I have never been particularly spiritual, and to this day I’m deeply uncomfortable with religion. I get that skin-crawling Otherness when I’m surrounded by people discussing prayer. There’s a lot of history as to why which I’m not going to get into, but suffice it to say that even new age-y woo-woo stuff will usually engage my fight or flight reflex.
On the other hand, mental health content is something that I’m always drawn toward. The idea that you can take concrete actions to heal your brain and soothe old trauma, change your perspective and even tweak your own personality and reactions? That’s the stuff right there.
Where spirituality and mental health seem to dovetail is in Eastern philosophy and meditation practices. There’s a science to it that’s appealing. My gateway drug of choice in that category was the mental health content of the HealthyGamerGG videos by Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K), with his focus on the use of Eastern philosophy as a mental health tool.
So I was curious when I was scrolling through the most popular available self-help books on my local library digital catalog and I saw Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty – whose story seemed to be oddly similar to Dr. K’s. Both of them spent time at a Hindu ashram, learning spirituality and meditation practices, but they moved on to very different career paths.
It’s a different perspective than the one I’d been reading about, and so I was curious enough to keep an open mind while listening to the audiobook of Think Like a Monk. Let me tell you what I learned.
Book Overview: A Brief Synopsis
Jay Shetty was born in London. The story is that, in 2010, he entered a Hindu ashram in India and spent the next three years living as a monk where he deepened his understanding of meditation, mindfulness, and ancient wisdom. At the ashram, he also learned that he was an engaging speaker and teacher, capable of capturing his audience’s attention and finding new ways to relate information.
In 2020, he published the book Think Like a Monk, which can be summarized as a self-help book that encourages readers to adopt a monk-like mindset to achieve inner peace and fulfillment. Shetty draws on his experiences as a monk to offer practical advice on mindfulness, meditation, and gratitude. The book emphasizes the importance of focusing on the present moment, letting go of negative thoughts, and cultivating positive habits. By adopting the practices he describes, readers can learn to find balance, reduce stress, and live more meaningful lives.
General Reflections
If I was worried about pages rife with woo-woo spirituality and praise lifted to some deity I had no knowledge of nor interest in, I needn’t have been concerned. The most spiritual thing that stood out to me were the meditation segments. The main focus seemed to be on attentive daily living. By choosing your actions and your view of events from the perspective of your highest self, the chatter of your mind can be quieted. And that, to me, is a worthwhile goal.
Insightful Tools
If you’ve read any of my content, you know by now that I’m a big fan of concrete tools and step-by-step instructions. However, one of the main reasons I read books like this is to find a way to change my perspective, which is a little more nebulous. When I can find a metaphor that feels so concrete it sticks, that’s worth its weight in gold to me. I found 3 such tools in Think Like a Monk that genuinely worked for me.
How to Discover Your Values
The first thing I took away was the best explanation I’ve ever seen of how to define my set of values. Have you ever been in a class or a conference where you’re asked to list your values, and then they use that to figure out whether you’re spending your time appropriately or something? It’s like I’m being asked what my favorite movie is. I don’t know! Don’t put me on the spot! I’ve never seen a movie, leave me alone!
I have to go search for lists on Google, stare at them, wonder if I’m a bad person if I don’t pick this or that value as my own. But when I read this book, I was actually able to make a list, in order, for basically the first time ever. It came down to two steps:
1. What do you get jealous of when other people have it, and what need can that jealousy show you? Home ownership is my biggest jealousy trigger because I value Security, which is what owning a house represents to me. You might get jealous of other people’s relationships because you value Love or Connection.
2. What do you appreciate in the friends you choose? This one blew my mind, because it made it so easy to identify the rest. Sometimes it’s hard to think about what you want until you find it, and there are a few people in whom I have truly found the type of person I want to be. There’s a running theme among my closest friends that already reflects my highest self. That’s some powerful stuff right there.
Here’s the list I came up with: Security, Peace, Honesty, Curiosity, Kindness/Empathy, Generosity, Creativity, Self-reliance, Open Mindedness, and Authenticity
Then – here’s the real kicker – Think Like a Monk encourages you to build your self-worth on your values, instead of your accomplishments or doing more. My self-worth has always been difficult to access – Perfectionism Brain says that if I’m not doing something worthwhile, then I’m not worthwhile. But that list of values is a window into my core self. And even if “loving myself” feels very false and far away, the core self that maintains that set of values is a worthwhile person. It’s a foundation for self-worth, something to build on.
Understanding Detachment
The idea of detachment always seemed cold and a little calloused to me. In some sense, I understand the renunciation of material comforts to pursue a spiritual life, but I look back on that episode of A:TLA, where Aang is asked to detach from Katara, and that’s how I feel about it. How can I possibly detach from the people and places I love without feeling like I’m going to be torn in two? I’ve said goodbye so many times already. I’m terrified of losing more – which is the height of attachment.
