All posts by Alan Klima
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.
40: Feel Your Way into Your Being
This guided meditation starts with a soothing breath to feel your way into the core of the breath-body and from your alive, sensitive presence, and then guides you to remain there, to enjoy your being now and to more easily return to it in the midst of busy life.
Talk 11: Feel the Natural Joy
There is a natural joy always here. Where is it? This question is an important one that requires radical honesty to answer, yet it is otherwise simple and natural to get into contact with this fount of aliveness.
38: Simply Being Short Meditation
Without having to do very much at all, simply being as you are is a very powerful meditation that uses our intention and attention in just about the most skillful way possible, which is to say, in the slightest, easiest, and simplest way. Practice this guided meditation and then apply it in your life to every stolen moment. Soon you will understand meditation very well.
Talk 10: The Quiet
The real Quiet is not the physical quiet of sounds, nor is it even a quiet from thoughts or a quiet mind. What is it and how can we recognize it? This can be a sticky point for meditators, but this sticky point cannot overpower the quiet itself, a silence greater than sound or thought and which makes everything about a meditation practice work better, even if our main goal happens to be having a quiet mind and body.
36: The Vivid Body Scan
Live Call-in Show! Sept. 10, 2014
34: Giving Yourself a Gift in Meditation
Sunday Sept. 21st 12 noon Pacific time– Live Call-in Show!
Our second live Q & A session is near!
Anyone can come and listen, watch the live video stream, and ask questions. I am taking questions via Skype (just the voice part)
Let’s meet live and have the chance for some back and forth and for responding to questions, issues, observations in context. I picked a time that works most places in the world.
Please come with your questions!
check out the live stream page here:
Talk 8: After I Meditate, It Goes Away
The states of mind we generate through meditation are like all states that come and go. If they don’t last, what’s the point of meditation? This talk explores two reasons why temporary states of equanimity through meditation help us to recognize our fundamental, always present and unshaken stillness, and also break the cycles of negativity. These two reasons are certainly worth the price of admission!
32: Intimate with Your Inner Mental Attitude
This guided meditation focuses on the inner mental attitude, on becoming intimately familiar with it. By reinforcing our connection of attention with the inner mental attitude, we head off cycles of negative thought and emotion sooner, naturally, and effortlessly. This practice sets this positive influence in our lives in motion. Practice it often! Good thing is, its easy and enjoyable.
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
Talk 7: Chattering Thoughts and Loud 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.