The Meditation Course Podcast

Welcome to the Sleep Meditation. An evidence-based practice designed to enhance your sleep. I have taught many meditations in the past that help with sleep. I have taught them on the basis that everyone is different and what works for one person doesn't work for another. There are many meditations that purport to assist in sleep but they are actually more like adult bedtime stories that are actual...

Introduction to Mindful Walking — Part 1 of 2 This is the first of two recordings in the Mindful Walking series. This introduction explains what mindful walking is and guides you through the full practice. Once you've listened once or twice, you can go straight to Part 2 — the guided walk on its own, with no introduction. What is mindful walking? Mindfulness is the undistracted awareness of th...

This episode guides you on your mindful walk. You can pause at any point and move between the sections. Timestamps 00:00 – Preparing to leave for your mindful walk (5 mins) 05:00 – Connecting to your senses before you set out (1.30 mins) 06:32 – Setting out for your walk, connecting to your breath and your body (5.28 mins) 12:00 – Connecting to what you can see (2.12 mins) 14:12 – Connecting to yo...

This podcast is designed for you to listen to while on your walk. There are places where I suggest you pause the recording and where it cycles, and can be repeated, so you can make the walk as long as you wish. Here is the link to a video explaining the walking meditation and a meditation you can do to prepare for it on my YouTube channel:Click here to view the YouTube video. Here is the link to t...

There is a set of practices that I teach which are largely based on the wonderful Buddhist tradition of Metta Bhavana which is the practice of Loving Kindness. These practices are the ones I am teaching this month in #LovingKindness month. Essentially they are meditations in these areas: appreciation, gratitude, compassion, self-compassion, and connection. In this weeks meditation I have added all...

This mediation was taught in one of The Meditation Course Group’s Private training sessions which is part of the benefits of joining the course. Visit https://www.meditationcourse.live/ to learn more. Loving Kindness (Metta Bhavana) is the Buddhist tradition of engaging with our comfortable emotions and using them as a way of making progress in our personal development. This includes gratitude, ap...

The Appreciation MeditationThis practice is part of the core training of The Meditation Course and is fully supported for course members with additional content, training and personally coached support. To find out more about the course, visit our website at: https://www.meditationcourse.live/ You can also just subscribe to our mailing list and get updated with new sample content and offers. The m...

On Saturday, the 28th of March 2020, I ran an online training class entitled the Two Wolves. There is a Native American tradition which says we all embody two wolves that are constantly fighting for control over our attention, actions, and choices - I call these The Wolf of Fear and The Wolf of Freedom. There is a story that a wise man once taught his grandson that... "The wolf that wins is the wo...

In response to the onset of the current crisis, on the 28th of March 2020, I ran an online training class entitled the Two Wolves. There is a Native American tradition which says that we all embody two wolves. The wolves are constantly fighting for control over our attention, actions, and choices. The Wolves represent our better nature and our tendency to be selfish and greedy. I call these The Wo...

This practice is part of the core training of the 2020 Meditation Online Course and is fully supported for course members with additional content, training and personally coached support. This is a meditation that I devised to help calm stubbornly busy mindsIdeally, use it as a precursor to following the breath and not as a replacement for it. Or use it to calm your mind if your mind is stubbornly...

This practice is part of the core training of The Meditation Course and is fully supported for course members with additional content, training and personally coached support. To find out more about the course, visit our website at: https://www.meditationcourse.live/ You can also just subscribe to our mailing list and get updated regularly with new sample content and offers. Labelling the Quality...

This practice is part of the core training of the 2020 Meditation Online Course and is fully supported for course members with additional content, training and personally coached support. To find out more about the course, visit our website at: https://2020meditation.comYou can also just subscribe to our mailing list and get updated regularly with new sample content and offers. Compassion isn't an...

