Prerequisite: Believe or disbelieve nothing. Find out for yourself. Check it out in your own experience.
Meditation accelerates seeing things closer to how they actually are instead of how we think they should be while still respecting and valuing the experiences of any moment. We build the muscle to bear the difficult and come to realize difficulty can characterize experience while not letting it define the experience. Meditation practice naturally unfolds an ever increasing skillful view of life and all things revealing how to better eliminate unneeded stress and suffering while empowering us to respond wisely instead of react.
FUNDAMENTALS
Intention
What brings you to meditate? What is your deepest intention, your highest aspiration for meditation and for your life? What motivates your thoughts, words and actions?
Cultivation
What is it you need to let go of? What within you needs cultivating? What’s your relationship to what’s already been cultivated? What is it internally or externally or both that is to be accepted?
Investigation
Being curious how each experience feels in the body. Dive deep into the details, zoom way out for the big picture and rest in neutrality for compassionate observation.
Balanced Wholeness
Exemplifying the embodiment that continually fosters our awareness to act wisely and realize wellbeing for ourselves in every area, then in all life and beyond.
But How?
Where do we start? By cultivating mindfulness with a core, regular (semi-)formal (sitting) meditation practice.
We’re already familiar learning from the voice of teachers and with visuals then later thinking about, reflecting upon and contemplating new material. But when we train in meditation to experience all phenomena with the body, mind and heart we come to directly see and know for ourselves well-being and wisdom that which remains nearly inaccessible by standard means of learning.
Formal Practices
Heart practices
- Loving-kindness/Unstoppable Friendliness: general good will & well-wishing
- Compassion
- Empathic Joy: happy for (other’s) happiness
- Equanimity: intimately seeing the arising and passing of all things with calm and balance
Mind unity (concentration)
Amongst other ways, turning attention into a focused laser beam without exertion by excluding everything except a single meditation object and gently but firmly returning to it again and again thus strengthening our concentration muscle while gathering and unifying the mind
Four foundations of mindfulness
- Body
- Hedonic/Feeling tone (pleasant, unpleasant or neither pleasant nor unpleasant)
- Mind
- Contents of mind/phenomena
Awareness practices
Where are you aware from? Are you aware of awareness? Are you the awareness that is aware? Is awareness aware of itself?
Let’s progress our practice
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