A long-awaited follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Search Inside Yourself shows us how to cultivate joy within the context of our fast-paced lives and explains why it is critical to creativity, innovation, confidence, and ultimately success in every arena.
In Joy on Demand, Chade-Meng Tan shows that you don’t need to meditate for hours, days, months or years to achieve lasting joy—you can actually get consistent access to it in as little as fifteen seconds. Explaining joy and meditation as complementary things that naturally reinforce each other, Meng explains how these two skills form a virtuous cycle, and once put into motion, become a solid practice that can be sustained in daily life.
For many years, meditation has been taught and practiced in cultures where almost all meditators practice full-time for years, resulting in training programs optimized for practitioners with lots of free time and not much else to do but develop profound mastery over the mind. Seeing a disconnect between the traditional practice and the modern world, the bestselling author and Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” has developed a program, through “wise laziness,” to help readers meditate more efficiently and effectively. Meng shares the three pillars of joy (inner peace, insight, and happiness), why joy is the secret is to success, and demonstrates the practical tools anyone can use to cultivate it on demand.
Chade-Meng Tan is an award-winning engineer, international bestselling author, thought leader, and philanthropist. He is cochair of One Billion Acts of Peace (nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize) and founding chair of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. As the former Jolly Good Fellow at Google, Meng led the creation of a groundbreaking mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course called Search Inside Yourself, which is also the title of his New York Times bestselling book. Meng delivered a TED talk on compassion at the United Nations and spoke at the White House about the development of kindness. His personal motto is, “Life is too important to be taken seriously.”
Table of Contents
Introduction: How I Learned to Be Jolly for Fun and Profit 1
Chapter 1 Joy Becomes You: Surprising (and Not-So-Surprising) Benefits of Mind Training 23
Chapter 2 Just One Breath? Surely You Jest: How Joy Can Begin with the First Breath 55
Chapter 3 From One Breath to One Googol: Settling into Sustainable Joy 83
Chapter 4 What, Me Happy?: Inclining the Mind Toward Joy 109
Chapter 5 Uplift the Mind in Seconds: The Joy of Heart Practices 143
Chapter 6 Happiness Is Full of Crap: Working with Emotional Pain 179
Chapter 7 The Great Mind Is Better than Sex: An Exploration Beyond Worldly Pleasures 215
