I’m now back after a few weeks away on retreat and thought I’d share a practice I came up with while away. It involves an exploration of what we identify with. On this topic, the philosopher Thomas Metzinger has a great concept he refers to as the unit of identification. In his words this …
This week we’ll be dipping into an acceptance practice. Acceptance of experience as it happens is crucial to increasing equanimity in the face of phenomena and thus to making progress with one’s insight practice. The more we learn to embrace, absorb and accept all experience as it manifests, the less we seek to grasp on …
This week we’re going to pick up where we left off last time in the investigation of the relationship between our embodied experience and others. We’ll warm up with a guided silent noting practice in the first meditation. Then we’ll further explore how that experience shows up in the presence of others. We’ll do this …
This week we’re going to focus on exploring how emotions show up in our bodies. We can start such an exploration from an understanding of feelings as a combination of arising thoughts and bodily-based emotions. Without perceptual clarity (which can be developed through insight meditation) this combination is often perceived as one entangled whole. We’ll …
This week we’re going to dive into a rarity at meditative.dev and do a single forty-five minute guided meditation where we practice and see the relationship between two aspects of concentration: meta-awareness and letting go. We’ll sharpen both of these in the first half of the session and then we’ll use our new shiny …
Harness meta-awareness and letting go in the search for the self Read More »
This week we’re going to be exploring the place where insight meditation and social experience meet. The three meditations are going to involve adopting a particular stance. By stance I mean a particular attitude or orientation toward experience. We can also think of such stances as lenses we can put on through either intention or …
This week we’re going to be reviewing fundamentals. It will be a good week to make sure you’re not missing any key aspects to your practice. The role of aspects such as posture, intention, relaxation, acceptance, effort, meta-awareness and the three characteristics in insight will all be put into practice in the session’s two guided …
The basic idea of why people get stuck in the dark night on Goenka retreats has to do with the movement of attention, where insight investigation needs to take place, and the generation of the hindrances from too much tension/contraction. First, the arc of attention over the insight stages: Attention gravitates to the centre in …
Why people often get stuck in dark night on Goenka retreats Read More »
This week we’re going to work with noting again. We will explore how we can apply noting effectively in off-the-cushion contexts. Using noting in such a way is kind of like using training wheels on a bicycle, you use the training wheels to get started, and then, once you can handle the balance without falling …
Hey everybody! This is the week of fire kasina. We’ve previously done visual field meditation (earth kasina) with bowls and other objects, but this one is a bit different. Here we start by looking at a candle flame (or other light source), however the real action plays out after closing one’s eyes and switching the …
