Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Meditation isn’t about doing it right. It’s about trusting yourself.

TIME magazine rarely has stories about meditation. So it was a pleasure to turn a page of the February 12, 2024 issue and see a title: "The noises in my head at a silent retreat." I could relate to those words. For after starting to meditate every day in 1971, during the past fifty-three years my meditation has involved a lot of noises inside my own head.  Thoughts. Emotions. Cravings. Things to do. Cosmic conceptions. Crude desires. You know, everything that's going through my mind outside of meditation. It's just more obvious when I'm sitting still, usually with eyes closed,…
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Posted inMindfulness

Pain is a good example of how mind and body are united

I'm intimately familiar with pain. All of us are, of course, since everyone experiences pain -- aside from the unfortunate people who don't feel it at all, which isn't a good thing, because they usually suffer serious injuries or even death from not recognizing when something is dangerous, like a fire burning their skin. Often pain becomes a more familiar companion the older we get. That's true of me. I was mostly pain free until early in 2020 when, at the age of 71, I developed sciatica in my right leg.  Because this coincided with the beginning of the Covid…
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Posted inMindfulness

Great observations about life in “The Mindful Body”

It was kind of a strange way for me to learn about a book. I usually ignore emails from Strong Towns, an organization devoted to making cities and towns more livable, but this one featured messages from staff members about what they're finding interesting in books, film, and such. I saw that a woman spoke highly of Ellen Langer's book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Since I'm big on mindfulness, and also liked the creative mention of "chronic health," I ordered the book after reading some laudatory reviews on Amazon. The cover copy says that Langer,…
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Posted inMindfulness

Joan Tollifson’s “awakening” seems to be mindfulness, basically

I'm continuing to enjoy Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp. As noted before, she has an approach to spirituality, and life, that resonates with me. Simple. Clear. Non-dogmatic.  But I'm coming to believe that as distinctive as her views are, they seem to boil down to a familiar subject: mindfulness. Since Tollifson doesn't use this term in her writing and speaking -- at least, I haven't come across it yet -- at first I thought that her worldview was founded in the disciplines mentioned on the back cover of Nothing to Grasp in an "About the Author" section:  Joan Tollifson…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Here’s a good description of what Buddhist mindfulness is all about

There's lots of ways to look upon mindfulness. Mostly I view mindfulness as a practice that doesn't require a grounding in Buddhism. However, I enjoy reading about how Buddhist practitioners view mindfulness, or vipassana insight meditation.  A concluding chapter of Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, a Buddhist monk, contains a description of what mindfulness can lead to that I found clear and mostly convincing, though I have some doubts about whether the supposedly unconditioned state of nibbana/nirvana actually can be achieved. Enjoy. As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together,…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation Vedanta/Advaita

If we’re only happy when life has no problems, we’ll never be happy

After recommending a conversation between Sam Harris and André Duqum after listening to only ten minutes of it, now I can really recommend the conversation after listening to two hours of the 2:20 talk between them. Harris is in fine form here. Having been an avid user of his Waking Up app, I've heard quite a few talks between Harris and some other spiritually inclined person. He tells some of the same stories in the Duqum conversation but much of what Harris says is new to me. I haven't been taking any notes, so will simply relate what I remember…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Don’t watch yourself. Be yourself. In meditation, and in everything.

I usually listen to a daily guided meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. But sometimes I enjoy other offerings on the app, which includes a section called Theory. There's also Practice and Life. Now and then Harris correctly says in his guided meditations that listening to a conversation in the Theory section can be just as valuable of meditating. After all, meditation is about paying attention to what's happening in the present moment. If that thing is an interesting conversation between Harris and someone else, and I'm paying close attention to it, then, hey, that's a form of meditation.…
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Posted inMindfulness

A mindfulness lesson in the checkout lane

This afternoon I was in a south Salem Fred Meyer checkout lane. There was only one person ahead of me, so I decided to skip the self-checkout, which I usually prefer as the lines aren't as long. When the person in front of me moved forward, I didn't immediately do the same with my grocery cart. I heard the man in back of me say something. Couldn't make it out exactly, but it sounded something like "you can move now." Anyway, I ignored the comment, unloaded my groceries on the conveyor belt and soon was at the head of the…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mindfulness meditation is like briefly being dead

Whenever I need a heaping dose of reality shorn of unnecessary concepts, my eyes wander to a bottom shelf in my office where the mindfulness books hang out.  This morning I was drawn to pick up a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn that I'd read before, Wherever You Go, There You Are.  I've read other mindfulness books by Kabat-Zinn. As he says in the introduction, his previous book, Full Catastrophe Living, is largely aimed at people akin to those who use his stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center run by Kabat-Zinn. That book had to be quite…
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Posted inAwareness Buddhism Mindfulness

What if religions are wrong and there’s nothing to find?

