Posts Tagged ‘Secular Practice’
Practice 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: 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 Live: The Hindrances
This guided meditation on the Five Hindrances was recorded live at the SBA Practice Circle on May 14, 2017. It’s about 27 minutes in length. If you’d like to join us at our free online dharma practice group, you can learn more here.
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 MoreI Suffer
Article originally posted on Medium – I Suffer by Dan Hanly I feel like I’ve always been a spiritual person. I use the word spiritual here, and not religious — in-fact, I’ve had a vehement dislike of religious trappings for as long as I can remember. I am and have always been an atheist — averse to the belief…
Read MorePractice Circle April 3: Rick Heller and Face Meditation
Hi! To avoid the holiday weekend, we’ll reschedule Practice Circle for Sunday, April 3, when author Rick Heller will join us as guest facilitator. Rick will share one of the practices from his book, Secular Mediation: 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion and Joy. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on the practice Rick…
Read MoreSecular Meditation: A Review
When I reviewed Sam Harris’ book, Waking Up, in these pages, I lamented that the book failed to live up to its subtitle, “A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.” Indeed, there are a growing number of volumes, from writers like Harris, Stephen Batchelor and others, that discuss the philosophical underpinnings of living a spiritual life…
Read MoreBatchelor's Ten Theses of Secular Dharma
All of the discussion on this website can be said to revolve around a single question: What is Secular Buddhism? How is it secular, and how is it Buddhist? What can we take from the traditional texts and practices, and what ought we leave behind? How does the dharma fit in with our knowledge from…
Read MoreMeditating Without Nirvana
Introduction A specter is haunting secular Buddhism;[1] it is the ghostly remnant of the non-naturalistic, supra-mundane dimension of traditional Buddhism. While we, as secular Buddhists, embrace the core insights of the Buddha about our human- existential condition, we need to usher this specter – the notion of nirvana – politely but firmly away from our…
Read MoreEscaping Dispute
The Gratification of Dispute How often do you engage in disputes over your views and opinions? Dispute and argument are an integral part of many secular philosophies, maybe even their most prized practice. Science itself functions around the adversarial methods of dispute, debate, and peer review. The difference between “natural philosophy” and what we consider the science of today…
Read More