Category: Meditation practices
Suffering Is Optional
Physical pain is unavoidable, but meditation practice can ease the mental suffering that often accompanies it. Diana Winston teaches us how.
Zazen: Just Wake Up
Zen teacher Myoan Grace Schireson teaches Zazen, sitting meditation from the Zen tradition, a foundational Buddhist practice.
Mindfulness: The Most Direct Path
Insight teacher James Baraz teaches how to train mindfulness with sitting meditation from the Vipassana tradition.
Taking Mindfulness to the Mat
Applying the Buddha’s four foundations of mindfulness to hatha yoga asanas, says Frank Jude Boccio, can enrich practitioners’ experiences.
Surprises on the Way
Is there a way we can extend and deepen these moments of awakened mind that coexist with our confusion? Or even just notice them when they occur? That’s the point of Buddhist meditation, which is never about doing or creating anything. We simply rest in everything as it is. It sounds so easy, yet nothing is more profound or mysterious.
Returning Home
Thich Nhat Hanh offers a guided meditation to relax our body and mind and return to the here and now. Fully present, fully alive, we find we are already home. Do you remember anything from your stay in your mother’s womb? All of us spent about nine months there. That’s quite a long time. I believe…
Not by Ourselves
Shikantaza demands our full self-expression, says Tenshin Reb Anderson, and this can only be realized when we meet intimately with others.
Breaking Life Down to Its Parts
The path to liberation, says Vipassana master U Pandita, is the precise breaking down of life as it unfolds – part by part, step by step, moment by moment.
Waiting. Waiting. For What?
Meditation, then, can show us our true and genuine life, with its freedom, its abundant creativity, and its joy.
Walking With St Francis
Gretel Ehrlich walks in the footsteps of St. Francis through the Umbrian countryside and ponders the life of a saint who was "radical without bitterness, vital yet gentle, dramatic—even outrageous at times—without narcissism."