Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention by Ken McLeod

Throughout this book's 450 pages, McLeod distills the nature and purpose of Buddhism to make it accessible for any newcomer without dumbing it down.

By Phil Catalfo

"To wake up is hard," Ken McLeod writes early in this book. "We must first realize that we are asleep." McLeod offers such direct, no-nonsense observations on every page of this impressive work, which presents the essential teachings of Buddhism and its practice of mindfulness in a secular, straightforward fashion designed to reach the Western mind. Wake Up to Your Life is not "the first book to deconstruct Buddhism for Westerners," as its promotional literature suggests; by now there have been hundreds if not thousands of books on Buddhism published for Westerners.

But this one is especially good, because of three things McLeod, director of Unfettered Mind, a Buddhist teaching and consulting service in Los Angeles, has going for him: his clear, incisive voice; his unwavering commitment to embracing the Four Noble Truths; and his ability to be both lighthearted and serious—without contriving to be either. As gifted a storyteller as famed meditation teacher and author Jack Kornfield, McLeod includes a generous helping of quotes and anecdotes from Sufi author Idries Shah, baseball legend and inadvertent koan master Yogi Berra, and everyone in between.

Throughout the book's 450 pages, he distills the nature and purpose of Buddhism to make it accessible for any newcomer without dumbing it down, a remarkable achievement in its own right, especially given how many of the aforementioned books do offer a kind of "Buddhism for Morons," hoping to cash in on a spirituality fad—as if a 2500-year-old practice can be considered a fad. McLeod's explanations of the core insights and aims of Buddhism is as clear and intelligible as any I've seen, and readers will find the many meditative exercises he provides both doable and useful. This is not a feel-good book; like the Buddha's original teachings, Wake Up to Your Life is about confronting death, "dismantling belief," and beginning the difficult, lifelong work of transcending the "I" that sees itself as separate from all else. As such, it is a good, helpful, compassionate, necessary book, and more valuable than a whole library of volumes telling us what we want to hear.