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Mindfulness (sati) |
The meditation practice of maintaining awareness of one's body and consciousness |
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Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds
If you’re out watering your flower garden by hand, you naturally concentrate the flow of water to benefit your beautiful flowers. If there’s an area of weeds, you don’t waste water there. As best you can, you avoid watering the weeds.It’s the same with your consciousness. You can learn to selectively water the positive seeds and flowers in you by attending to them. There are enough weeds. You don’t have to encourage them. More » -
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Commit to Sit: Week 4, Thoughts
WEEK FOUR: ThoughtsYou’ve made it to the final week. Acknowledge your hard work and recognize the joy that comes from following through on a commitment. In this final week we will further develop the skills we have worked on over the last twenty-one days and will expand our realm of focus to include thoughts. Working with Thoughts For the purpose of meditation, nothing is particularly worth thinking about: not our childhood, not our relationships, not the great novel we always wanted to write. This does not mean that thoughts will not come. In fact, they may come with tremendous frequency. We do not need to fight with them or struggle against them or judge them. Rather, we can simply choose not to follow the thoughts once they have arisen. The quicker we notice that we are thinking, the quicker we can see thought’s empty nature. More » -
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At Home In Our Bodies
Can Buddhist practice liberate us from the prison of physical pain? How can meditation help when medicine falls short? Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph. D., professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, speaks to these questions as a longtime practitioner of Buddhist meditation and hatha yoga, and as a pioneer in the use of mindfulness to treat chronic pain and illness. More than 13,000 people have visited the world-renowned Stress Reduction Clinic that Kabat-Zinn established in 1979 at the UMass Medical Center, and the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program—described in Kabat-Zinn's bestseller Full Catastrophe Living—is now also offered at some two hundred other medical facilities worldwide. More » -
Got Attitude?
A few years ago I was in the middle of a difficult negotiation with the Maui County Department of Water Supply, a local government agency, trying to resolve a long-standing stalemate. Things already weren’t going my way when the leading official said to me, “You surely don’t need me to remind you that life’s unfair! You’re old enough to know that!”His rebuke triggered a wave of emotion and reactivity. Embarrassment, humiliation, shame, and then indignation washed over me. I watched the impulse to be angry with him rise like a tide and flood my mind. Schemes, strategies, and thoughts of revenge rushed to the surface. I was tense and self-conscious. I longed to escape. More » -
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Instructions for Listening Meditation
Try to sit stable like a mountain and vast like the ocean.Listen to the sounds as they occur. Do not imagine, name, or analyze the sounds. Just listen with wide-open awareness. Let the sounds come to you and touch your eardrums. Go inside the sounds and notice their fluid nature. If there are no sounds, listen, and rest in this moment of silence. Notice how sounds arise upon certain conditions and disappear upon others. Do not grasp at any sounds. Do not reject any sounds. Just be aware of sounds as they arise and pass away. Open yourself to the music of the world in this moment, in this place. In your daily life, notice the positive and negative habits you might have in your approach to listening. What helps you to listen fully and spaciously? If you are in a place that is very noisy, how can you help yourself? Must you find a quieter place or wear earplugs? Or can you be with these sounds in a different way? More »
