Now About Meditation

We spend so much of our energy and focusing on what we want—the things we don’t have.  What happens when we choose to focus on what we do have? Finding gratitude shifts our perception towards the abundance of gifts and blessings that are present for us in this moment. Especially during hard times, a moment of gratitude can remind us of just how much we’ve been given: love, support, simple pleasures, material resources, our health and safety, this breath, this moment, this life.    To take it a step further, we can give thanks not only for the good things in our lives, but for the challenges and difficulties that push us to grow and give us the opportunity to put our spiritual work into practice.  “We should be especially grateful for having to deal with annoying people and difficult situations, because without them we would have nothing to work with,” writes Acharya Judy Lief. “Without them, how could we practice patience, exertion, mindfulness , loving-kindness or ...

Life is full of transitions, big and small. We transition all of the time and don’t realise they are happening. Sometimes transitions in our lives might be as simple as going from sitting to standing with such without us realising have an effect on us. How?  For example, the flow of blood in the body changes through shifting our position, the amount of effort exerted to be upright changes, and even the breath and heart rate change slightly. Small body transitions change our perception and interaction with the world, so you can imagine that the bigger the transition, the more significant effect on us. And those big transitions aren’t always in the physical realm. They could be and often are in the realm of thoughts and emotions. Relationships change and evolve; comfortable things may need to be swapped out for things that are less comfortable and familiar. The nature of the entire universe is impermanent , and we cause ourselves to suffer by wishing things didn’t change. Noticing ou...

Transcendental meditation: Repeating a mantra , such as a word, sound, or phrase, is a part of transcendental meditation. In transcendental meditation the mantra allows you to concentrate and relax without having to exert much mental effort.  Some contemplatives call a mantra "that which protects the mind".  This practice helps ground our attention in the present to cultivate mindfulness. Yoga: Yoga is a form of exercise as well as meditation. It involves a sequence of positions while concentrating on your breath, balance, and body alignment.  And this helps ground our awareness in the body and help us cultivate mindfulness. Body scan: This easy-to-learn method of meditation which is ideal for beginners. During a body scan , you close your eyes and concentrate on one area of the body at a time, usually beginning with the toes and working your way up to the head. While doing this one makes a note of any feelings of tightness, relaxation stillness or other physical sensatio...

Feelings of worthlessness, humiliation, and self-criticism that you may have had at various times in your life and that may even resurface during meditation sessions are manifestations of deep wounds. Children who are neglected or abused by their parents may unintentionally develop the idea that they are terrible or worthless. This can happen as a direct result of being told that, but it can also happen for less obvious reasons. Children are completely reliant on their parents for existence, so the thought that there is something really wrong with their caretakers and that they are injuring them is too frightening for them. As a result, children place responsibility on themselves—someone must be to blame, and it can't be their parents; therefore, it must be them. When self-blame initially surfaced, it was an understandable and adaptive attempt to cope and keep sane. Understanding this and reminding yourself of it with compassion whenever such sentiments occur might help them gra...

Loving-kindness towards others and self-compassion. As an initial step in the practice of loving-kindness, we start by focusing on self-compassion because self-compassion is the foundation and launching stage from which we then can reach out to others in kindness. Why because as we learn love for self this in time will flow out naturally as we expand our loving-kindness outwards. We can only learn to love others and truly accept them for their own human shortcomings if we have first learned how to love ourselves. Following is a link to a practice called “Memories of Kindness” which can help us acquaint ourselves with the topic of being kind to others, receiving kindness from others and being kind to ourselves - https://claytonmicallef.com/memories-of-kindness-meditation-practice/

  In Mind Like The Sky Thoughts Like The Clouds guided sitting meditation practice, we start by settling into our posture and setting our intention and motivation for the practice.   Then we will go to the stage of settling the mind so as to settle the gross distraction present in the mind.   After we go to the grounding phase, where we will ground the mind within the body as this helps the mind keep present. Remember, the mind can be lost in the past, or the future, or just daydreaming in the present, but the body is always here, and there is one of the greatest allies in our practice. After grounding, we move into the stage of resting in our embodied presence, mind resting in the body resting on the ground unconditionally supported by the ground.   So resting in our embodied presence and then connecting with the sense of the mind being the sky and the thoughts being clouds passing through the sky.   Inevitably our mind will wander away into thinking carried ...

