Free Your Mind
A Meditation Guide to Freedom and Happiness
At its core, this book introduces principles and ideas that separate daydreams from reality and encourage fulfillment from within.
The bright pink cover with a line drawing of a brain and fun font indicates that Free Your Mind: A Meditation Guide to Freedom & Happiness will be a joyful read and a positive experience. Ajay Kapoor delivers a book about meditation that asks tough questions and attempts to build meditation into an ongoing habit of awareness and acceptance.
Kapoor’s motivation and methodology are rooted in many familiar truths such as, “You are your own best friend. You are your own worst enemy.” His book is an opportunity to explore expectations and “conditioning” different people and societies place on themselves, and to explore what real impact they have on happiness. Through his six “profound questions,” the author helps seekers of fulfillment and happiness realize that they have the power to achieve this already within themselves.
Free Your Mind is a guide and workbook, and Kapoor warns readers against trying to “finish the book” rather than work through it with meditation. Unfortunately, even with time and space to use the book as it is intended, the format and lack of organization make it difficult to follow. Each chapter is written as a numbered or bulleted list of thoughts, when the combined use of narrative style and smaller lists would have been more effective.
When describing “The Ladder of Evolution,” the book introduces a tangle of “seven rungs” which it inconsistently refers to as “steps,” “rungs,” “states,” and “milestones.” In this case it would have been more effective to use a numbered list to indicate the important ladder rungs instead of the twenty-two numbered thoughts, which obscure them. Some chapters include so many sublists of roman numerals, upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and bullets that the challenge is no longer about meditating but simply deciphering the formatting.
At the core, however, the book introduces principles and ideas that separate daydreams from reality and encourage fulfillment from within. It is not a new concept, but the approach of Kapoor’s “Z Meditation” is unique and thought-provoking. Because he explores many layers of mental development—from basic human nature and social conditioning to personal vocational fulfillment and desires—Free Your Mind is less an introduction to meditation and more a commitment to practice.
Kapoor writes with the rambling enthusiasm of someone who wants to convey all of his wisdom at once. Ironically, for a book about slowing down and recognizing subtle influences on awareness, it is hard not to be distracted by the style and disjointedness. But he writes with sincerity, and “Z Meditation” is not a haphazard concept. It is a deeply reflective practice that introduces personal responsibility for our own happiness.
Reviewed by
Sara Budzik
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
