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Meditation 101: Less is More

Teaching meditation in prison, Barry Evans found the heart of his practice when he was forced to cut most of it out.

Barry Evans

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Amulet, Steven B. Perkins

My instructions to first-time meditators are becoming more and more minimalist. These days, it’s something like “Sit quietly and notice what’s going on.” It used to take longer—when I was the meditation instructor at a Soto Zen sangha in Mountain View, California, I would spend thirty to forty minutes telling newbies how to sit, how to breathe, how to bow—not to mention how to enter and leave the zendo, how to ask a question, and (talk about setting them up!) what to expect.

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