Developing healthy boundaries plays an essential and sometimes critical role in developing compassion. Boundaries are similar to the stake and wires used to help keep young trees rooted and growing straight.  Having health boundaries early on in our compassion practice is adamant because if not when we might be faced with complex and new challenges, blocks to the cultivation of compassion might easily arise.  Because of this, a lack of healthy boundaries can lead to our compassion being thrown off track before it has any chance of taking hold and spread its roots. On the other hand, if we are trying to develop compassion and we are plagued by boundaries that are held too tightly. This can easily stifle our efforts to cultivate compassion and keep it from reaching maturity.  So it is crucial that in the process of developing compassion , we need to become skilful at knowing when to apply boundaries and when to relax or release them.

When someone is abrupt with us, we should reflect on the notion that such action might be a reflection of their current situation. Most of us have experienced having or being in a conversation, maybe with a co-worker, an acquaintance or a friend, where they might have been a bit abrupt? After experiencing such situations, we usually end up thinking, “what was that about? Are they annoyed at me?” Because of this, we might get swept away by anxiety or anger and not see what’s really going on. In these situations, we might end up going down one of two routes - either get anxious that they’re upset with us and think of everything that we might have done that could have upset them or them might have taken offence to, or maybe we might get annoyed and end up confronting them, throwing a coin or two into the swear jar on the way out. Although there an alternative to getting swept away in any of these routes. We can choose to take a step back and not get swept away by our immediate rea...

The Buddha said suffering is a part of life, something that we know to be true: life is stressful and uncertain. It could be said that change and uncertainty are probably the only constants in our lives, which can either be a cause for us to suffer or to growth.  One thing is certain when we start a family, everything changes ; it results in a total upheaval right down to our brain, body and hormones for both women and men.  There is nothing more stressful, uncertain, and constantly full of change than the process of parenting one's children. And while it might be that the change into becoming parents might bring us hardships and joy, growing up is not all fun and excitement for our children. So how do we go about dealing with change? How do we learn to bear the pains and joys of life without being caught up in them or turning our backs on them, and how do we teach our children to do the same? Traditionally, in eastern meditation practice, this quality of abiding is called equ...

  More often than not, when we get thoughts about our bodies, they are usually related to how much we weigh, how hungry we are, and the pains and aches we are feeling, and it seems that we cannot stop thinking about the body.   On the other hand, there are times when we completely forget about the body, causing us to go through the motions of life while we are totally lost in our thoughts.   When I’m in one of these situations, what I find helpful is the short practice by Tsoknyi Rinpoche, which I found on Lion’s Roar a meditation practice of dropping into the body and our feelings .   Personally, I have found this practice very useful as its simple, practical practice that helps in bridging the divide between our bodies and mind. Also, another practice that I found helpful is the memories of kindness practice  which also helps me bridge the divide between how I feel and my body.

 We could say that we are immersed in a world of sounds. If you pay attention, almost every minute of your waking life is filled with some form of sound: most prominently the ambient sounds in our natural environment, including music and radio, conversations and messages, and the cacophony of thoughts in your own head. Considering all of this, we have to ask ourselves: How frequently do you get genuine moments of silence in our everyday life? If we reflect, it seems that we have the inclination for filling moments of silence or stillness with noise and distraction and all other activities in between. What is the reason for this? Why do we have this inclination towards filling up moments of silence with some type of activity?   Because it seems that silence makes us feel uneasy, and since silence makes us feel uncomfortable, we will automatically try to fill it up. Why? In moments of silence or stillness, we return to ourselves, which is not always an easy thing to do to ...

 When it comes to meditation practice I really find helpful the following by Christopher K. Germer the author of the book the mindful path to self-compassion; You shouldn’t feel disheartened when you discover that your mind wanders incessantly. That’s the nature of the mind. It’s also the nature of the mind to eventually become aware of its wandering. Ironically, it’s in the very moment when you despair that you’re not mindful that you’ve become mindful. It’s not possible to do this practice perfectly, nor is it possible to fail.  That is why it’s called a “practice.” (Germer, 2009, p. 35) This reminds me of the notion that in meditation there is no success or failure it's all about the cultivation of awareness so becoming aware of a wandering mind is in itself not a failure within our practice but an achievement a reminder to return to resting on our meditation anchor  which is the fundamental pedagogy at the heart of mindfulness meditation practice.   And in their ...

