'Smartly researched, warmly engaging, and 100-percent free of New Age blather.' Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author



Jennie Rothenberg Gritz grew up meditating twice daily in a community of two thousand in rural America - one of thousands of Westerners who had embraced a practice that, just decades earlier, was entirely unknown outside the monasteries and temples of Asia. How did ancient Eastern wisdom travel so far, so fast, and transform so completely? In The Inward Trip, Rothenberg Gritz traces the remarkable journey of meditation from the banks of the Ganges to the boardrooms, therapy offices and school classrooms of the modern West.





She charts the pivotal figures who carried these practices across the world: the Indian swamis who scandalised Victorian America, the Beat poets who found in Zen a counter to postwar conformity, the Beatles who brought Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to a global audience, and the scientists who stripped meditation of its spiritual context and repackaged it as the billion-dollar mindfulness industry now embedded in every corner of our lives.





Part cultural history, part scientific investigation, part personal reckoning, The Inward Trip is the richest account yet of possibly the most consequential thing to have traversed the Silk Road - and how it has quietly reshaped the way millions of people understand their own minds.



Jennie Rothenberg Gritz has spent two decades as a writer and senior editor at The Atlantic and Smithsonian, where her work gravitates toward life's bigger questions. A graduate of UC Berkeley's School of Journalism - where she won the Harper's Magazine Award for Outstanding Magazine Writing - she is also a trained teacher of Transcendental Meditation. The Inward Trip is her first book.



For anyone who has ever felt confused about meditation, or guilty for not doing it, The Inward Trip is a revelation. Jennie Rothenberg Gritz uses warmth, wit, and rigorous reporting to show that meditation isn't a monolith. There are many ways to meditate and glean its benefits, and this book explains meditation in a way I've never before understood.



In her groundbreaking book The Inward Trip, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, brilliantly illuminates the smorgasbord of meditation options for those justifiably mystified by their similarities and differences. Written in a welcoming style, mixing erudition with compelling personal anecdotes, readers will find The Inward Trip a voyage of discovery worth taking



The Inward Trip is not just a fascinating history of meditation in America, but an illuminating and profound exploration of the nature of the human mind. Gritz is a wonderful writer, companionable and wise. An intellectually bracing work-yoking together east and west, science and religion-this is also one of the most affirming books about our brief lives on this earth as you're likely to read.



To my mind, there could be no better, wiser, more qualified guide to the science, history, mysteries, and benefits of meditation than Jennie Rothenberg Gritz. The Inward Trip is smartly researched, warmly engaging, and 100-percent free of New Age blather. It's a bounty for beginning meditators - and the simply curious -- yet has much to offer the experienced practitioner. Dive in(ward)!