Meditation by waterfalls
I’ve noticed a common thread in talking to many new meditators and Buddhist practitioners. People want to know how meditation is going to make them happy. How long do you have to meditate to transcend to the next plane? How long do you have to meditate before getting high. How does all this meditation get rid of my suffering?!!!! Continue reading “Meditation Magic” »
Ban Offshore Drilling
Buddhism has a reputation for being passive, and there are good reasons for this. All that meditation and mindfulness we do appears passive. And in the beginning many of us do have to mindfully hold back reactions, and refrain from falling into old active patterns that used to get us into trouble. But there is a time for apparent passiveness, and a time to act, a time to be engaged. Continue reading “Engaged Buddhism Needed” »
I’m reading Stephan Batchelor’s new book Confessions of an Atheist Buddhist, and I must say it resonates deeply with me, not because I’m an atheist, but because I went on a similar curvy path of confusion through Buddhism. Fortunately, I didn’t spend years and years on that twisty road like Batchelor did. I saw through the religious BS of Buddhist traditions over a 6 year span instead of decades. Continue reading “Bringing Buddha’s Ideas Back to Buddhism” »
I am surprised by the number of people I meet in person and online who have never stopped to consider the nature of their thoughts or beliefs. What seems to be much more common is that people’s minds are dragging them around, back and forth through life experiences, and they assume that all those thoughts and beliefs that arise are correct, important, and worth defending. Continue reading “Exploring the Mental Experience” »
One of the most useful skills you can get out of meditation is the ability to see and experience objectively how you label patterns of thinking. Soon you realize you have a lot of incorrect labeling in your speech for your views, and you notice it in others. You also start to catch lazy thinking, especially regarding what we know versus what we accept, versus what we believe.
Continue reading “What You Know, Accept, or Believe” »
2008 was full of surprises! Many of those events or situations were not exactly welcome or wished for and some were. And in all of that was a lot of learning and growth, and thankfully I made some interesting discoveries: Continue reading “Sitting Comfortably with Uncertainty” »
If you have any interest at all in meditation, or its benefits, please take the time to watch this video. My wonderful meditation teacher Shaila Catherine talks about her book Focused on Fearless, and the meditative methods that she teaches in the book. She has been gone on a four-month silent retreat, and I’ll be so glad when she gets back!
If the video above is not working, try this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D51WotfbpCE
The methods she describes are in her book, shown below:
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Landing in a hospital bed for a week because of a failing digestive organ got me to thinking a lot about my dietary habits. This is not new for me, though. For the last several years I have yo-yo’d between dropping the junk food in favor of more healthy fare, and bounced right back to eating cheese puffs for breakfast. Continue reading “Who’s in Charge Here Anyway?” »
As some of you may know from my previous post, Continue reading “Making Myself at Home in Second Life” »
One morning I took Cannon outside to do his business, and discovered my neighbors digging holes in the cement of their carport adjacent my side yard. Nearby they had a pile of wood and bags of cement. Mind you my side yard is about three feet wide, where I have two trees and had just planted four new bushes. It’s a small, narrow plot that runs along the side of my house. To step off the dirt off my yard is to step on their carport. Continue reading “Making Peace in My Own Backyard” »
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