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Vipassana
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    Larry Rosenberg: The Challenge of Change Paid Member

    Posted by Philip Ryan on 04 Oct 2010
    Larry Rosenberg is the founder and a guiding teacher at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. He is also a senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts and the author of Breath by Breath - The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation and, more recently, Living in the Light of Death - On the Art of Being Fully Alive. His writings have appeared frequently in the pages of Tricycle. In a 1999 interview with Tricycle editor Amy Gross, Larry discusses vipassana meditation as he sees it: The heart of the whole thing is understanding. More »
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    Larry Rosenberg and CIMC Paid Member

    Posted by Philip Ryan on 28 Sep 2010
    Yesterday I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts to help videographer Denise Petrizzo with some of the filming of Larry Rosenberg's upcoming Tricycle Retreat. (I'm not much help with these kinds of things. I try to just stay out of the way.) Here's a picture I took of Larry in the meditation hall at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, looking refreshed after filming (sorry for the terrible cellphone-photo quality): More »
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    Daily Dharma: The Natural Activity of Mind Paid Member

    Posted by Philip Ryan on 10 Sep 2010
    Just as awareness is a natural activity of mind, so, too, feeling, perceiving, and thinking are natural, impersonal activities of mind. They condition judging, liking, disliking, explaining, strategizing, and rehearsing. While these are all natural activities of mind—meaning they appear due to causes and conditions— these secondary activities of mind enhance the sense of self even as they ensnare it into identifying with the content of thoughts. Deeply habituated cultural, social, religious, familial, and personal karmic conditionings dominate the untrained mind. More »
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    Off the grid, into the mind Paid Member

    Posted by Rachel on 01 Sep 2010
    In today's New York Times, Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, describes his experience returning to technology after a week-long Buddhist meditation retreat at Insight Meditation Society (IMS). Having spent his time at IMS "unplugged" from technology---Wright spent five hours of sitting meditation and five hours of walking meditaiton each day---upon returning home he had to confront his email, smart phone, and the seduction of the 24-hour news cycle. Wright describes the wave of complicated emotions that befell him after falling into the trap of clicking on a link to a video of Paris Hilton's recent arrest and then succumbing to his "techno-lust"---online window shopping for a new smart phone (though he admits that he already has an iPhone): So there you go: covetousness, schadenfreude, anxiety, dread, and on and on. More »
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    Concentration and Flow with Weezer's Rivers Cuomo Paid Member

    Posted by Rachel on 10 Aug 2010
    In an interview published yesterday in the LA Times, Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo discusses the band's upcoming "raw and emotional" album Hurley, experimenting with different vocals, and the creative ways he keeps fans on their toes during performances (at a recent show, he found himself serving beer at a bar in the back of the venue.) When the interview turned to cultivating a peaceful mind through Vipassana meditation---which Cuomo has practiced for seven years---the singer said that exercising his mind helps to focus his concentration and flow during Weezer's performances: Your image is as a perennial frustrated guy howling about girls, yet in reality you are a practitioner of Vipassana meditation. More »
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    The Truth of Silence Paid Member

    Posted by Monty McKeever on 31 Jul 2010
    Today’s Daily Dharma: Many people have some ambivalence about silence; they fear it, or don’t value it. Because we only know ourselves through thinking and speaking and acting. But once the mind gets silent, the range of what’s possible is immeasurable. So first you taste the silence. Then you realize that it’s not a vacuum or dead space. It’s not an absence of the real stuff; it’s not that the real stuff is the doing, the talking, and all that. You get comfortable in it and you learn that it’s highly charged with life. It’s a very refined and subtle kind of energy. And when you come out of it, somehow you’re kinder, more intelligent. It’s not something that you manufacture—it’s an integral part of being alive. And it’s vast. We’ve enclosed ourselves in a relatively small space by thinking. It binds us in, and we’re not aware that we’re living in a tiny, cluttered room. More »