Posts Tagged ‘mindfulness’
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…
Read MoreWhat is Right Mindfulness?
Mindfulness meditation is increasingly popular nowadays, but its roots go back to early Buddhist texts associated with the seventh stage along the Eightfold Path. We will delve a little into these texts and attempt to flesh out the key aspects of mindfulness meditation in the early tradition.
Read MorePractice Circle: Lake Meditation
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…
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: Stay Close to Your Resentment
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…
Read MorePractice Circle: Make Practice Your Whole Life
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…
Read MoreThe Two Major Kinds of Buddhist Meditation
Now with better quality video! More info about a couple of folks mentioned: Leigh Brasington Jon Kabat-Zinn
Read MoreA Forgotten Key to Mindfulness
Days grow shorter. The small ruby-throated hummingbird that visited our feeder for sugar-water several times a day through August has decamped, beginning the first leg of his journey down to Mexico. Overhead the Canada geese flock in great ‘V’s, calling out to each other as they wing south. The sugar maple at the bottom of…
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…
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