Last week, I attended a public conversation between Sam Harris, author and neuroscientist, and Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. Watch the highlights here and the full video here. Harris has recently come out with his new book, Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (which I recommend) and most of the discussion examined themes central to the […]
Minute of Mindfulness: My blog on the teachings of the dharma.
Wise Stillness (Samadhi) 4/4: Twinkle, Twinkle
In the final installment on Wise Stillness (and also the final installment on these short reflections on the Noble Eightfold Path), I want to try and draw some themes together, particularly the link between Wise Stillness and Wise View. The last limb of the Eightfold Path, in Pali, is Samma Samadhi, often translated as Wise Concentration. […]
Wise Stillness (Samadhi) 3/4: Don't Focus on the Breath
In the first two segments of this short series on Wise Stillness, I tried to emphasize two complementary attitudes that support the experience of stillness. The first, as beautifully articulated by Ajahn Brahm’s teaching, is the attitude of allowing and letting go. The second is an appreciation of essentialism, reminding oneself of the explicit value of simplicity. […]
Wise Stillness (Samadhi) 2/4: No Other Single Thing
Essentialism. I recently came across a fantastic book by Greg McKeown with lots of ‘dharmic’ themes. The book is: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. One of McKeown’s basic ideas is that it’s not just a question of decluttering, stream-lining and getting rid of stuff that’s in your way; it’s much more an issue of investing […]
Wise Stillness 1/4 (Samadhi): The Pleasure of Less
Stillness. And so we come to the final spoke of the Eightfold Path: Samadhi. Often, Samadhi is translated as ‘concentration’, but as Ajahn Brahm suggests in the clip below, it might be translated better as ‘stillness’. This clip is some of the best advice I’ve heard for the development of Samadhi. Please take a few minutes […]
Wise Mindfulness (Sati) 3/3: Proper Balance
Balance. It’s a word we hear a lot about. Work-Life Balance. Fiscal Balance. Spiritual Balance. Protein-Carb-Fat Balance. And like so many of the spiritual faculties we read or hear about, balance, in any sense, can often feel rather elusive. How does Mindfulness Promote Balance? Through meditation practice we gain an intimate glimpse on the way the mind tends to move […]
Wise Mindfulness (Sati) 2/3: Not Mickey Mouse Mindfulness
For this Minute, I wanted to address some of the misconceptions that tend to crop up around the popularized understanding of mindfulness. And these misconceptions are what I’m referring to when I say: Mickey Mouse Mindfulness. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these three forms of Mickey Mouse Mindfulness come up again and again and could benefit from some […]
Wise Mindfulness (Sati) 1/3: Not What, But How
In these next few Minutes, I’ll be reflecting on, of all things, Mindfulness (Sati). Imagine that. Sati is the seventh aspect of the eight-fold path. Many previous newsletters (now archived on my blog: www.minuteofmindfulness.com) have focused on Sati, particularly this one here. But in this newsletter, I wanted to pick up on a theme mentioned in Jay […]
Wise Effort 3/3: The Marvel of Unknowing
Last week I tried something different. At the end of the summer, I often sit a retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. But this year, the center’s schedule and my own weren’t compatible, so I decided to undertake a stay-cation of sorts and do a self-retreat at home, in the middle of Cambridge. The plan was […]
Wise Effort 2/3
Continuing with the theme of Wise Effort in meditation, I wanted to pick up on a thread from Ajahn Sucitto. He writes: “Energy has to be sustainable. For this reason, it’s good to assess if there are things you’re doing that you don’t need to do, so that your resources don’t dissipate. Even as you […]
Wise Effort 1/3
Last week, I was visiting with a friend who is passionately involved with a project to bring sustainable energy to the millions of people on the planet without adequate energy access. He was calling the initiative Sustainable Energy For All (SEFA) [Acronym, mine]. As I listened to him rattle off jaw-dropping facts and figures, my […]
Wise Livelihood
The theme of Wise Livelihood is something that I think about, a lot. Again and again, it raises its head, like a koan. What does a life of integrity and purpose look like? Back in college, I didn’t have a clue what to do with myself. I could see my peers ramping up towards respectable […]
Wise Speech
Ok, back to Wise Speech. No doubt, bringing mindfulness to habits of speech is one of the trickiest, hardest and rewarding domains of practice. I was raised in family and school environments where the art of verbal ju-jitsu was not only required for self-preservation but also a highly-esteemed character trait. The perfectly-timed, razor-sharp, dryly-delivered insult […]
The Intention of Compassion
Here, in New England, we’re bracing ourselves for a winter blizzard. Unfortunately, because of the nasty storm predictions, I decided to reschedule this weekend’s Yin training at Fresh Yoga, in New Haven, CT, to July 11-14. Alas, safety comes first. But this gives me a moment to carry on with the contemplations on the Eightfold […]
Thoughtless Thoughts
Over the years of practicing and sharing meditation, I’ve long believed that attaining a thoughtless state is not the goal of practice. Rather, the aim of practice is to bring mindfulness to thoughts, effectively disempowering them and liberating oneself from their tyranny. I still, more or less, believe all that to be true, but have […]
The Intention of Good Will
Before I continue with reflections from the Eightfold Path, I wanted to indulge in some shameless name-dropping. If you’ve been to my classes, you’ve caught wind of this. But during my last retreat at IMS in December, I re-met, an intellectual hero of mine, Robert Wright. I say re-met, because 8 or 9 years ago, I bumped into […]
Thoughts on Thinking
From the previous discussion of Wise View, we move along the Eightfold Path to contemplate Wise Intention, sometimes referred to as Right Intention. The Buddha describes Wise Intention as a threefold subdivision: the intention of renunciation, the intention of good will, and the intention of harmlessness. Each of these is meant to provide the antidote to […]
A Mind With a View
In the last Minute, I gave a brief overview of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path and how it works to uproot problematic patterns within the mind and leads to an experiential peace beyond the scope of conditioned existence. At first glance, the process seems to unfold in a stepwise progression. The path begins with forms of […]
Radiant and Pure
A frequently cited passage from the Buddha’s teaching is this: “the heart’s nature is intrinsically radiant; defilements are only visitors.” (A 1.61) The term ‘defilement’ is slightly anachronistic. But used here, it refers to the spectrum of mind-states that obscure the heart-mind’s essential radiance. So anything from greed, hatred, delusion, to irritation, restlessness, jealousy, doubt, distress, depression, etc… […]
When The Zen Hits The Fan
I hope this finds you well, relatively cool, and relaxed. In spite of my name, I find the summer to be the most challenging of seasons. It’s the heat, you see. It makes sleep problematic. It’s hard not to sweat profusely, all the time. It’s hard to stay cool-headed. Or as a modern idiom might phrase it: […]