Practice Circle: Keeping Your Practice Together

By Mark Knickelbine | September 8, 2017

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,…

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Practice Circle: Lake Meditation

By Ted Meissner | August 21, 2017

Continuing in our exploration of visualizations in contemplative practice, this Sunday at 8 pm CDST, Practice Circle will focus on the Lake Meditation. To join our video conference group, simply follow this link: https://zoom.us/j/968569855. Ted Meissner, MBSR teacher with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Center for Mindfulness at UMass, will be leading this session’s half hour guidance and…

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Practice Circle: Mountain Meditation

By Mark Knickelbine | August 10, 2017

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…

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Practice Circle: See Confusion as Buddha

By Mark Knickelbine | July 21, 2017

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,…

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Practice Circle: Stay Close to Your Resentment

By Mark Knickelbine | July 7, 2017

One of the interesting things about working with the Tibetan Lojong slogans is the way they so often seem strangely counterintuitive. The slogan we’ll be working with this week at Practice Circle is a good example: “Stay Close to Your Resentment.” What? As good Buddhists, aren’t we supposed to be releasing our clinging to illusory…

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Dealing with the Five Hindrances

By Doug Smith | July 3, 2017

The five hindrances get in the way of our meditation, and get in the way of living wisely. Here we will look at them and at methods for dealing with them skillfully, mostly from the early tradition. A good source for information on the hindrances in early Buddhism is Anālayo’s book “From Craving to Liberation…

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Practice Circle: Make Practice Your Whole Life

By Mark Knickelbine | June 23, 2017

Those of you who have joined us at Practice Circle lately know that we have been working with the Tibetan Lojong text, fifty-nine slogans that present seven points of training the mind. There have been countless commentaries on the Lojong text; the one we’ve been working with is Norman Fischer’s wonderful Training in Compassion: Zen…

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Meditating with Muse

By Mark Knickelbine | October 28, 2016

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?…

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