HANDBOOK FOR HARD TIMES by Gelong Thubten

I can thoroughly recommend this book. It looks great - it’s a hardback with gold leaf on the cover. It’s endorsed by Annie Lennox and Ruby Wax. The author is a Tibetan Buddhist monk but he was born in the UK so you feel he is familiar with “the Western experience”. The most interesting thing is that he is deeply immersed in Tibetan practice but he has also suffered from profound depression and anxiety, which didn’t just end when he was ordained. In fact he describes an attack that he had when he had just started a four-year meditation retreat on a remote Scottish island. So you feel that he knows what he is talking about when he offers teaching on challenging mental states, and that the meditations and techniques he offers in this book are going to be a great help if we suffer from depression or anxiety.

224pp, 223 x 141 mm, Hardback, 2023, RRP £16.99