Posts by Mark Knickelbine
Practice Circle: Trust Emergence
When Practice Circle meets again this Sunday, 7/12/20, at 8 pm Central, we’ll work with a practice called Insight Dialogue. To prepare, I thought I’d share this essay we originally published in 2015. At Practice Circle, we’ll be working with an interactive mindfulness practice developed by Gregory Kramer called Insight Dialogue. In this practice, we…
Read MorePractice Circle Live: The Benefactor Body Scan
This guided meditation was recorded live at the SBA Practice Circle on October 22, 2017. If you’d like to learn more about why we developed this practice, and how you can join us at Practice Circle, you can read about it here. Transcription I’m Mark Knickelbine from the Secular Buddhist Association, and this is the…
Read MorePractice Circle: The Benefactor Body Scan
Recently, SBA Community Director Jennifer Hawkins engaged us with folks from the North American Buddhist Alliance to talk about the body scan, a practice used widely in both Buddhist meditation and mindfulness programs. If you’re not familiar with it, it consists of systematically directing your concentrated awareness to one body part at a time, starting…
Read MorePractice Circle: Mindfulness of Sound
Stop what you’re doing right now, and just listen. Were you surprised by all you heard? Before you stopped to listen, you may have been completely unaware of all of the sounds going on. As soon as you directed your attention to them, there they were, loud and soft, far and near, pleasant, unpleasant and…
Read MorePractice Circle Live: One Rare and Precious Life
This guided meditation on the Lojong slogan, “One rare and precious human life,” was recorded live at Practice Circle on June 11, 2017. To learn more about our online practice group, visit the Practice Circle Page.
Read MorePractice Circle: Autumn and Impermanance
We’ve crossed the Equinox, and here in the northern USA where I live, the arrival of autumn is unmistakable. Green leaves dry and are touched with orange, red and gold. The evening turns cool and dark. Soon the lush profusion of life will give way to the barren cold of winter. It’s a very good…
Read MorePractice Circle: Keeping Your Practice Together
I won’t bore you with the details, but 2017 has been a tough year for me. Job loss, unemployment, an auto accident, the stress of adjusting to a demanding new job, physical injury, and more — it’s all come one after another. Dukkah, thick and fast. And, just as I needed my practice the most,…
Read MorePractice Circle: Mountain Meditation
Visualization can be a powerful tool in meditation, and one of the visualizations used by both traditional Buddhists and MBSR practitioners is “becoming the mountain.” This Sunday at 8 pm CDST, Practice Circle will share a mountain meditation based on the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. I hope you’ll join us! To join our video conference…
Read MorePractice Circle: See Confusion as Buddha
I love the Tibetan Lojong slogans because so many of them provocatively explore the dharma from angles that we can tend to overlook. I often initially react negatively toward them, because they are trying shock us into understanding our practice in new ways. The slogan we will work with at Practice Circle on July 23,…
Read MorePractice Circle Live: Make Practice Your Whole Life
This guided meditation was recorded live at Practice Circle on June 25, 2017. If you’d like to learn how to join our online dharma practice group, check out the Practice Circle Page.
Read More