In my experience, the most difficult part of writing is the first sentence and the last sentence. With one, there's nothing that comes before. With the other, there's nothing that comes after. So those sentences are unique. I struggled with the first sentence in my book, Return to the One. Until finally, a sentence popped into my head that seemed just right to me. If something has been lost and you're not sure where to look for it, there's good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield. Then I spoke about the familiar situation (familiar…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

Mindfulness: whatever happens is the curriculum of that moment

One of the things that I like about the Buddhist notion of emptiness, where change is omnipresent because nothing possesses an inherent existence, is how much money it saves me on books. For I've found that rather than buying a new book to get some fresh ideas, I can look over the books I already own and reread them. This gives me fresh ideas because I've changed from the last time I read the book, so much of it will seem new to me. Case in point: a few days ago I was looking at the mindfulness section in my…
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Posted inConsciousness Mindfulness Neuroscience

Important truth: what we need isn’t God, but our own being

Well, today I finished a book I've been blogging about for a while, Seth Gillihan's Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As is the case with most books I read, I liked almost all of it, finding just a few parts annoying. I'll mention the annoying parts first, to get them out of the way. Gillihan doesn't mention religion or his own faith very often in the book. But given his subject, even a few times seemed too many to me. I was OK with him using "spirit" as a way to describe the deeper aspect of life. Here he describes his…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Mindfulness and meditation aren’t about improving ourselves

I used to believe that meditation, and its close relative, mindfulness, were supposed to make me and my life better.  Wiser. Calmer. More spiritual. Happier. And more besides. In other words, I looked upon mindfulness and meditation as akin to exercise. I put in the work of training my mind and I benefit from that workout. Maybe not instantly, but over time I'd reap the rewards. I can't say that I've totally discarded that perspective. However, it isn't as strong in me anymore.  Instead, I've come around to the notion that the idea of gaining something from mindfulness and meditation…
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Posted inAwareness Mindfulness

Mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy

I got a Master's Degree in Social Work way back in 1973 that exposed me to the fundamentals of counseling before I headed off in the direction of health services research and planning. Then I married my second wife, Laurel, in 1990. She also had a MSW, but unlike me, pursued a career in social work, ending up after our marriage by starting a private psychotherapy practice. Laurel would talk about how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was used in her practice, since it is fairly short-term and insurance companies don't like paying for lengthy psychotherapy aimed at delving into the…
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Posted inMindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

If our attention wanders, the question is where it should rest

Most of us are afflicted more often than we'd like with what often is called "monkey mind." Meaning, our attention is prone to flitting around from this to that to whatever, sort of like monkeys swinging from branch to branch in a seemingly aimless fashion. But why is monkey mind a bad thing? Monkeys seem to have a good time in trees. Why are we humans so concerned about controlling our attention? That's one of the themes in an article by Casey Cep in the January 30, 2023 issue of The New Yorker, Eat, Pray, Concentrate. The online version is…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mindfulness helps bring body and mind into the same place

Inspiration can be found anywhere. When I started to read the current issue of TIME magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to turn a page and find "5 ways to be mindful without meditating." (The online version of the story has 8 ways.) I liked what Angela Haupt had to say about how our body can be in one place while our mind is in a far distant place -- often not just geographically, but also in time, since almost everybody is prone to thoughts of the past and future even as our body is firmly in the present. After reading…
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Posted inMindfulness

Mindfulness made simple, by my own mind

I like mindfulness a lot. It's become my favorite approach to meditation. But given how many books I've read about mindfulness, I'm struck by how overly complicated this activity can be described. Which I think says more about the economics of the book business than about mindfulness. After all, few people want to buy a book that's just a few pages long. So authors who write about this subject have to say a lot about something that appears to me to be quite simple. Thus here's my exceedingly brief summary of how I've come to view mindfulness. Naturally others likely…
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Posted inMindfulness

Feel more with the body, less with the mind

When someone asks "How are you feeling?" that familiar question contains within it a lot of profundity. Because how we answer it reveals quite a bit about ourselves. Mostly I take a few moments to think about what I've been doing recently. You know, how well or poorly my day is going. Or week for a longer time span. I'd remember what's been bothering me and what's been pleasing me, then try to describe the net effect of my joys and sorrows. There's nothing wrong with this. But reading "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness" has…
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Posted inMindfulness Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Why I find mindfulness so appealing after 35 years of religion

Having given up on organized religion, an Eastern/Indian variety, after 35 years of embracing the lure of returning to God by traversing supernatural realms, I've become enamored of mindfulness. (See here and here for some previous blog posts explaining why.) Before making another attempt at this, this is how a book I'm reading, and enjoying, "The Mindful Way Through Depression," describes mindfulness. As we said toward the end of the preceding chapter, mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to things as they are. It's a way of shifting from doing…
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Posted inBooks Mindfulness Spiritual practice/meditation

Instead of trying to fix ourselves, it’s better to be just be ourselves

One of the joys of reading for me is finding connections between seemingly disparate books. As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm reading a book about depression and mindfulness. I've also started a book by a neuroscientist, "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness." Patrick House, the author, says that he doesn't agree with all of those ways, but in brief creatively-written chapters he makes the case for each way in accord with how proponents argue for it. In his first of the nineteen ways, House puts us in the place of a sea creature. It needs fast reflexes…
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