Skillful Means Podcast

Text me your feedback. Maintaining practice is a must for yoga and meditation teachers, as well as serious practitioners of all sorts who are interested in spiritual growth. Establishing and maintaining the habit of practicing regularly is often hard won. It doesn’t take much to disrupt a daily routine, so what happens when holidays arrive? What happens when we travel for work or go on vacation? H...

Text me your feedback. This relaxing Body Scan practice is inspired by a Buddhist teaching called Mindfulness of the Reality of the Body that appears in the First Foundation of Mindfulness. It's designed to help cultivate non-attachment to the body and to demonstrate one of the Buddha's most fundamental teachings: impermanence. Jennifer begins this episode with a short talk on the contex...

Text me your feedback. In this bonus episode and companion to Episode 6, Sarah Jane takes you through a guided RAIN practice. Experience for yourself this transformative method for reframing your relationships with your feelings while cultivating self-compassion. Skillful Means Podcast offers these guided practices to help you deepen into your yoga and mindfulness journey. Follow us on Facebook an...

Text me your feedback. RAIN (Recognize, Accept, Investigate, Nurture) is a mindfulness meditation method developed by western Insight Meditation teachers to support practitioners in skillfully dealing with difficult emotions. RAIN can be used as an antidote to obstacles when they arise during meditation practice, as a practice in and of itself, in partnership, or off-the-cushion as a means to simp...

Text me your feedback. In this practice episode, Sarah Jane guides you through the practice of walking meditation. You can expect instructions, reminders, and several periods of silence for you to focus on the experience. A formal meditation practice doesn't have to be static. Walking meditation is particularly helpful when you're feeling restless, but it also takes your practice off the...

Text me your feedback. In #4, we discuss what it means to advance in a yoga practice. Through the lens of the koshas--concentric layers of a human’s identity described in the Upanishads--you can view advancement as moving from the gross to the subtle, from the physical to the mental. We unpack the koshas and their related practice methods from the outside in, from asana for anamaya kosha (the phys...

Text me your feedback. Breath awareness is the heart of a mindfulness practice, a gift that brings the mind and body together in the present moment. This simple, yet profound, meditation will help you relax while also boosting concentration and focus. You can practice with this meditation by itself. The short format also makes it ideal for meditating before a yoga practice to help you settle the m...

Text me your feedback. In Episode 2, we unpack “skillful means”: teachings and methods that support a practitioner’s journey on the path toward enlightenment. Serious yoga practitioners and teachers know this both includes and goes beyond asana and pranayama. So, what other means can we take up to wake up? According to the Buddha, there is no one prescription. In Buddhism, skillful means (Pali: up...

Text me your feedback. In Episode 1, we start at the beginning, with the phenomenon that gave rise to the shared project that is Skillful Means Podcast: spiritual friendship.  In Buddhism, spiritual friends (Pali: Kalyāṇa-mitta, Sanskrit: -mitra) provide support and encouragement along the path. They may be monastic, lay peers, or teacher/student pairs. These relationships are fertile ground for b...

Text me your feedback. Welcome to Skillful Means Podcast. Through the lens of Insight Yoga, hosts Sarah Jane Shangraw and Jennifer O'Sullivan will offer conversations on a variety of topics including: an emphasis on the quieter, yin aspects of practice nourishing the energy body weaving in meditation with asana, and inquiry methods, particularly Internal Family Systems Launching: Late Septemb...