Sublime

True meditation is nothing but the cultivation of our capacity to deeply listen in this way.** Through listening—not with the ears but with our whole being—we arrive at a quiet inner knowing of what is right for us, which is not obtainable through any amount of thinking or discussing with others (though those activities can sometimes be valuable as

We see that we are that very irritation in the present moment. Thanks to this approach, we no longer need to make an effort to oppose, expel, or destroy the irritation. When we practice observation meditation, we do not set up barriers between good and bad in ourselves and transform ourselves into a battlefield. That is the main thing Buddhism seek

Guided Meditation: Embracing Life with a Smile The compassionate Buddha is often seen in statues and pictures with a slight smile as he embraces the ten thousand joys and sorrows. When we meditate with the spirit of a smile, we awaken our natural capacity for unconditional friendliness. Sitting comfortably, close your eyes and let the natural rhyth

Dwelling meditatively in the different and expanded sense of self that the process of inquiry opens will make it less likely that habitual self-views are so easily reestablished once this particular experience ends.

One way to sort this out might be to say we should take ourselves lightly but our practice seriously. Usually, we do it the other way around. We are very serious indeed about ourselves, how we’re doing, what we’re suffering, what progress we’ve made, what insight we’ve gotten or failed to attain. We confuse a practice of awareness with an ongoing,

When you find yourself feeling somehow imprisoned in a situation, or grasping unhelpfully at something that is not present, see if you can look within and around you in a way that ‘deconstructs’ your world into its aggregate appearances of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, physical sensations, and mental and emotional experiences. Play and experiment

Jack Kornfield tells the story of a particular evening when Hob was giving a Buddhist dharma talk. One evening, however, he found himself standing before a meditation group having forgotten who he was and why he was there. So he simply began to mindfully acknowledge out loud his experiences: “blank mind … curiosity, nervousness, calming, blank mind