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

This guided tour through the body sensitizes you to all the flavors of feeling in the body, and brings you to the vivid enjoyment of subtle breath sensations interacting with whole body sensations. This is a profoundly accessible and healing meditation that leads us toward the shift into a mindful life.

Live Call-in Show! Sept. 10, 2014

The tensions between meditation and our natural state are explored through great questions about restlessness, how to begin a practice, and what the “inner mental attitude” is all about . This is the straight raw recording of our live online video stream with call-in questions. You can join the next one!

34: Giving Yourself a Gift in Meditation

This guided meditation leads you to discover the light-hearted, warm-hearted feeling that is already there, and from that place give a gift to yourself and the world. Very simple, very easy, very good.

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

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.

Talk 4: Where Can I Stop Thinking?

How do I stop thinking so much? It’s a question with the wrong target, pointed in the wrong direction. In this live Q & A recording a meditator asks the question that naturally arises to anyone who tries to meditate. A question that is always going to come up from time to time for everyone. Naturally we may seek to stop or reduce thought because it seems to be something that’s not great for us, to say the least. But is this so? Or is there nothing wrong with thought itself, and what we truly want is just to not suffer our thoughts. Explore the important pointer in this talk.

22 Breathe into Your Emotional Core

Use this guided meditation to contact the layer of basic, innocent sensitivity with which we receive all the echoes and reverberations of emotion in our body.

21 Mindfulness of Thoughts

Wandering thoughts can be part of the meditation. Then there is no such thing as distraction! Just as important, with this noting thoughts mindfulness practice we can get increasingly clear on understanding the nature of thought, distinguishing it from bodily sensation, and becoming aware of what we are actually thinking. All this gives us a leg up on the sometimes confusing swirl of thoughts and feelings that happens in some of our emotional states.