Trudi Edginton , University of Westminster After a busy and stressful year, I recently found myself physically and mentally exhausted with a very real need to relax. A last-minute holiday felt like a perfect solution and I returned feeling refreshed and recharged. What was it that helped me to relieve my physical tension and restore my inner calm? Was it exploring somewhere new, swimming in the sea, spending time with family – or just lying on the beach, touching the sand and completely switching off? As a clinical psychologist, cognitive neuroscientist and mindfulness teacher, I am fascinated by how our thoughts and emotions relate to our physical responses. They are a key to understanding our ability to tolerate and respond to stress. Scientific research has highlighted a range of ways our individual perception and experience of stress vary. For example, the amounts of certain chemicals in our bodies that affect how we feel, such as cortisol and oxytocin, can be negatively affect...

  We go through the critical elements for the development of mindfulness in this sitting meditation session. Through first picking our chosen point of focus for directing our attention as an anchor for our mindfulness practice. Then, if we find our mind drifting away from the anchor, kindly guiding it back to it, no matter how many times it has done so. We also discuss the notion of proper focus in mindfulness meditation . We'll go through the stages of settling, grounding, and resting in this mindfulness session. After that, we gently rest our attention on our preferred anchor, with the purpose of this exercise being to note when we lose awareness of our point of focus and gently bring it back into our attention. While reminding ourselves that the act of recognizing a wandering mind or that we are caught in compulsive thoughts is a moment of mindfulness, the recognition of a momentary lap of awareness within itself.

Karma means action and refers to physical, verbal, or mental acts that are done with purpose and, therefore, intentional. These intentional actions effect our minds and leave imprints or seeds on our mind-streams. When the appropriate conditions come together, the imprints ripen and sprout out into our life experience. For example, when we act intending to help someone wholeheartedly and with kindness. This action effects us in such a way that it leaves an imprint on our mind-stream.   Thereafter when the right conditions arise, we will cultivate the fruits of this imprint into ourselves, receiving help when we need it because of the nature of the action's goodness.   When it comes to Karma, it is understood that the fruits of our actions transfer onto our next lifetime and do not get lost.   With Karma, if an action brings suffering, it is considered unwholesome, destructive and unvitues.   On the contrary, if an act results in happiness, it is wholesome, c...

Dusana Dorjee , Bangor University Meditation has been hailed as a way to boost mental health , help chronic pain , reduce stress and build a new appreciation for the world around us. But even with all this interest, misconceptions about what this ancient practice can do for human health and well-being are still circulating. 1. There is only one type of meditation Only some meditations involve sitting quietly with legs crossed. Qi Gong and Tai Chi , for example, focus on meditative movement. This combines a relaxed but alert state of mind with slow movements and gentle breathing. Others, like Tibetan Buddhist meditation involve visualisations and/or mantras. There is also “thinking meditation” where one reflects on topics such as impermanence , while staying relaxed yet focused and reflective. Many types also encourage bringing meditation into ordinary daily activities – such as mindful dish washing involving paying attention to the sensations of the water and ...

 Vipassana is usually interpreted as the practice of the development of "Insight" by applying awareness and understanding of what precisely is happening as it happens. "Concentration" or "calm abiding" can be translated as Samatha. It is a state in which the mind is brought to rest, centred on one thing only so as not the wandered away and remain focused to achieve single-pointedness.  A profound relaxation pervades the body and mind when single-pointedness is finally achieved, described as a state of calm that must be witnessed to be appreciated. The meditator uses this focus as an instrument in Vipassana meditation . He directly applies this concentration to his consciousness, through which he chips away at the delusion wall that cuts him off from the living light of reality. Vipassana involves a progressive development of knowledge into the mind's inner workings over several years. The student's interest is carefully drawn to an intensive an...