Tag Archives: Sharon Salzberg

January 25 – Perception and the breath

Dear Friends, Body, feelings, thoughts, hindrances, aggregates… That’s a lot of things to think about. But it all starts simply. Bhante Gunaratana has this simple reminder about perception of breathing: When you breathe mindfully, you see the arising, existing, and passing away of the form of the breath, or breath-body, immediately as it happens. In the same way,… Read More »

January 22 – Your meditation is always successful

Dear Friends, As we enter into the fourth week of our daily emails, our focus now moves to the fourth way of establishing mindfulness, mindfulness of dhammas, which can be translated as mindfulness of phenomena or “stuff”. As Mark Coleman explains in a lecture from Essential Buddhist Teachings, The other three [ways of establishing mindfulness] – we were… Read More »

January 4 – Walking and lying down

Dear Friends, In The Now Effect, Elisha Goldstein writes: Stepping int the now doesn’t happen only when we stop and pause our bodies; we can enter into a space simply by acknowledging what we’re doing. … why not allow the movements of our lives to be the entry points into the now? One of the most frequent movements that… Read More »

January 18 – Taking aim with the ray gun of kindness

Dear Friends, Kindness! That’s a good thing to reflect on in the middle of the week of the middle of the month! There are traditional meditation practices one can do to incline the mind towards kindness, sometimes called lovingkindness or metta. The Mindful magazine posted a brief discussion of the steps in the practice here: https://www.mindful.org/the-mindful-practice-podcast-loving-kindness-with-sharon-salzberg/ Outside of a formal practice,… Read More »

January 7 – Walking

Dear Friends, Walking meditation. There are plenty of instructions on how to do the formal practice. An older article in Tricycle collected thoughts on walking from a number of respected teachers: Walking: Meditation on the Move Achaan Chah, Sylvia Boorstein, Yasutani Roshi, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Joan Halifax, Bruce Chatwin, Henry David Thoreau, and Matsuo Basho on walking meditation… Read More »

January 6 – nourish yourself

Dear Friends, One of Sharon Salzberg’s “stealth” meditations is Eat a meal mindfully, noticing the colors, the flavors, the texture of what you are eating. The first time I tried mindful eating was the “raisin meditation” in Jeanne’s MBSR class. Here are some instructions for that simple exercise (text; exercise takes ~5 minutes): http://hfhc.ext.wvu.edu/r/download/114469 Every time I try… Read More »