Fresh perspectives are great for practice. Variety can be a spice of Meditation! This talk explores the meaning of “meditation techniques” and shows how a variety of ways of attending to our experience is immensely helpful in sustaining a practice within a busy modern life. Most important, is doing it consistently, and variety and freshness helps this immensely. The best meditation is the one that gets done!
Playing with meditation is a natural way to stay engaged, and in these exercises you can play along with Alan at knowing and noticing thought and recognizing our awareness itself. Rather than trying to figure it out, better to play around with it and gain direct experience. There is actually quite a lot of potential here to recognize our already present, always knowing awareness.
There are not only two kinds of breath: deliberate and automatic. There is a whole spectrum between and in fact our understanding of intention is much better felt, sensed, and experienced than defined in words. This breath meditation explores the realities of our relationship with the breath and is a powerful way to come to the stillness that sees it all.
The idea can reach a meditator that we must stare straight into suffering without flinching, and also not be attached to pleasure. This is usually not a skillful idea and is not good for mindfulness practice. In this talk, we are pointed in another direction, toward our simply being present and the inherent joy of that, an acquired taste we should be gaining. Resisting pleasure and stoically facing our suffering can be like turning a deaf ear to this.
This lesson and guided meditation practices the art of checking our inner mental attitude. It is a good lesson to go through at least once to investigate our awareness of something intimate and powerful, that colors our every experience. Change your attitude, change your life!
Delve into the intimate and subtle feelings of the heart region, use the breath to explore and bring to light what it is that we are feeling. A simple and fundamental pointing to what meditation can be: actually feel what you feel.
Sensitizing the awareness to walking and the feet is a great meditation and complement to sitting meditation. Learn this meditation here, or refresh your connection to it with this guided walkthrough of walking meditation.
Starting with a grounded sense of the body, this breath meditation explores breathing into and from a sense of presence, and has a contemplative benefit to it as well as a centering effect.
Commitment to the moment is to the moment alone, and does not even include committing to meditation or any future endeavor or even to future moments, and it is not regret about past moments lost to distraction. In this guided contemplation we explore presence and distraction in the light of what is immediate and real.
Bodies are made up mostly of space, on the atomic level, and the sensations in our body can be experienced as space-like, giving us a new perspective on them, taking our sensitivity deeper, and helping us accept and make room for our denser, more challenging sensations and pains to release.
Learn mindfulness on whole body breathing, a very deep meditation that gains us access and sensitivity to the body. It can also be deeply healing.
Meditation that prepares the body and mind for sleep, using a guided body scan leading into a guided rest in a natural effortless awareness. Great as a regular sitting meditation when we are stressed and over-energized too!
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One of the first, best tools that a meditator can acquire is an awareness of attention itself, and a way to experiment and play with, and investigate, attention. In this guided exploration we will develop a taste for attention and an awareness of some of its behaviors.
Today’s guided body scan meditation is medium-length, definitely enough to sink very deeply into awareness of the body. This is one of the fundamental practices of meditation, because it sensitizes us in a way that helps any other kind of meditation we do. Mindfulness of the body helps us come out of excessive thinking, deal with moods and emotions, and expand the range of our awareness of sensation ranging from pain to the most subtle sensations. This flexibility is of utmost importance to the curious and inquiring meditator, and sensitizing the attention to the subtlety is of immense importance down the road.
This 10 Minute Guided Mediation on the Breath gets us directly in touch with our feeling presence and resets the day, readies us for the day, or prepares us for night.
There is more to breath meditation than “Pay Attention to the Natural Breath.” This talk explores some of the ways to play with and experiment with the breath that are equally “mindful” as the more common instruction, and have surprising extra benefits. This talk goes with the last guided meditation and helps start the inquiry into our experience through breathing.
This Breath Meditation is much more effective and enjoyable than simply “paying attention to the breath.” Find out how much fun and fascination is possible with this mindful breathing meditation. Just follow along.
When we are assailed by thinking, it seems like thought is big and we are surrounded by thought, engulfed by thought. Or even when the mind is just plain noisy, this meditation helps really experience the smallness of thought and gives us a clear perspective on thinking. With this meditation on space and thinking, the big problem of thought, worry, stress, and monkey mind is put in its proper perspective, as a small thing that arises inside of a bigger space.