Category: Observing Thoughts and Emotions
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Presence and Active Meditation: The Practice Field of This Moment
Read time 4 minutes. Presence and Active Meditation is a stand alone article in our series regarding mindfulness and meditation. In our last lesson we considered active meditations and their potential to lead us into deeper states of awareness. I suggested they can even open the door to Absolute Presence and Absolute Freedom. That is a bold claim, and perhaps a…
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Active Meditation: What Is It? What Are the Benefits?
Read time 2 minutes. Active Meditation is a stand alone article in our series regarding mindfulness and meditation. Today we take up the value of active meditation. Since all forms of meditation invite presence into our lives, we will also return to this theme in the next few lessons. Presence, after all, is at the heart of…
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Traditional Meditation: A Realistic, Come to Buddha, Conversation
Read time 2 minutes. Managing our expectations of meditation. Traditional meditation is a stand alone article in our series regarding mindfulness and meditation. We won’t be talking about technique today, but about the real value of traditional meditation—and the challenges that inevitably come with it. When I first began meditating, my expectations were sky-high. I thought traditional…
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Beyond Mindfulness and the Limitation of Expectations
Read time 5 minutes. Beyond Mindfulness is a stand alone article in our series regarding mindfulness and meditation. I recently read an article on McGill regarding mindfulness meditation which addressed some of the possible shortcomings of that practice. The article states that many studies seem to indicate that, at least in the short term, mindfulness…
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Imaginative and Emotive Activity
Read time 3 minutes. Explore the vicious cycles that arise as a result of our imaginative/emotive activity. This stand alone article is part of our letting go series. In our last lesson, we saw how emotions are born from a disconnect between intellect and instinct. Today, we look closer at how that disconnect gets amplified—and why our emotional…
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Emotional Freedom: Zen and the Art of Letting Go
Read time 3 minutes. Emotional Freedom is the first stand alone article in our continuing series regarding letting go. What would it feel like to experience true emotional freedom?What steps would we take to begin? For many of us, even on good days, there’s a weight—an untraceable tension that hangs beneath our other experiences. A…
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Mind Means Disturbance—and That’s Not a Problem
Read time 3 minutes. Turn overthinking into a useful tool—an alert for mindfulness into peace of mind. A common misconception of Zen training is that we’re supposed to rid ourselves of all thoughts and emotions. But if we make that the goal, we’ll likely end up frustrated. As Nisargadatta Maharaj says in I Am That, “There…