Posts Tagged ‘Practice Circle’
Practice Circle: Meditation Basics: The Body Scan
Whether you’re new to meditation or you’ve been doing it a long time, it’s always good, I think, to spend some time working on the fundamentals. There are a thousand kinds of meditation and more are created every day. Sometimes we forget, however, that the very basic methods that we learned starting out are still…
Read More6/29 Practice Circle: Meeting Difficult Emotions with RAIN
This is a time of difficult emotions. We are scared, anxious, angry. We might be grieving everything and everyone who has been lost, or we might be frustrated by the slow chaos of progress. It doesn’t matter that we’re all feeling these things, or that it is very natural to have turbulent emotions in the…
Read More6/14 Practice Circle: The Power of Poetry
I’ve been a poetry geek since I was a kid, and the poetry I liked best was the most mysterious. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, were utterly indecipherable to me at 14 – and even years later, after I got a graduate degree in this stuff, it’s still hard for me to understand what…
Read MorePractice Circle 4/26: Love is the Antidote to Fear
There is the liberation of the heart by loving-kindness; frequently giving wise attention to it — this is the denourishing of the arising of ill-will that has not yet arisen, and the decrease and weakening of ill-will that has already arisen. — SN 46:51 There is much fear in the world now. Most of us…
Read MoreTips for Online Practice Groups
Virtually all of the in-person practice groups I participate in during this time of social distancing are scrambling to convert to online offerings. I read in the New York Times today that downloads of Zoom have increased exponentially. Many of these initial meetings have seen hiccups as presenters attempt to get the technology to work…
Read More1/26 Practice Circle: Benefactor Meditation
For several years now, the mindfulness group I practice with has been learning a set of meditation practices adapted by John Makransky from Tibetan dzogchen and mahamudra methods. Although these techniques have much in common with the mindfulness practices adapted from Theravada Buddhism, such as vipassana and loving kindness meditation, there are some differences in emphasis and…
Read MorePractice Circle 1/12: The Sound of Silence
I love guided meditations. Whether in person with a teacher or with an audio recording, I find the sound of verbal instructions can make it much easier to meditate. Good instructions do more than remind me to be present when my awareness drifts. They also help bring a different perspective to my experience while in…
Read More12/22 Practice Circle: Soft Belly
At my UW Health Mindfulness sangha a couple weeks ago, the teacher shared a passage from Steven Levine’s 1995 book, Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings, on what he called “soft belly meditation.” Here’s a sample: The belly is an extraordinary diagnostic instrument. It displays the armoring of the heart as a tension in the belly. The…
Read More12/8 Practice Circle: Hope in Darkness
Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are rapidly approaching the Winter Solstice. Darkness and cold are gradually encroaching. The trees that not long ago were full of color now stand bare against the pale sky. The harshest part of winter is nearly upon us. I know I’m not the only person who struggles a…
Read More9/22 Practice Circle: Listening to the Felt Sense
I’m going with my gut on this. It’s what’s in my heart. I have a funny feeling inside. These common phrases indicate that we recognize that physical sensations in the body have important things to tell us, things that may be beyond the grasp of our conscious awareness. Several of the world’s wisdom traditions put…
Read More