This practice is part of the core training of The Meditation Course and is fully supported for course members with additional content, training and personally coached support. To find out more about the course, visit our website at: https://www.meditationcourse.live/You can also just subscribe to our mailing list and get updated regularly with new sample content and offers. It is traditional in se...

Labelling the thoughts is one of the key mindfulness meditation practices that I teach as a foundation for mindfulness meditation in The Meditation Course. For information on how and when to use the practice and how you can benefit, join our course by subscribing from The Meditation Course Website. To find out more about The Meditation Course, visit our website at: https://www.meditationcourse.liv...

The Meditation of No Meditation is partly a meditation and partly an experience of Mindfulness. It is a window into a present moment that isn’t crowded with repetitive thoughts, memories, anxieties, tasks, priorities, worries and all the other baggage of the 21st century. Mindfulness is “The undistracted awareness of the experience of the present moment.” - My definition. The attributes of the Med...

We all have a collection of memories of our difficult past experiences. These can stay with us for a lifetime. Sometimes these experiences can build up and become a very real burden that is unhelpful for our happiness. There are a number of ways that students of meditation can release their emotional baggage. Compassion, gratitude and self-compassion are key practices that I teach regularly. At th...

A guided version of the following the breath meditation. The following the breath meditation teaches us two things: We have an alternative to being ruled by random thoughts. There is a neutral place, the breath in the present moment, where we can find a refuge from the stresses of everyday life. We learn all of this in the best and simplest way. Gentle repetition trains our mind to return to the p...

This is an example of the sort of content I will upload into the Meditation Course. I have added it to the Meditation Podcast so that the course students can listen and practice. Visit https://www.meditationcourse.live/ for more information. The following the breath meditation is an ancient practice that was taught in India about 2500 years ago.The way I teach it is essentially the same. Follo...

You can practice the Four Tens Meditation to help you to learn to relax. It is also a mindfulness practice as when your attention wanders, you return yourself to the present moment by starting again. Focus your attention on the area of your eyes: forehead, eyebrows, eyes and cheek. Relax this area on ten successive out-breaths. Focus your attention on the area of your jaw: mouth and lips, jaw and...

The first meditation taken from The Meditation Course. This training is from Month 1, Unit 1 - 'How to Meditate - Building the Foundations of a successful practice'When we breathe in, we are activating the sympathetic (fight and flight) nervous system. When we breathe out, we are activating the parasympathetic (relaxation) nervous system. By increasing the ratio of time spent in the out-breath (re...

First of all I’d like to say thanks to all the supporters of the restful mind podcast and the More than just mindfulness podcast. It’s been a source of constant inspiration to me to check my stats and discover people all over the world listening to the podcast, some of you quite regularly. I want to explain my plans for future podcasting, and also, for future meditation training online. Throughout...

Human beings are creatures of habit. To build a new practice such as meditation, it is necessary to do two things. We need to build a habit, and more difficult, we need to intervene in the habits we already have. Intervening in our habits is difficult because they become combined. One habit brings another and this fills our day with a subconscious process I call the Autopilot. The Autopilot consis...

The Yoga of MeditationReferences:The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - Swami SatchidanandaBhagavad Gita - Stephen MitchellInner Engineering - Sadhguru This is a recording of a live-streamed class from The Loving Awareness Meditation Course. You can join us for four live-streamed guided meditation classes on most weeks of the year for the price of a weekly Starbucks latte. https://meditationcourse.live

I recorded this episode at a global corporation in the City of London that I have been teaching at since 2014.For them, and for most people working in the square mile, this is the busiest time of the year. Many projects and deadlines finish at Christmas as does accounting periods so the stress is on. My students here also have extremely busy lives and so fitting in a meditation practice can feel l...

In the Modern World, our minds have been captured by a narrative that also runs in the minds of many others around us. With variations, this is true for almost all of humanity. This incessant train of repetitive thought rationalises and justifies and rehearses and reconstructs our pasts, our futures and our life situations. All in an attempt to make sense of it. To try to explain this complexity,...