Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Meditation Is less about concentration and more about open awareness

Meditation isn't one thing. It is many things, because there are many ways to meditate, and it's impossible to say that any is the best. Or worst. It just depends on what someone feels works for them. Which is no different than eating ice cream. There's no best flavor. Some people prefer vanilla. Others prefer chocolate. Still others prefer a different flavor. Each to their own. For many years, decades really, I practiced a form of meditation based on a mantra and the goal of withdrawing one's attention from the outside world and focusing it "within." I put that word…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness Uncategorized

Being fully absorbed in an activity is enlightenment

Usually I hate to stop reading a book after I've started it. Unless it is really bad. I figure that even though I'm not enjoying the book very much, there will be something in pages to come that I'll learn or be entertained by. So I'll read more rapidly, less carefully, as I make my way further into the book. This just happened to me with Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, by Dainin Katagiri. I go hot and cold with this book as Katagiri shifts from interesting practical advice about living to conceptual Buddhist…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

My thoughts often seem like inner speech. But many people think in a different fashion.

In my "Our inner voice is linked to our various selves" blog post (August 2022), I described the decidedly strange experience I had after imbibing an excess of marijuana. Most of us have an inner voice speaking to us inside our mind. It can either be voluntary, as when I read "Most of us have an inner voice" and can hear those words silently echo within my brain. It can also be involuntary, as when I do something wrong and hear "You're an idiot" admonishing me without my consciously willing those words. This inner voice generally is taken for granted.…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Flow — the marvelous blend of body and mind, exemplified in an amazing video

There's words about flow. And there's the experience of flow. Both help us understand what flow is all about. But a video I learned about in the "Surfing the Moment" chapter of In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant provides an unforgettable vision of flow. Here's how Marchant describes the video. In a seven-minute online film called 'The Ridge', Scottish trials cyclist Danny MacAskill rows across a remote loch on the Isle of Skye before hauling his mountain bike out of the boat onto the windswept beach. Once in the saddle, he wheels away…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness Neuroscience

Epilepsy and meditation: two paths to “everything is as it should be”

So, I was reading along in In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, which I've been blogging about recently, and came to a passage that reminded me of a post I wrote a few weeks ago, "What if everything is okay just as it is?" I described the feeling: There are moments when we look upon life not as a series of problems to be solved, but as a complete answer lacking even the need for a question. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. These can lead to such moments. So can meditation, nature, exercise,…
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Posted inAwareness Mindfulness Neuroscience

Past and future are optional concepts, since some cultures lack them

Most of us worry a lot about both our past and future, even though the past is gone and the future has yet to occur. We do our best to live in Now, the present moment, but often the past and future occupy such a big part of our mental real estate, the present gets squeezed into a relatively small corner. One reason I'm liking In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant so much (the subject of several recent blog posts) is that the book points to some provocative ideas about our usual sense…
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Posted inMindfulness Neuroscience

Cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness

I recently finished writing in a ruled 8 1/2 X 11 pad of paper that I've used for various purposes, turning over a page to start writing on a fresh page without discarding what I'd written before. I was about to throw the pad away, or rather, recycle it, when I decided to look at the first pages and see what was there. Which was... 3 2/3 pages of scribbled notes that I'd taken titled "CBT & Mindfulness -- Waking Up." That made me recall listening to a series on the Waking Up app that featured a subject that interested…
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Posted inMindfulness

Thinking is good. Overthinking, not so good. Ruminating, pretty bad.

Sometimes people attached to a certain kind of spirituality (or pseudo-spirituality) say that thinking should be avoided, that somehow we should live in an intuitive la-la land where actions occur spontaneously and naturally, no thinking required. Aside from being totally unrealistic, I've wondered how it is that these people express their distaste of thinking in words that sure seem like thoughts. After all, what is saying or writing "thinking should be avoided" but an expressed thought, thinking should be avoided. Mindfulness practice, in my experience, doesn't view thinking as a problem any more than emotions are a problem. Both are…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Three meditation tips that go against what I did for many years

I've meditated every day since I was 21 years old. So I've put in a heck of a lot of cushion and chair time in the past 56 years. (Yeah, I'm old.) What keeps me going with meditation is feeling like I've always got something to learn from the experience. Like life itself, no moment in meditation is the same as any other moment. Something always is changing in my mind, my surroundings, my body. I used to believe that there was One Best Way to meditate. Namely, the way that my guru taught. Looking back, that was an absurd…
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Posted inMindfulness

Worrying about the future distracts us from enjoying the present moment

In my previous post, "Not-knowing is wise, because we know so much less than what we think we know," I said: But it seems to me that a major source of my customary feeling of knowing what’s going on in my life comes from self-talk derived from a basic assumption that what I think will happen, actually will happen. Meaning, I wake up, envision what is on the day’s to-do list, and have a comforting feeling that I know how things are going to happen today. Problem is, that rarely happens. There’s always surprises. Something else comes up. I change…
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Posted inMindfulness Reality

