Philosophy of Coaching: An International Journal Vol. 3, No. 2, November 2018, 88-90. http://dx.doi.org/10.22316/poc/03.2.07 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Book Review Goleman, D., & Davidson, R. J. (2018). Altered traits: Science reveals how meditation changes your mind, brain, and body. New York, NY: Avery. Krish Iyer Singapore It’s been two years since I embarked on making meditation a daily routine, and over the last two years my practice has grown from a thought- jangling, mind-wandering, “Is it time yet?” 5-minute sitting to a steady, breath- aware and attention-centered sitting of anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour. It’s now something I so thoroughly enjoy that it’s with a deep sense of relaxed regret that I experience my programmed digital Dengze gong sounding the end of the sitting. What has caused this change? Could I dismissively ascribe it to “habit”? Or were there deeper mechanisms at work here? Why have I stopped reacting to impatient car honks that sometimes greet my slow acceleration at traffic lights, for instance? And what other changes have I undergone that I’m not even aware of? There is a saying: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. That’s exactly how I felt when I chanced upon Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson’s latest work Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes your Mind, Brain and Body at my local library. Containing a wealth of wisdom explaining why and how meditation works, all validated with scientific references and elaborations of the key concepts and effects of meditation, Altered Traits provides a logical and rational explanation for what has historically been understood as a strictly spiritual endeavor. Daniel Goleman is most well-known for his seminal work on Emotional Intelligence. What is not so well known about Goleman is the years he spent, starting in the early 1970s, pursuing mindfulness meditation, as well as bringing what was then seen as an esoteric Eastern, almost otherworldly practice, to Western shores. Richard J. Davidson, an acclaimed neuroscientist and meditation practitioner in his own right, and good friend and compatriot of Goleman’s, spent decades pursuing and validating the science behind