Real Happiness is Sharon Salzberg's structured introduction to insight and loving-kindness meditation, published by Workman in 2011 and reissued for the program's tenth anniversary in 2019. The book sets out a four-week curriculum modelled on the format Salzberg uses at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with one core technique introduced per week — breath, body, emotions, lovingkindness — along with journalling prompts and troubleshooting notes between sessions. The accompanying audio (originally CD, later download) carries Salzberg's own guided versions of each session, and is the component long-time readers most often cite as the operational core of the book.
Reception
Real Happiness is the highest-selling of Sharon Salzberg's books and the title most often used in entry-level secular mindfulness courses outside the formal MBSR curriculum; it has been continuously in print since 2011 and the 2019 anniversary edition added a new introduction and updated science endnotes. Within the Insight Meditation Society lineage (Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield) the book is read as the most accessible of the three teachers' published curricula — Goldstein's Mindfulness is denser and more doctrinally Theravada, Kornfield's Path with Heart more biographically discursive — and as the volume that did the most to bring the IMS approach to a non-retreat audience. Critics in the engaged-Buddhist tradition (Ronald Purser, David Loy) have argued that the book's program-format presentation, by separating the meditation instructions from their ethical and communal context, is part of the broader movement Purser calls 'McMindfulness'; Salzberg herself has addressed this in later books (Real Love, 2017; Real Change, 2020).
Frequently asked
What is Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation about?
It is Sharon Salzberg's 28-day structured program for learning meditation. The book introduces one core technique per week — breath concentration, mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of emotions, and lovingkindness — with guided sessions, journalling prompts, and troubleshooting notes. The accompanying audio carries Salzberg's guided versions of each practice.
What are the four weeks of the program?
Week one covers concentration through breath meditation. Week two introduces mindfulness of the body. Week three extends mindfulness to thoughts and emotions. Week four covers lovingkindness (metta) — the practice of cultivating goodwill toward oneself and others, drawn from the Theravada tradition Salzberg studied in Burma.
How does Real Happiness differ from the MBSR curriculum?
Both programs draw from Vipassana lineages and run over roughly the same period, but Real Happiness is a self-directed book-and-audio program rather than a clinically supervised group course. Salzberg's curriculum includes explicit lovingkindness practice (metta), which the standard MBSR format does not; and it places the material in a Buddhist teaching context rather than a secular medical one.