Not-knowing is wise, because we know so much less than we think we know

Way back when, Garrison Keillor said about his fictional locale, Lake Woebegone, "all the children are above average." This reflects the neuroscientific fact that most people consider themselves to be better drivers than average, more loving and compassionate than average, and in general, above average in lots of areas. Which is mathematically impossible, of course. For every person above average, there has to be another person below average. This seems to also apply to the general notion of how much we know. Most of us, me certainly included, like to believe that we know a great deal about many things.…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness

In Zen, faith, doubt, and energy are all pleasingly natural, not supernatural

In my religious believing days, what happened during my morning reading time today would have struck me as a message from God. Or at least a message from the universe. Now, I simply view it as a coincidental message -- turning to three books and finding that continuing where I'd left off reading resulted in a similar point of view. Which, I suppose, isn't all that surprising, given that currently I only read books with a naturalistic perspective. I want to embrace reality as it is, not as someone imagines it to be. First I picked up James Ishmael Ford's,…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Just this — a simple yet profound Zen saying

Zen Buddhism is known for focusing on the natural world rather than abstract concepts. Chopping wood and carrying water are favored over devotion to God and similar thoughts divorced from everyday reality. Just this. A simple yet profound Zen saying. Just this breath in meditation. Just this step in walking the dog. Just this seeing of the full moon. Just this sensation of a hot bath. There's nothing lacking in just this, nothing to strive for, nothing to hope for, nothing to pray for. The present moment is complete. Undeniable. Impossible to argue with. Beyond doubt. Religious notions of faith…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

The dry clarity of one who no longer lies

This morning I felt in love. With a chapter in Robert Saltzman's book, The 21st Century Self: Belief, Illusion, and the Machinery of Meaning. I knew that I wanted to share it in a blog post tonight. But it was a long chapter. I doubted I could type all of it into a post. So I started typing, figuring that at some point my fingers would tire, the time would grow late, and I'd have to pick and choose what to share, and what to leave out. Yet as I got into the rhythm of Saltzman's writing, needing to pay…
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Posted inMindfulness Reality

What if this here and now is our true home?

You know what's really strange? That the title of this blog post sounds strange to so many people. I mean, all those people, who once included myself, who consider that this world we're living in here and now actually isn't where we are supposed to be. That Other Place, that Mystical Destination, that Promised Land -- religions and philosophies disagree about what it consists of, but for billions of humans it is a real thing, a goal to be pursued. So Christians yearn for heaven, or the Second Coming here on Earth. Hindus hope that their eternal soul, Atman, will…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

“Never let your mind leave your body” — wisdom from Ajahn Mun

If I come across a few ideas in a book about meditation or mindfulness that make me go "Wow, that's really good advice," I'm a happy reader. It only took me 17 pages of reading Martin Aylward's book, Awake Where You Are: The Art of Embodied Awareness, to find a statement that had a pleasing wow factor. Ajahn Mun, another famous Thai meditation master, used to give the instruction, "Never let your mind leave your body." If that seems too much to ask, then how about this: every time you notice that your mind has left your body really notice…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Martin Aylward’s embodied awareness makes body as important as mind

One thing leads to another. That's the story of my life. Also, everybody's life. Here's a recent example.  I've been going along in my morning meditation, enjoying a mixture of guided meditations from Zen master Henry Shukman on his The Way app and from Tamara Levitt on the Daily Calm app, when I feel an urge to check out what's new on Sam Harris' Waking Up app, as I hadn't used that app for a while. (My meditation has become app'y, obviously.) On Waking Up, I noticed a new series of 30 lessons from Martin Aylward called Awake Where You…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Acceptance, says the Mindful Geek, is the key to real growth in meditation

I've meditated almost every day since 1969, when I became studying yoga during my college years under the instruction of a crazed Greek man who blended Christianity and Hinduism in a strange way.  Even so, I still consider myself almost as much of a beginner when it comes to meditation at my age of 76 as I was at the age of 20. (Guess that's why I like the book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.) I have no idea what produces real growth in meditation. But other people do. Like the author of The Mindful Geek, Michael W. Taft. I started…
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Posted inIndia Mindfulness

How Amit Sood escaped his Asian Indian spiritual traditions

Once in a while I enjoy picking up Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D. to remind myself why I liked the book so much when I first read it in 2019. Here's the blog posts I wrote about Sood's book back then. Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century -- my new favorite bookDalai Lama isn't big on single-pointed attentionDon't look within for inner peace. Look without. This morning I re-read the "Guilty and Back" chapter where Sood describes how the traditions he grew up with in India held him back from coming up with the modern…
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Posted inMindfulness

What we do isn’t as important as how we do it…mindfully

Maybe it wasn't much, but I'll take it. A few days ago I found that an insight which I've rationally known for a long time had partially passed through the dividing line between intellectual understanding and experiential understanding. Meaning, the insight now wasn't so much something that I thought about, but something that had become more of my basic attitude to life. Put into words, my aha! sounds rather trite. Yet it resonated with me. I realized that I'll always be disappointed if my goal is to resolve the problems in my life. For as soon as I deal with…
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