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Taylor, October 19, 2008

The Inner Smile is a book entirely devoted to the inner smile meditation technique developed by Mantak Chia. Chia discusses some of the basics of chi and Taoist energy work and then proceeds to describe how the inner smile technique works. His perspective is that using the inner smile can be used to bring emotional happiness to the internal organs of the body.

While I think this is a good book, my main problem with it is that pretty much all of the material can be found in his more advanced books. While he does seem to go into a bit more depth about the inner smile meditation technique in this book, it doesn’t, in my opinion, justify a completely new book to explain the practice. It feels like he’s trying to milk these topics for everything he can get, when he might better serve his readers by combining some of the related topics into a larger book. The consistency of how much he repeats his other works diminishes the value of this book and his other writing.

I’d recommend this book for someone who’s just learning about Taoist breathing and energetic techniques and wants a light introduction to it. However, I can’t really recommend it to anyone else, because the majority of the information is available in all of this other books.

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