Maybe right now as you are reading this, you feel a little overwhelmed, anxious or bored. There is well-being in this, too. Give this a try. Make yourself comfortable and become aware of how your breath breathes all by itself. How your chest rises ever so slightly on the inhale, and relaxes on the exhale.…
I was struck by a poem the other day while reading a new translation of the Therigatha, a small book of verse compiled in the beginning of the 6th century BC, by Buddhist nuns, chronicling their spiritual struggles and victories. It is also regarded as the earliest-known collection of women’s literature. Here is the voice…
The meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal, in one of his talks, speaks about visiting his son one day when he was in preschool. The kids were all running around, as little kids do, but when it was time to transition to another activity, the teacher stood in the middle of the room, and started to whisper.…
The only way to fail at meditation is to stop meditating. As long as you show up, the meditative process happens. It is really simple: sit down on a chair or a cushion, set the timer on your phone for, say, twenty minutes, then pay attention to how your body feels, or how your breath…
I had this dream the other night that allowed me to see similarities between lucid dreaming and meditation. In the dream, lines from an obscure American poet kept haunting me, and I couldn’t remember the poet’s name. I tried searching the Internet for the name, putting the lines I remembered in quotation marks: “I called…
The suffering in the world is overwhelming, but the whole mess looks differently when we when know how to meditate every day. Everyone is frazzled. Shootings, politics, racial and economic disparities, climate catastrophes. That’s why it’s really important to learn how to meditate every day. This is not a post about learning to meditate in terms…
Meditation has many wonders to reveal, but they remain hidden until we develop samadhi. Many insights into the nature of our existence lay waiting for the intrepid inner explorer. Many lost connections waiting to hook up again, like loose wires strewn about the neural frontier. samadhi is the secret sauce of meditation Samadhi, or focused,…
The Burmese meditation teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya on how a meditator can practice mindfulness during hard times. His response was “practice as usual.” OK, really? His dry answers to the questions posed by the Western interviewer stewed in the back of my mind for a few days. Do not practice to make something happen or…
We meditate for many different reasons. Often, our original motivations morph as we move forward on this path. It’s juicy to reflect on why we keep this up. Maybe we meditate for stress relief, maybe to lower our blood pressure, feel less anxious, or just to feel better physically. Or perhaps existentially. an existential motivation…
I have been stopped in my tracks only a few times in this life, stunned and then grateful for an instruction landing at exactly the right moment. This was one of them. I was listening to an old talk given by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, sometime in the early 1970s. A student asked him about enlightenment,…