A friend recently asked me how to reconcile meditation practice with making plans. One way is to use our thinking mind rather than have it use us, another is to stay aware of our breath as an anchor into the present moment, and another is to make a spiritual vow as to how we will act in the future.
One of the ways meditation can most help in our daily life is when we take small, regular, refreshing breaks from what we have been doing to sit, check in, and deeply listen to ourselves and the world around us.
Mindful, meditative eating is a powerful practice popular with both ancient monks and modern Americans, and consists of bringing focus, attention, and presence to the process of eating.
There are various ways that meditation practice can help us to have fewer addictive urges, and to resist them when they do arise.
Practicing being mindful when interacting with other people can be among the most positively transformational practice that we can do.
Walking is a popular posture for meditating, either as something that we can give our full attention to and do intentionally as a formal practice, or when walking functionally, while we are on our way to a destination.
Aging is an emotionally challenging experience for most people at least at times, and is sometimes one of the most difficult. Mindfulness meditation, thankfully, is a friend that can help create more ease with the process.
Last weekend, I ran a 10k race. It was my first race at that distance in maybe 25 years. I had a good showing, and I think that that came in part because I was doing a concentration meditative technique during the whole race, which I think helped free, unify, and integrate my body’s energy.
I sometimes prefer to speak in a way that is unusual and clunky, but that feels to me like it embodies more mindfulness, presence, freedom, spaciousness, openness, groundedness, and invitation – ways of speech that are more “meditative”.
This post has suggestions for taking a healthy, comfortable posture when meditating in a chair.
Not only is “mindfulness” a popular trend that’s sweeping the nation, but “mindfulness in the workplace” specifically is too. This post will give you some suggestions for helpful techniques for staying spacious and open when working an office job.
A friend asked me about how to use meditation to avoid feeling physical pain. I replied that, yes, classically, there are mindfulness techniques that help us to turn away from and avoid pain, but usually these are just preliminaries to turning towards and fully feeling the pain.
One way to understand meditation practice is to see it as similar to the habit of physical exercise and working out, which is something that more people are more familiar with and able to understand.
We can get liberated with any sensation: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, subtle or strong, dynamic or static, mental, physical, or of the external senses. The point is how we relate to the sensation.
Isn’t all coaching supposed to be mindful? What’s unique about coaching via mindfulness-informed sensibilities? How does appreciating and having a personal relationship with mindfulness affect coaching work? What’s your experience with coaching, mindfulness, and mindful coaching?
The technique that I have found most useful for meditation while driving is to simply be present and focused on the sense impressions of the act of driving – to see what is going on around us, to keep our ears open for the sounds of traffic, and to be aware of the bodily feeling of sitting in a car seat holding a steering wheel. We can developing an all-round awareness of what is to our sides and behind us as well as in front, inside our cars and outside, repeatedly releasing wandering thoughts so as to bring ourselves back to the richness of the present moment.
I imagine that most people would agree that it is often difficult to find appropriate words of condolence when a friend is grieving. I personally do not want to say to a grieving friend that I hope that they feel better soon, because I think that it is healthy for a human psyche to go through a period of pain when it has lost someone or something that it cares about. I believe that people often say “feel better soon” because they are uncomfortable in the presence of another person’s pain, and that that phrase can sometimes feel like an unpleasant pressure put on a grieving person to have it all put back together sooner than would be otherwise natural for them.
One question that sometimes comes up for people who are learning how to meditate is whether it is a good idea to meditate in the period between climbing into bed and actually drifting off to sleep.
I spent five years in the nineties as part of research teams studying how to improve drug and alcohol treatment. My job was to manage and clean the data, and to do statistical analysis
In my first job after university, I worked on a team that examined “proximal outcomes” for recovery, both for twelve step programs and cognitive behavioral therapy. The idea was, each modality of treatment program suggests various activities for people to do if they want to get sober – but which of these many activities are actually most effective in helping people to stay clean?
The group for this retreat has a little over forty monks in it, which fewer than the sixty to eighty who were here when I have been here for ninety-day retreats in the past. This means that all groups of monks (the work crews, the meal serving crews, the kitchen crew, etc) are on a smaller scale. We’ve had a number of people coming and going, which is fine, but I also find that I liked better the tighter container that I experienced in past years (i.e., where everyone who is here at all is here no less than the full three months).
I put on YouTube two interviews that I did for a local Buddhist-themed TV show. Some of it is kinda advanced Buddhist stuff, but almost all of it should be pretty accessible to all folks with an interest.
With the “Who am I?” part of the mantra, I dissolved whatever felt solid in me. I noticed all the definitions of self that my mind kept coming up with – some of them superior to the people around me, some inferior to the people around me, many neither. As my defining mind did its thing, I felt the heaviness tired constrainedness of those definitions – “I’m this kind of person, and that fact means that”. As they came up and I got caught by them, I kept asking “Who am I?” – i.e, “who is the I that believes this?”, “is this definition of self who *I* am?”.