53: Guided Compassion Meditation

This classic formula for cultivating compassion is an excellent way to bring us back to the fact that mindfulness attention is a kind attention. It is also a great meditation to use at bedtime to sleep great!!

Mindfulness is not a neutral or clinical or objective attention. This guided meditation takes us through several layers of wishing well for ourselves and others. This traditional method of cultivating “metta” is a bit of genius. Using an inner voice, you put voice to a strategically chosen series of well wishing that both taps into established wells of love and spreads the good intentions liberally and indiscriminately, starting from one’s own sense of self and eventually extending to all beings everywhere.

While there may be areas at any point that are conflicted and mixed, that too is part of the work that this meditation does. Some may have mixed feelings about extending good wishes to certain people close to them, or maybe even to themselves. That’s all part of the mix and perfectly fine, as this practice winds itself through you.

A couple tips: don’t worry if you don’t mean it every time (remember its all part of it!) and if one can semi-believe that these good wishes actually could have a effect, that heightens it (but is not necessary).

Have a great time!

52: Being Simply As You Are

This guided meditation is very simple and short, giving you the space and pause to do nothing but remain as you are. Simply being is a refreshing, restful pause that brings us back to ourselves, from one point of view, but really dispels a whole lot of extra stuff that when gone reveals what we already and always were.

Talk 16: Surrender or Self-Improvement?

Meditation is about more than Self-Improvement. That is only its possible side-effect. If we bend meditation to our will and make it serve us, the only definite side-effect is frustration. At some point the meditator will have to make the switch over to something bigger than their sense of “Selfyness” and to a longing for freedom that has been driving their interest in meditation all along.

50: Surrender to the Breath

In this guided meditation on the breath the emphasis is on receptivity, sensitivity, and opening. By offering up the breath sensations to the world to which they belong, we also cultivate an attitude of allowing everything to be as it is.

49: Playing with Being and Breathing

If you play with the edge between conscious deliberate attention and open awareness, your meditation in enhanced so that you can quickly find yourself in a state of ease.

48: Breathing with Intention, and Not

This breath meditation explores the difference between when we consciously, deliberately feel the breath, and when we let it go and allow it to appear by itself. These two flavors of attention are great to recognize, and are easier to recognize by contrast. This meditation will make this clear on an experiential level and give you an attention tool so that you can adjust your meditating to changing circumstances.