What makes it so hard to stick with a simple meditation we do every day? What gets in our way, and how can we make meditation a regular part of our lives? The instructions are so simple: relax and just be aware of what is happening in the present moment. And yet we find this
We can experience deep Buddhist insight by examining our present moment experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. This mind of our is pretty amazing. Our cognitive power propels us to the top of the food chain on this planet, and maybe even on others as we plan the colonization of Mars. But
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around. Traveling lightly, we feel airborne. We move into a keener love of simplicity. There is a story by Mark Twain about someone who dies and goes to “heaven” and gets a pair of wings and a harp. At first, they used the wings as a
The comedy improv teacher Jimmy Carrane mentioned in a blog post that the Illinois State Lottery once had a slogan that went: You can’t win if you don’t play. Although I’m not endorsing gambling here, we can apply this slogan to how we practice mindfulness. If we approach our practice as a grim duty to
If we get uptight about feeling uncomfortable in meditation, just remember this simple instruction- give careful and kind attention to whatever arises. Do you ever find yourself feeling uncomfortable in meditation after just settling in? If your mind could text you, what would it say? Lately, mine would text: Oh, no- not my aching knee
Do you have a fear of missing out on a more spiritual experience doing a mountain of laundry, washing a sinkful of dishes, or raking leaves till kingdom come? The meditation teacher Karen Maezen Miller, in a piece published in Lion’s Roar, rightfully calls us on this thought, while describing how the domestic lives of
The title here steals from Carson McCuller’s remarkable debut novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940 when she was only 23. Our mind can easily turn into a lonely hunter when it thinks there is something to get or achieve in meditation. When we eat breakfast, can we just eat? Just taste
Lately, I’ve been dealing with a relative of monkey mind I am calling crabby mind. They may be far apart on the biologic tree of life, but they are kissing cousins on my meditation mat. I’ve turned into a real crab. No, I didn’t wake up one morning to discover I was a decapod crustacean
What makes the difference in the contemplative life are the qualities of heart we bring to our everyday experiences. When asked the value of contemplative life, the 13th century Japanese monk Dogen said it allowed him to feel “an intimacy with all things.” Mindfulness allows us to see a flower, or watch a sunset, or
… when the mind complains it does NOT want to meditate, says the Buddhist monk U Tejaniya I’m going to assume that you are like most of us who are into meditation–you struggle maintaining a regular practice, right; you might even ask when is the best time to meditate. The instructions are so very simple—be