Rope Burn

It seems as though the only way for there to be some suggestion of my existence as a separate "self", it can only be hinted at through assumption. The second I start looking for it in my direct experience, it vanishes.

Coming out of a few weeks of fairly potent sadness and overwhelm and depression, I've gained a little bit of insight as to what I can be doing as unpleasant thoughts and feelings arise (alarms) two more skillfully triage my taking action into "now", "later" or "never."

The last time my wife and I were really high together, we came up with a saying that seemed to capture the feeling of being completely open to everything that was happening. Now, that same saying is a window which either opens to happiness or closes, and keeps happiness out.

Somehow I thought all the spiritual practice had put me in a position of being immune to overwhelm, burnout and feeling stressed out. Turns out, I was wrong.

We are fortunate in that we can actually conditioning service systems to become more accepting of unpleasantness while simultaneously accessing states of relaxation. This means external circumstances are no longer what govern our sense of "things being okay," and instead we find ourselves in a position where we can gradually increase the territory of what we consider to be "okay."

In this meditation we're going to be practicing noticing when we have been carried away by trains of thought, and simply getting off each train. We will be shifting our attention to the in-breath, and abiding in a state of mental tranquility if it arises.

As I record this episode I'm in the middle of feeling resentment and anger. Normally, these feelings would be directed at another person. But the deeper truth is that I am the problem.

Inviting all aspects of experience into the traveller's inn of awareness, and tending the fire of awareness that illuminates them all.

Rumi (an ancient enlightened poet) was asked, "What is Sufism" and he replied, "Joy in the face of sudden disappointment."

Border Collies need to be challenged physically and mentally in order to thrive. If neglected, and left to their own devices - this breed of dog is inclined to misbehave. The excess energy becomes destructive and the potential for that energy to have been spent skillfully is squandered. Our minds are similar, and in this guided meditation we will give our "dog minds" a job to do.

Exploring the inverse relationship between knowledge and freshness of experience.

I've always tended to separate formal meditation from tedious and mentally strenuous tasks like those encountered on my laptop at work. My question at this point is how do I maintain an awakened mind during heavily left-brained tasks which by their very nature require my full attention, leaving not much additional RAM for paying attention to attention itself.

The space between thoughts is all we need to notice during meditation. This silence is the non-dual state, where we have not become identified with thought.

A line from the Bhagavad Gita can guide us to the insight needed to skillfully participate in our worldly activities while maintaining an open heart.

Just returned from a 4 day Zen retreat, trying to communicate what it's like at the moment.

If you don't know how to get out of your own way, the practice of releasing all effort may be wild new country replete with opportunity.

We work our asses off to have these enlightenment experiences and then what? What does practice look like on the other side of seeing that you are indistinguishable from the rest of the universe, and the Avatar of our "self" was never actually there in the first place? Oddly, it comes down to satisfaction. If we can ask ourselves if we want anything in any given moment to be different, and for the...

Internal Family Systems (IFS) seems to overlap with Zen in one very significant and helpful way: it provides a system for disidentifying from our own challenging emotions and becoming merely aware of them. The surprising part is that we become unburdened by that which we simply notice, versus that which we "are". In the end, it seems increasingly true to me that the less "self" is present (and the...

For whatever reason, early in my practice I really had a hard time complying with the instruction to always sit straight while meditating. My thinking mind could form all kinds of arguments against it and so I wanted to practice meditation in all these different positions. But as my practice has matured a little, I'm seeing more clearly that the structure in traditional seated meditation plays an...

In the first written Zen document, the Hsin Hsin Ming - a Zen Master warns us that the greatest mistake is to pursue Mind (nirvana/enlightenment) with the thinking mind. In the shadow of this statement lurks a direct pointing to a meditative technique which we can use to open us up to glimpse the infinite.

How we think about our meditation practice can actually get in the way of true meditation. The ability to discard the identity of the "meditator" and to really just continually come back to just paying attention is the antidote to struggling to meditate consistently.

Our starving ancestors used to spend days chasing antelope across the fertile crescent. Their hanger served them well enough to get us to where we are today, and so I'm not so sure we should want to turn our backs on this evolutionary gift.

I've been spending time with ChatGPT trying to rebuild a 1989 computer game. During the process, AI and I have accidentally produced a hero paint brush. And with this hero paintbrush, I unlocked an uncertainty epiphany.

Considering the possibility that our thoughts are totally inconsequential can offer utter release from being implicated by them. At first, thoughts are like a finger tracing a line in water. As we practice, thoughts become more like a snake uncoiling and slithering away. As our practice matures, thoughts become like thieves breaking into an empty house. By giving those thieves nothing to steal, we...

Despite the obvious fact that we will always experience setbacks in our day to day lives, we tend to have some underlying expectation that "one day" things will be just the way we want them. How do we free ourselves from this fantasy and engage directly with the freedom already available in on this bumpy ride of life?