Posts Tagged ‘awareness’
8/26 Practice Circle: Getting Out of Default Mode
I have tended to give concentration practice short shrift. To me, devotion to intense concentration – jhana practice, long sesshins, and the like – seemed like spiritual calisthenics, meditation for its own sake, another skill to attach the ego to. Coming out of the vipassana-influenced MBSR tradition, I thought the tangible benefits of exploring the…
Read More4/8 Practice Circle: Mindfulness of Mind
I’ve been reading Beth Ann Mulligan’s The Dharma of Modern Mindfulness, which is impressive for the way she uses anecdotes from her secular MBSR course to illustrate basic Buddhist principles. In that spirit, when Practice Circle meets again this Sunday, April 8, at 6 p.m. Pacific, 8 Central and 9 Eastern, we’ll continue our four-part…
Read MoreJudgment and Non-Judgment
It is critical to our progress along the path that we make lucid judgments about skillful and unskillful thoughts and behaviors. At the same time though we are often enjoined to pursue a kind of non-judgmental awareness. How are these recommendations reconciled? Or are they completely at odds? We will look at this question in…
Read MorePractice 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 MoreWhat Is Dependent Arising?
By Linda Blanchard I said that dependent arising is both very simple, and very complex, but always helpful, and worth the effort to understand. Let me start with the very simple. It Really Is Simple Dependent arising says that we come into the world with certain drives that cause us to build a view of…
Read MoreMeditating with Muse
As soon as I saw the first ads for Muse, the “brain-sensing headband” that provides users with feedback during meditation, I felt both intrigued and conflicted. After all, you don’t need a $300 electronic gadget to meditate. Would this be just one more mindfulness commodity, another plaything to become attached to? Would it be useful?…
Read MoreNow is Strange
Now is strange. We only experience things in the present. Our access to past and future is through reconstruction and prediction. So much of our lives is spent in our heads, living in thinly disguised fictions of time gone and time to come. This seems obvious, and at the same time it seems so surprising. And yet…
Read MoreMy First Float
Last Saturday, I had my first experience in a float tank, sometimes also referred to as a sensory deprivation chamber. I had been curious about them since I first learned about them in the 1970s, especially after seeing the 1980 William Hurt movie, Altered States. Recently, a couple of commercial float ventures have opened in…
Read MorePractice Circle: Energy and Information
In his book Mindsight, Dr. Dan Siegel tells the story of when he began trying to understand the mind in a serious way. As he approached experts in various disciplines, he soon encountered a fundamental problem: there was no agreed-upon definition of what the mind is. As Siegel convened an interdepartmental working group at UCLA,…
Read MorePractice Circle: Jason Siff and Recollective Awareness Meditation
Happy New Year! We’re excited to be starting 2015 with our first guest-led Practice Circle featuring Jason Siff, the author of “Unlearning Meditation” and “Thoughts are Not the Enemy.” Over the next two Practice Circle sessions, Jason will be teaching us the technique he calls Recollective Awareness Meditation, which involves open awareness practice, journaling, and…
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