"Pagis’s monograph supplies a valuable and accurate description, as well as a highly sensitive analysis of the happenings in the Goenka Vipassana centers. It weaves together personal experience, theory, and interviews with others to create an elegantly persuasive account that contributes a unique and important exposition to the growing literature of the new cultural field of Buddhist meditation outside Buddhist Asia and also to the sociology of secularity and religion in postmodern times. In addition, it contributes a sensitive phenomenological account of meditation practice that is all the more important now, considering the current flood of quantitative studies on the effects of mindfulness."

Journal of Buddhist Ethics

“This striking ethnography sticks in one’s mind: rooms full of silent meditators coordinating their body rhythms on a tacit channel, observing sensations over every inch of their bodies, and washing away pains not by seeking their causes but by detached attention. Pagis depicts meditation in a secular age, not as religion but as bodies among bodies giving each other space to repair the inroads of too much social self.”

Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

“Pagis’ beautifully written, brilliantly argued ethnography of meditation makes three major contributions: it shows how some of our most private experiences are socially enabled; it demonstrates how our selves are not only linguistically but sensuously mediated; and it reveals how attention is not merely a faculty but a practice. All three have profound consequences for understanding the sociality of human beings.”

Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago

Pagis’s book is a tour de force for those interested in social constructivist theories of self-development; sociologists of religion, spirituality, and Buddhism; and meditators. The book would provide excellent contributions to sociology courses on these topics. The book is not only carefully constructed, painstakingly grounded in various historical and sociological literatures, but written in an interesting and accessible manner, which students either at the undergraduate or graduate level would enjoy.

American Journal of Sociology

"Pagis weaves theory, participant interviews, and her own personal experiences seamlessly together, resulting in a reading experience that continually surprises, engages, and persuades. Inwards is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on the secular and religious study of meditation and should be considered essential reading for those interested in the transformative powers of interiority."

Tyler Carter | H-Net