31: Short Guided Meditation on the Breath

 

Use this when you don’t have a lot of time but want to be consistent with your practice and not skip a day. Or as a quick pick-me-up anytime you need to re-establish intimate contact with your breath again. Then again, when is that not a good thing to do?

30: Guided Meditation for Focus and Presence

Use this meditation to stabilize the mind and focus in on a single meditation point. While this classic meditation is understood in the west to be merely for enhancing ones mental powers of concentration, in fact it has a direct connection to the development of wisdom and insight into our presence and freedom. This guided meditation explores both aspects and takes us on a tour from concentration to wisdom.

Talk 7: Chattering Thoughts and Loud Thoughts

A Questioner asks: what’s going on with chattering little thoughts all the time while feeling the breath? Should we attend to these chattering thoughts? The practical answer to this question parallels the very purpose of meditation and the very meaning of freedom. This talk points in this direction even alongside the related issue of long, loud, troubling thoughts.

28: Continuity of Sensation Shows Us What is Mindfulness

A guided meditation on sustaining the presence of sensations also leads us deeper into understanding the practical meaning of “mindfulness” and what is awareness. This meditation practices the ability to keep a meditation object present by getting clear on what is the precise action that we do to make that happen. At the same time, we also become more familiar and intimate with that which does not require our action and is our deepest, effortless support in practice.

Talk 6: What is Awareness?

Mindfulness and Awareness can mean two very different things– what is the benefit we meditators can have from drawing this distinction? What does it point to?

26: Letting Awareness Do the Work of Meditation

This guided meditation focuses on the natural support we already have in our practice, on recognizing the awareness that is always there. Meditation need not be a lot of striving and effort– we can recognize this and relax into awareness and relax into the fact that it can do the work of mindfulness for us.

Talk 5: Knowing your Inner Mental Attitude

Half guided meditation, half talk, this intro to the inner mental attitude explores something that colors all of our experience. While we can’t monitor our attitude indefinitely, even by knowing it only sometimes we can turn our whole life around.

24: Follow the Path of the Breath guided meditation

Scan the breath with this meditation that travels along the core path of breath sensations. It’s a massage for the body, from the inside! And it also helps us explore the inner regions of our body where we store emotional traces. This can be a key tool in finding your bridge between breath and intimate contact with your emotional well being.