Think of every time you bring the attention back into the moment as no different from meditation. This helps you to develop an on-going meditative state of mind and makes it easier to link into the meditation quickly when it comes to sitting meditation. The other thing you can do is to keep making a strong wish to Awaken, at any time of day. Continue reading How To Meditate With Tiredness
The instruction is not to focus on the heart, wake, open and be. The words are there to give you the co-ordinates as it were. When you say “heart” or simply think of the word, for a fraction of a second you experience something… Continue reading How do we work with the Formless Meditation instructions ‘Wake, Heart, Open, Be’? Doesn’t using them just involve more thinking?
We are enough just as we are – what a relief just to hear that and know we are totally loveable and adequate in ourselves – all we need now is to realise that fully and its full implications – our nature is Buddha – and what does that mean? Continue reading Why do I feel so moved by the line ‘Here there is nothing to remove and nothing to add’?
All the time we try to think by stepping back and trying to be objective in the sense of not recognising that splitting ourselves off from experience actually distorts it, and yet what else can we do? That is what we gradually learn in meditation… Continue reading How can the mind be limitless? How can that be true?
Some people are not able to engage properly with vipashyana because they just haven’t enough Shamata [calm abiding], and sometimes the reason is that they are too tense and so relaxation needs to be their first step.
Others are too loose so focusing on a single object helps to bring the focus back to a single point in order to settle and integrate the mind and body enough to be able to develop vipashyana. Continue reading Can I listen to music when I meditate? Or use an object to focus on?
It is interesting isn’t it? With a bit of effort we can get certain experiences that seem to be leading in the right direction and then what? There is much more to it than passing experiences… Continue reading Putting the ‘Heart’ into Meditation
We express our presence through our body, actions, movements and speech. We express it in our bearing, our posture and the way we do things. Our presence expresses itself in the way we take our place in the world, the way we take our seat. Continue reading The gift of being ‘fully present’
To find that way of being we have to make some kind of effort to recognise what is blocking us and setting ourselves up to let those blockages dissolve. Continue reading How do we balance ‘doing’ and ‘not-doing’ in our meditation practice?
First of all we need to know what a Pure Land is and what it means. Eventually we learn that the pure land is nothing other than our true nature. The pure land manifests in the heart when we realise that our true nature is our Buddha nature. So why call this a pure land? Why a place? We are Buddha nature. We are expressions of Buddha nature so why talk about it as if it were a Pure Land? Eventually it’s a matter of seeing this world we are in now as being the Pure Land. Continue reading Long Read Part 1: What is a Pure Land? And Why pray to be reborn there?
Accustoming ourselves is a good way of putting it because it’s not as if we have to create love and compassion – it is more like awakening it within us and then aligning with it more and more – accustomise in that sense. Continue reading Meditation as becoming accustomed to our sense of Love & Compassion
