43: Meditation for Seeing Beyond a Wandering Mind

This guided contemplation points to something essential that every meditator must see and understand if they are to go beyond worry over wandering mind. There are many ways to deal with wandering thoughts, but the most important and most powerful is to see the knowing that is beyond wandering or not-wandering. Recognize this and your life will change. Recognize it more and more, and your life will change more and more.

Talk 14: Reality and Illusion in Meditation

What does “Life is an Illusion Mean” and what does it have to do with your electricity bill? I mean, you have your real life, while there are many spiritual statements that seem to indicate there is an ultimate reality and it is different than what we see as real and true now. In this talk, I want to show what the source of the confusion is here and how each and every one of us can get a clear sense, from our own direct experience, of what can be meant by such things as “moving from the unreal to the real” in meditation.

42: Quick Body Scan Guided Meditation

Making the body more accessible to us gives us a base point with which we can get perspective on excessive thinking, explore our emotions, and get communication from our body that leads us in beneficial directions. The body scan opens these lines of communication! Use it early and often.

Talk 13: Balance Striving and Being

The huge question of how to balance our striving in meditation practice opens a whole lot of possible things to say. In this talk however one very important point is made that before trying to work all that out, it is crucial to fully explore and surrender to single moments of allowing everything to just happen.

And these moments should be kept separate from any plan, including how good it would be to do this! Including how to sustain it in time, how to stay with it, or how it relates to everyday life. Keep these special moments separate from all plans as much as possible. Then, we will be more open to the important two aspects of the rest of the question.

1. We have a planning and orienting energy, and it’s there for a reason, and it can and should be used in some measure to go about our life, if it is arising for us. But we get out of balance when that energy captures our attention.

2. We don’t have to figure out that balance by ourselves, life itself will show it to us and life itself will move us down the proper course. If we are open to it that may happen easier. But if we are not open, life will bite us until we get what it is telling us.