5 Best Meditation Books for Beginners
If you want to start meditating at home and you have no experience, there are plenty of resources to help you. While you can use many guided meditations to get started and evolve your practice from there, you may want to learn more about the practice, benefits, and history of meditation. These meditation books for beginners are the perfect introduction.
There are many books available written by scientists, doctors, and meditation teachers covering topics from how to meditate, to what is mindfulness, and the health benefits of meditation. By reading these books for newbies, you can learn meditation techniques, different exercises to use in your own meditation practice, and the science behind the benefits you will experience when you meditate daily.
In this article, we provide a list of 5 books great for those who are new to meditation. They’ll help you learn techniques, correct posture, and different types of meditation.
Meditation Books for Beginners
Meditation for Beginners
This book by Jack Kornfield covers all the basics for newbie who want to learn to meditate. He’ll cover everything you need to know to start a daily meditation practice. It includes simple step-by-step guides to meditation and building a regular practice.
This book does focus on traditionally Buddhist meditation techniques, but one does not need to become a Buddhist to practice meditation or learn any other rituals or traditions. Instead, the focus is on learning how to use meditation to benefit your life to encourage greater compassion and mindfulness.
This book is available in paperback, hardcover, audible, Kindle ebook, and iBooks ebook.
Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment and Your Life
This book by Jon Kabat-Zinn focuses on mindfulness, promising to help transform the way you think, feel, love, and play to embody who you really are. The book is structured in a way that it can be read normally or used as separate lessons in mindfulness to explore, either randomly, or a new one each day.
Though the book covers more than just a focus on meditation, this overall approach to mindfulness will help deepen and improve your meditation practice. This book goes well with Meditation for Beginners for anyone who wants to learn to meditate and be more mindful in their life.
This book is available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle ebook, and iBooks ebook.
Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids (and Their Parents)
If you’d like to start your meditation practice with your whole family or you just want to teach your kids to meditate, this book is a good starting point. Eline Snel wrote this book to help parents and children use mindfulness meditation to calm anxious or worried children, help manage anger, introduce patience, and make sleep easier.
This fun approach targeted to younger meditators includes ways to teach children to meditate and exercises the whole family can do together. Bring peace and bonding to your home with this book.
The book comes with a 60 minute audio cd of guided exercises to help start your meditation practice.
Available in paperback, Kindle ebook, and iBooks ebook.
Little Book of Mindfulness
The tagline for this book by Patricia Collard is “10 minutes a day to less stress, more peace.” This cute little book is filled with exercises in mindfulness that help you meditate to relieve stress and anxiety and find stillness in your life.
This is the kind of book you can keep next to your bed and at the end of each day randomly pick an exercise to practice. It will help you be more mindful and establish a regular meditation practice.
Available in Flexibound book, Kindle ebook, iBooks ebook.
Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom
If you’re more practically minded, you will enjoy this book by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius. Buddha’s Brain looks at the science behind meditation and mindfulness to discover how changing the way we think changes our brains. You can then use this as a guide to reshape your brain to take advantage of the greater happiness and love that comes from regular meditation.
The book does include guided meditations and mindfulness exercises based on neuroscience to achieve brain states of calmness, joy, and compassion. Banish worry, sorrow, and anger. This also makes a great gift for anyone who skeptical of meditation and needs to see hard science and facts to appreciate the benefits of mindfulness.
This book is available in Paperback, Audible audiobook, CD audiobook, Kindle ebook, and iBooks ebook.
By utilizing these books and tips from this website, you should be able to easily start a meditation practice that will benefit your health immediately. Just take time each day to meditate and you will notice you feel calmer and will be able to sleep more easily at night.
If you’re more of a visual learner, check out these meditation videos and DVDs for beginners.