Meditation and Beyond

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Beyond Meditation and this episode Accessing Your Natural Stillness. It is in our larger self that we experience natural stillness – a stillness and clarity which progressively bring distress and suffering to an end, revealing our expansive human possibilities. This stillness is not on a continuum with restlessness. It is not a calm mind. It is not a Relaxed mind. It is...

Send us Fan Mail  As a perfume naturally and spontaneously arises from its flower, our natural empty/aware self has a perfume as well - the qualities of human flourishing. These qualities are seamlessly interwoven into our true self. They have no cause or reason. They just are. They arise spontaneously. They are permanent and unchanging.  These include a peace and serenity that surpasses understan...

Send us Fan Mail In the previous session we experienced the Practice of Direct Awakening. Utilizing this practice we directly drop into and experience our true self. In this episode we will explore how to integrate this experience of our inner self into daily life, so that our life becomes our practice and our practice becomes our life. To accomplish this we explore what to cultivate and what to a...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the next podcast of  The Practice of Direct Awakening.   Previously,   we explored the essence of our true self. We learned that our natural self is both empty of the usual mental content and  aware of moment-to-moment experience. In this podcast we will learn to awaken quickly, directly, and again and again to our true self, until it progressively stabilizes and become...

Send us Fan Mail Your authentic self is both empty of the usual mental content and aware of moment-to-moment experience. We can say, our true self is empty awareness. It is empty of personal history, fully aware of the present, and uninfluenced by our past. As a result, the awareness of our natural self is vibrant, fresh, and free of interpretation. Isn’t it amazing that we retain a pure awareness...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to our fourth session of The Practice of Direct Awakening. The practices we’ve already explored bring us towards the first aim of meditation – cultivating a healthy human life. In this session we begin our exploration of the second aim of meditation – the direct experience of our true self.  We begin by focusing on the differences between our usual day-to-day “ego-I,” our...

Send us Fan Mail Using the foundation of a calm mind, we will practice cultivating a pure, clear, and unconditioned awareness, which is essential ground of meditation. Pure unconditioned awareness - awareness that is free of past content or history - is the natural flow of the living experience, uninterrupted by comment, judgment, or mental elaboration. It is a presence and “beingness” with life,...

Send us Fan Mail A still mind is a prerequisite for accessing our full human possibilities. Rather than relying exclusively on the usual methods to still the mind, we will now learn to overcome the overactive mind through a wise and subtle understanding of how the mind actually works. Left untouched by our interest, attention, or reaction, random mental activity comes and goes by itself like a wav...

Send us Fan Mail                                                 Meditation Meditation is an age-old contemplative practice that has two aims. The first is to improve the quality of day-to-day life through reduced stress, reactivity, distress, and suffering accompanied by a greater happiness, calm, and spaciousness. The second and most traditional aim is to support and enable us to go beyond the p...