One area of meditation that challenges many of us is establishing a daily practice. How do we bring meditation into our life in a way that sticks? As Anne Cushman writes:
Paradoxically, the practices we know are most vital to our wellbeing are the very things that are usually pushed aside by d...
Our speedy, productivity-obsessed world tends to overlook sleep, even view it as a kind of necessary evil. Nothing could be further from the truth! Professor Matt Walker has this to say in his TED talk:
Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity. It is your life-support system, and it is Mo...
After sitting and walking meditation, we worked with a reflective meditation technique called Six Ways of Knowing - a way of noticing the stories we tell ourselves so we can see them more clearly. The key, after identifying a challenge in our lives that has produced a recurring story in our mind, is...
After sitting and walking meditation, we shared a section from the book Difficult Conversations that talks about we argue and why it doesn't help. Here's an excerpt:
If the other person is stubborn, we assert harder in an attempt to break through whatever is keeping them from seeing what is se...
What is Mindfulness? We read and discusssed an article that unpacks its many meanings in classical Buddhism, for example:
Mindfulness does not just mean being aware or being conscious, because one is always conscious when not comatose or dead. Consciousness is the fundamental quality of mind, un...
We practiced meditation–while sitting and walking–and then watched a short video about stories--how they can inspire, guide, and elevate us. The speaker, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, says this in her talk:
A good story is like a compass, it points to something true and invites us to orient our own...
This week, after sitting and walking meditation, we read an article about natural awareness and how it relates to meditation:
What some meditative traditions call “natural awareness” is a state of being wherein our focus is on awareness itself rather than on the things we are aware of. It’s “a...
Last week weread part of the chapter titled "The Heart of Practice" from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh's classic book, Being Peace. He writes:
Without a cloud, there will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in [this sheet of...
Special guest Sally Johnson joined us to share her experience with the work of teacher and author Reginald Ray. Here is an excerpt from Ray's book, The Awakening Body:
It is as if we are waking up, within our Soma [body], and we suddenly find ourselves in a new world. We are uncovering a comple...
Before and after tea, we brought our attention to walking meditation or kinhin (Japanese). Walking meditation is often done between periods of sitting, and because of that is sometimes seen as a kind of stretch break. But that misses a vital point of why we meditate at all: to be present in our...