flow to someone, would be to say that it's the gap in between thoughts. Monocha says that this gap can be extended and we can learn to stay longer in this state of “mental silence” over time and with steady practice.

What I Personally Got From This Book

I like the fact that this is one of the few books on meditation that I've read that actually quantifies the claims being made for meditation with some real, robust and seemingly very valid scientific studies. Monocha references multiple studies in this book in order to validate his claim that Sahaja yoga is a more direct way to increase “flow” and the state of mental silence, and therefore gain the benefits that comes from doing so. The studies are on the website, and they can be found here.

As of reading this, I've not yet consistently been practising the techniques outlined in the book for achieving Mental Silence, and so cannot verify whether the technique is “all that”. I do plan to, and will update this section with my experiences, along with possibly writing another article on the method itself and my findings personally. However at the time of writing there's simply been too much going on.

Useful Related Resources

Here's a list of useful related resources for Silence Your Mind:

• The Official book website
• An objective description of Sahaja Yoga (Wikipedia)
• Silence Your Mind (Amazon page)

Final Thoughts

I think overall this is a great book and well worth the read, and especially if you're someone like me who's still looking for the right meditation. I find the scientific references and stories about how this type of meditation has helped people personally very valuable, and it adds a lot of credibility to the book overall.

Another thing to mention, more related to the actual style of mediation that Sahaja yoga emcompasses, is that I think this is relatively easy style to practice (from my limited experience allbeit, thus far) compared with other types of meditation that I've attempted in the past, like Vipassana meditation for example, which I found for lack of a better word, gruelling.

Lastly, this is also a relatively quick book to read, it's not hard to read this in a few days once you get into it, and whilst there's references to scientific studies around Sahaja yoga, this book is in no means difficult to read, or too “heady” for the lay reader.

Discussion On Silence Your Mind and Dr Monocha's Material

I've love to hear from you if you've either read this book, are thinking of reading it, or know anything about Sahaja Yoga itself. This website is meant to encourage discussion, and so please leave a comment below if you've any comments at all about this book/approach to meditation and your experiences with it.