Tag: meditation
Why Do We Keep Practicing?
I had an email exchange recently with a gentleman who asked some very good questions, and thought it might prompt some helpful discussion here on the site. Names and identity details were removed. Email One To: Webmaster I just got through listening to your interview on Books and Ideas podscast. I … attended the local [...]
Episode 165 :: Leigh Brasington :: Sutta Jhanas
Leigh Brasington Leigh Brasington joins us to speak about what the Pali canon suttas have to say about practicing the jhanas. In traditional Theravadin Buddhism, there’s this thing called the Eightfold Path. It is the process by which we abandon the fetters, those pesky things that lead us to regular encounters with dissatisfaction in life. [...]
Practice: The Four Strivings
When we practice, we strive to become proficient. The Sanskrit term for meditation, “bhāvana”, actually means “development” or “cultivation”, near synonyms for “practice” itself. Indeed, meditation is central to the Buddhist path: to meditate is to develop wholesome mental states through mindfulness and concentration. In the Cūḷavedalla Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 44.12), the lay follower Visākha [...]
Practice: Working with the Hindrances
The first and biggest problems we all have in meditative practice are those constant bothers that the Buddha termed “hindrances”, clouding the clear water of awareness. He counted five, usually translated: sensual desire, ill-will, restlessness, sloth-and-torpor, and doubt. When I first heard these, I wondered, why these five? They sound like a miscellaneous grab-bag of [...]
Strategies of Secular Buddhist Practice
As Ted Meissner and Mark Knickelbine have been emphasizing, practice is an essential part of any Secular Buddhist path. But it took me quite awhile to find my way to a really worthwhile practice. For many years I followed a Zen-based form of what I would term ‘free form’ meditation, oriented around samādhi, or focus [...]
Meditating on the Mud Machine
Ordinarily we begin meditation by focusing on the body, in particular, the breath. This is known as “mindfulness of breathing” and we learn about it at the beginning of the Buddha’s sutta on the Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 10. I use the Ñaṇamoli/Bodhi translation). The Buddha suggests a few other body-oriented meditations, [...]
Body Scan Guided Meditation
Guided Body Scan Meditation Follow this Guided Body Scan Meditation by Mark Knicklebine (about 40 minutes):
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