Review: How to Train a Wild Elephant

How to Train a Wild Elephant: And Other Adventures in Mindfulness
by Jan Chozen Bays

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are 53 mindfulness exercises in this book, and each one is presented in a multipart format. First you are told what to actually do, then how to remind yourself to do it, then preliminary thoughts on the exercise, then deeper analysis of possible outcomes, then a summary thought. This structured format makes it easy to use the book as a source for adding mindfulness exercises to your daily life. The book also provided a useful introduction to the practice of mindfulness using the training of wild elephants as a model. I didn't find the actual exercises consistently appealing however, some of them seemed like very slight variations on earlier ones. This may be valuable in developing mindfulness however, to revisit a past activity. There were several that I plan to try.