This book will almost certainly change your life for the better. It has mine. In entertaining and graceful English Mr Threadgill helps you to analyse and fix the things in your way of living that are making you tense.

He emphasises that relaxing is not about adding extra things to your list of stuff to do. It's about looking at the ways you unnecessarily tense your body and burden your mind, and learning, very gently, to have a better time doing the things you have to do anyway.

It's the kind of book you can dip into - in fact, he advises not reading the whole thing at a gulp, but reading a bit here and there as you want to. It's not a very long book, but all of it is interesting and potentially helpful, so it's worth taking it slowly and digesting it properly.

Best of all, he writes like a down-to-earth P.G. Wodehouse, so, unlike that of most self-help books, the writing style doesn't make you feel like you're asking for the help of a third-rate journalist. Quite the reverse. I do love the satisfying click of a well-turned sentence. Threadgill appears to be one of those people who just naturally write that way.

Even if you don't necessarily agree with everything he says or feel that all of it's for you (and he's keen to emphasise that that's fine!), you'll probably get a lot out of merely reflecting on the things he says. It's easy to read, full of good and unusual advice and far from patronising. How far you go with it depends on your own inclination (the final sections give some techniques in which you can take relaxing further than the everyday - if you want to). I've personally found it really helpful, and highly recommend it. Warning: you may want to buy a copy for most people you know.

I unhesitatingly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to learn to relax, or is interested in meditation. Don't be fooled by its length: this is a deep book.

At less than 80 pages, Threadgill's is quite possibly the best book I've ever read on meditation, and I've read many. Having completed 5 years of intensive study with several teachers, Threadgill offers a friendly, fun, and simple (but not simplistic) approach that avoids the many pitfalls the majority of books on "relaxation" and meditation fall into.

How to Relax is not a "guru book". Threadgill does not claim to be enlightened or take a stance in which he claims to know things that you do not. Rather, he freely and humbly admits that he has struggled to learn to relax, but has had some good teachers and engaged in some systematic experimentation. He offers the reader the fruits of this experimentation.

Threadgill also avoids the wide-eyed proselytizing to which some writers fall prey. There is no talk here of 'enlightenment' or other such misleading notions, no Buddhist-Taoist terminology, wishful thinking, hero-worship, or other mumbo-jumbo that is of little use to the new meditator.

Rather, Threadgill offers a sort of charmingly British, Douglas-Adams-like voice that says, "don't panic, it's only relaxation!" while serving up, in short order, a range of key practices drawn from the Asian meditative and body-mind tradition.

Threadgill emphasizes that techniques are not nearly as important as one's attitude. If one wishes to relax, how could one possibly do it if relaxation is yet another thing to master, yet another potential feather in one's cap, yet another chore to struggle with and worry about? And, if one wishes to relax, how could one do so if one goes about detesting everyone in one's life? (The section on behavior toward others is extremely brief, really just a side-note, but a sly one, in that softening our attitude toward others turns out to be a quite important element of relaxation).

Threadgill throughout the book offers support for the reader in dealing with the inevitable difficulties in learning to relax. Because so much of the business of relaxation is bound up in one's attitude and state of mind, this technical support ends up being crucial to gaining satisfaction from one's attempts to learn to relax. We need a voice that reminds us, for example, that "falling off the wagon" in various ways is part of the deal, and best regarded, not as evidence of yet another failure to excel on our part, but of the extraordinary subtlety of the practice of relaxation.

Perhaps most important, Threadgill adds the crucial element of a sense of humor into the mix of humility and open-mindedness. To quote one of my own teachers, to be enlightened is about being "light" and not heavy!

I found this book to be an accessible, practical and very funny guide to a subject which has eluded me for ages. For years I've been trying to relax and the closest I came was managing to appear relaxed on the outside while holding a world of tension inside. With this book's help, I have for the first time started to truly relax, both mentally and physically. I highly recommend it to anyone who wishes to feel more relaxed.