Posts by Mark Knickelbine
12/22 Practice Circle: Soft Belly
At my UW Health Mindfulness sangha a couple weeks ago, the teacher shared a passage from Steven Levine’s 1995 book, Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings, on what he called “soft belly meditation.” Here’s a sample: The belly is an extraordinary diagnostic instrument. It displays the armoring of the heart as a tension in the belly. The…
Read More12/8 Practice Circle: Hope in Darkness
Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are rapidly approaching the Winter Solstice. Darkness and cold are gradually encroaching. The trees that not long ago were full of color now stand bare against the pale sky. The harshest part of winter is nearly upon us. I know I’m not the only person who struggles a…
Read More9/22 Practice Circle: Listening to the Felt Sense
I’m going with my gut on this. It’s what’s in my heart. I have a funny feeling inside. These common phrases indicate that we recognize that physical sensations in the body have important things to tell us, things that may be beyond the grasp of our conscious awareness. Several of the world’s wisdom traditions put…
Read More9/8 Practice Circle: Mountains Flowing
I recently returned from a vacation in the Rockies, where we stayed in a little cabin near the tree line. We had a wonderful view of a hilltop just across the valley, with patches of snow lingering in the August heat. We spent hours on the front porch watching that mountain as the sun moved…
Read More8/11 Practice Circle: Compassion for Ourselves and the World
The key to compassion, either for ourselves or for others, is the understanding that suffering is something we share. It may be easy to grasp intellectually that all sentient beings experience suffering, but this insight is also deeply counter-intuitive. When I am in pain, that suffering is mine, part of a drama that is bound…
Read MorePractice Circle 7/28: Four Tasks
When Practice Circle meets on July 28, 2019, at 6 pm Pacific, 7 Mountain, 8 Central and 9 Eastern, we’ll share practice and discussion of how the Four Noble Truths manifest themselves in secular dharma practice. To prepare, I’m sharing this article I originally wrote in 2013. A link to our free, online practice community…
Read More7/14 Practice Circle: Relax
I think every contemplative technique I’m aware of involves at least some degree of relaxation. The practices I was taught in MBSR all begin with bringing awareness to areas of tightness and holding in the body and inviting them to relax; the Body Scan, which is the first technique one learns in MBSR, consists of…
Read More6/9 Practice Circle: Letting Go
In the Pali texts, Gotama teaches that one cause of our suffering is our inability to allow and accept our experience the way it is. Because we so desperately want conditions to be the way we want them, despite the realization (or perhaps because of it) that we can’t really control our circumstances in any…
Read More5/26 Practice Circle: New Attitudes of Mindfulness: Gratitude & Generosity
At Practice Circle, we have worked with Jon Kabat Zinn’s Seven Attitudes of Mindfulness: Acceptance, Nonjudging, Nonstriving, Letting Go, Patience, Humor, Trust, and Beginner’s Mind. In their terrific training manual for mindfulness teachers, A Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness, Christina Wolf and J. Greg Serpa add three more: Curiosity, Kindness, and Gratitude and Generosity. When Practice…
Read MorePractice Circle 5/12: New Attitudes of Mindfulness: Kindness
At Practice Circle, we have worked with Jon Kabat Zinn’s Seven Attitudes of Mindfulness: Acceptance, Nonjudging, Nonstriving, Letting Go, Patience, Humor, Trust, and Beginner’s Mind. In their terrific training manual for mindfulness teachers, A Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness, Christina Wolf and J. Greg Serpa add three more: Curiosity, Kindness, and Gratitude and Generosity. When…
Read More