The Cow in the Parking Lot

A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger

By: Leonard Scheff, Susan Edmiston

Narrated by: Bill Mendieta

Imagine you're circling a crowded parking lot. Just as you spot a space, another driver races ahead and takes it. In a world of road rage, domestic violence, and professionally angry TV and radio commentators, your likely response is anger, even fury. Now imagine that instead of another driver, a cow has lumbered into that parking space and settled down. Your anger dissolves into bemusement. What has changed? Not just the occupant of the space but your perspective on the situation.

We're a society swimming in anger, always about to snap. Using simple, understandable Buddhist principles, Scheff and Edmiston explain how to replace anger with happiness. They introduce the four most common types of anger (Important and Reasonable, Reasonable but Unimportant, Irrational, and Impossible), then show how to identify our real unmet demands, dissolve our anger, and change what happens when our buttons are pushed. We learn to laugh at ourselves, a powerful early step, and realize that others don't make us angry. Only we can make ourselves angry.

©2010 Leonard Scheff and Susan Edmiston (P)2010 HighBridge Company

Great advise for those troubled by anger

I recently admitted to myself that I have an anger problem and not liking how this made me feel I vowed to change. This audiobook gave me several insights into the source of my anger and how to deal with it properly. I have listened to this book a couple times now and find it very useful to go back to when I find myself getting angry. It's a great listen and I highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves struggling with anger.

Helpful!

I thought the book had great content, flow, pace - everything you could ask for. If, like me, you occasionally lose your cool and live to regret it, this should be a good book for you.

As for the narration, here's a trick I learned: If you have a player that allows it (iphone, newer ipods do) speed the narration up to 1.5. The book's still fine to understand, and the narrator-itis disappears completely. Try it!

(If you can't, you may wanna think twice, because that poor, sweet guy did try a little too hard and it is pretty annoying.)

Good book, Read it again without the accents

This guy reading this book is doing these phony Asian accents which are borderline problematic and regardless quite annoying and absolutely unnecessary. You can read the quote from the Asian guy without doing a fake Asian accent. it is frankly bonkers.

Narration is Fine

The message of the book is excellent and useful and entirely realistic. But I'd like to make a note about the narration. He sounds fine. He reads slowly but it is easy to get used to his pace. He also does adopt different accents if he is playing a character in one of the many parables. However, most readers do this and his voices are no worse than anyone else's. Please don't let the negative reviews about the narration sway you from trying this book. The content has unexpectedly changed my life for the better.

Good book

A very good book, well narrated. I would recommend this. Thanks to Audible for having such great books in store

Angry Birds Hates This Book!

Talking about being angry? Well this book will make you stop and think: Being Angry - is it worth it? nice book, a good approach overcoming anger and the narrator's soothing voice is another plus-plus. Easy five stars!

Excellent book

Fantastic book for people wanting an intro to Zen Buddhism. Narrator - the accents you use are awful :) why did you do that?

Controlling your anger

This books breaks down a lot of different angers and how to deal with the various situations of life with random ppl and loved ones

Great, if you are trying to change your mind about anger

I have already decided I don’t want anger in my life so I was looking for more skills to help when I feel anger. There are some peppered throughout the book, but this is more about why anger is bad for your life.

Good and profound, but inconsistent performance

The book itself provides very good and useful information that I found very relevant to my situation. While it isn't necessarily groundbreaking, it puts a lot of good, common sense teachings into bite-sized pieces that are easy to understand and apply. My only complaint with the book itself is that, despite the author's disclaimer that this book is not about teaching a religion, it focuses very heavily on Buddhism, to the point that "This is how Buddhists do it" tends to distract from the central point of anger management that this book is written for. The teachings are good, just a bit tilted, IMO.

As for the performance, it was quite inconsistent. You can clearly hear frequent edit points and re-recordings, where the narrator's voice changes sometimes dramatically in the middle of a sentence or paragraph (in places where such a change doesn't make sense, e.g. when personifying different characters in a dialogue). Background noises and zero space are distracting when listening on headphones. Despite this, I was able to absorb the material quite well.