Online, Together, Meditating, Secular: An Event Announcement from New Zealand!

For those who don’t know, New Zealand has a lively Secular Buddhist community: https://secularbuddhism.org.nz/ http://www.onemindfulbreath.org.nz/ http://abet.nz/   Last month, the prominent Ramsey Margolis announced via his newsletter that he wanted to try to lead a free, online meditation using Zoom similar to SBA US’s Practice Circle. Not only had he gone out of his way to…

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Practice 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…

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Meditation 101

Ever thought about meditating, but weren’t sure how to begin? This video goes through some of the basics involved in sitting and walking meditation. Just the right thing to get you started!

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Practice 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…

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My First Retreat – Part 3

This is Part 3 of a series of 3 articles.   For Part 1: https://secularbuddhism.org/2017/10/12/my-first-retreat-part-1-of-3-a-zen-sesshin-at-rocky-mountain-ecodharma/ For Part 2: https://secularbuddhism.org/2017/10/12/my-first-retreat-part-2-of-3/ …continued: Morning 3: This was the last day, a short day. And in everything, I “relaxed”… in a “bad way.” I think that one factor was a personal or internal one: all of the praise I got during Dokusan…

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My First Retreat (Part 2 of 3)

This is Part 2 of a series of 3 articles.   For Part 1: https://secularbuddhism.org/2017/10/12/my-first-retreat-part-1-of-3-a-zen-sesshin-at-rocky-mountain-ecodharma/ …continued: Day 2: We woke up at 5AM (successfully!), chanted, and sat (zazen). I couldn’t tell you much about what came up during that specific sit, but I do recall that most other retreat attendees took full advantage of any breaks to…

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Practice 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…

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