Now About Meditation

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.