The Inward Trip

How Meditation Made the West
The definitive history of meditation in the West - from Emerson and the Beats to mindfulness and the science of the mind.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz grew up meditating twice daily in a community of two thousand in rural America - one of thousands of Westerners who had embraced a practice that, just decades earlier, was entirely unknown outside the monasteries and temples of Asia. How did ancient Eastern wisdom travel so far, so fast, and transform so completely? In The Inward Trip, Rothenberg Gritz traces the remarkable journey of meditation from the banks of the Ganges to the boardrooms, therapy offices and school classrooms of the modern West.

She charts the pivotal figures who carried these practices across the world: the Indian swamis who scandalised Victorian America, the Beat poets who found in Zen a counter to postwar conformity, the Beatles who brought Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to a global audience, and the scientists who stripped meditation of its spiritual context and repackaged it as the billion-dollar mindfulness industry now embedded in every corner of our lives.

Part cultural history, part scientific investigation, part personal reckoning, The Inward Trip is the richest account yet of possibly the most consequential thing to have traversed the Silk Road - and how it has quietly reshaped the way millions of people understand their own minds.

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