The metaphor Think Like a Monk provided changed my perspective. He describes being on vacation, in a beautiful hotel room. It doesn’t belong to you, but you can thoroughly enjoy it and be grateful for the experience, and when you leave you can keep your memories without mourning the loss.
Sometimes I find myself mourning the inevitable separation between me and the people I care most about, before the separation has even happened. I’ve had five-day visits with someone before where I would cry about the last day before the first one had even finished. But maybe I can work a little towards changing that perspective, letting go of fear, and begin to see myself as a visitor who owns nothing close to me, yet has the privilege of enjoying everything.
It won’t happen overnight, but if I can enjoy even one more minute of life with my son that isn’t spent buried in the terror of losing him, it’ll be worth it.
Focus on the Present Moment
I’ve already been a big fan of the Gen Z idea of romanticizing life. In my Drink Water post, I mention the idea of romanticizing water a little in your head. It’s really just a storybook version of focusing on the present moment.
Focusing on the present moment, also known as mindfulness, has a host of mental and physical benefits from improved mood and emotional regulation to better blood pressure and sleep. While Think Like a Monk wasn’t the first book to introduce this concept to me, Shetty does go into detail about it. He describes ways to find enjoyment in simple tasks like washing the dishes – enjoying the smell of the soap and the feel of the suds on your hands, the small rewards of each clean dish (which is what got me thinking about romanticized life). Thinking about this as I read brought me back to an awareness of my tasks that I don’t often have.
I’m a list-maker. I love checking off boxes. But a lot of the time, I spend my time doing chores focused on something else. The dishes were a good start, honestly. Instead of being a task to check off the list, it became a way to push the constant chatter out of my mind, the way I can usually only do with a walk alone in the park. It made me realize that, if I practice, I could make many other tasks into something peaceful and meditative. I can zoom in and live my life as it’s happening, not in daydreams of the future and nostalgia over the past.
Where the Book Fell Flat
I’ve already mentioned that one of the most spiritual things in Think Like a Monk were the meditations. After all, monks and meditating go hand in hand. However, I was surprised to find that many of the meditations, apart from a few Hindu mantras mentioned quickly within a few paragraphs, were ones I recognized. Shetty even describes the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique as if it were a meditation, and lists box breathing when discussing breathwork – things that I learned a long time ago while searching for appropriate ways to work through my day to day anxiety. I’m 90% certain neither of those tools originated in an ashram, but someone not already deep into mental health work might not know that.
I was honestly a little surprised at how “white bread” the spirituality in Think Like a Monk became at times. I expected to learn a bit more history of Hinduism or Buddhism other than a mention of the Bhagavad Gita. I was going into it with an open mind, and I wanted the author to go into depth about where this information/advice is coming from.
He does provide quite a few stories, effective to illustrate his points, but I didn’t expect the spirituality aspect of it to be so easily digestible. It left me intellectually curious, which isn’t a bad thing, but it felt very Americanized. Like the Panda Express of spirituality, it was a lot of rehashed self help techniques like the ones I mentioned, coated in the flavors of Eastern philosophy but lacking in substance.
Another thing that fell flat for me was one of the ideas posited: that you should remember the good others have done and forget the bad, and remember the bad you have done and forget the good. While I understand the principle that we should be forgiving and to focus on the things we can improve, I have to patently disagree.
Maybe that works for some, but for people who have been traumatized at the hands of others, it makes no sense to “forget” the bad, because remembering the bad others have done to you is necessary for safety. And for perfectionists like me, we already over-focus on our failures at the expense of our self-esteem. I’m all for learning how to forgive others without forgetting, but I also think it’s important to forgive yourself. Hard pass.
So, Should You Read It?
Maybe!
I’ll admit that Think Like a Monk isn’t something I’m likely to read through again in its entirety, but I am glad that I read it, and I think that listening to the audiobook was a good use of my time. It did give me some particularly good insights and shifts in my perspective on life, and it made me curious to learn more about Hinduism and Buddhism. I think that, if you read it, you would probably find some insights that really help change your perspective for the better.
It’s just far from perfect. Like many self-help books, a lot of the advice is repackaged content that someone else came up with first. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing in itself, because finding a new audience for good advice is still worthwhile. I’m doing the same thing here, more or less!
But repackaging an anxiety attack grounding technique (attributed, according to Google, to Dialectical Behavior Therapy psychologist Marsha Linehan) as a monastic visualization method was a little odd to say the least, and it makes me question how much of the rest of the content sources are trustworthy beyond the quotes from the Bhagavad Gita.
If you’re interested in true monastic tradition and learning more about Eastern philosophy, you can probably skip Think Like a Monk. If you’re more interested in gleaning insights about mindful living, it may be a fantastic introduction to several concepts that you can use to springboard into a happier, more purposeful life.
Get your library card ready. Below are the links to the WorldCat library copies of both the book and audiobook. Happy reading!
Print/eBook: https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/1137203108
Audiobook: https://search.worldcat.org/formats-editions/1134529302