Book Review: The Inner Garden – Meditations from 9 to 90

by Maureen Garth. ISBN 1/86371/329/8. Pub. 1995 Gill & McMillan, 141 pages.

This is a glossy book. In it there are twenty four scripted meditations or visualisations. Garth says she learned to meditate in her late thirties and reaped the benefits of ‘going into silence’. After a series of nightmares suffered by her daughter Eleanor she formulated a series of meditations that, as she says, ‘gave both of us pleasure’.

If you are a regular meditator or if you use visualisation in your life or work this book will not add anything to your experience but if you are coming to these things for the first time then this book may help you understand the value of these activities.

Garth creates her meditations very fully so that each is a complete and consistent story. There is a lot of content in the meditations and this strikes me as not very helpful since it imposes an outside direction on the medita­tion. They are not loose enough to be metaphors to carry one’s own inner process work.

This may be an unfair criticism since the book is primarily written with children in mind – despite the sub-title.

Alan A. Mooney