Rabbit Hole

This 25-minutes long practice was recorded in Costa Rica on March 17th, 2020, in a time of great anxiety about coronavirus. It describes how to face emotional intensities and/or sensorial challenges in a paced and responsible way: the pendulation between opening and expanding capacity, and then moving back to safety and comfort and knowing our […]

This 17-minute meditation was recorded in Costa Rica on March 19th, 2020. My retreat co-leader Scott Davis and I had been up all night taking care of someone in great distress. Scott is a Chinese Traditional Medicine practitioner; he has a very grounded and comforting way of putting his hands on people, feeling the pulse in their wrist, […]

One of my favourite life and meditation practices is called “practice enlightenment.” It comes by way of Dogen, the famous Japanese founder of Soto Zen, and is a kind of antidote to spiritual striving. What if you were already exactly where you needed to be? In this way, we practice our own “enlightenment,” moment by moment. It’s a superb practice for lazy people and I intend to ruin your motivation forever.

“Hey, what are you doing today?”
“Nothing.”
“But, you did that yesterday.”
“Yes, and I haven’t finished.”

Something mysterious and beautiful happens when we do nothing together. It seems to make space for a particular kind of intimacy that – as per the theme of this month – we can call devotion. This Monday, we explore.

Here’s a 5-minute guided meditation called “The Most Basic Meditation,” from the 10% Happier app. It’s about staying open and centred even when we’re tense. You can do this meditation sitting, or while walking around. Just a few minutes can feel like a mini-reset.

Hello Exploded Brains! My own exploded brain wishes to communicate with you, but (on account of said explosion) I find myself unable to summon the necessary resources. Fortunately, like all of us, I have a strange nature-given capacity to un-plode myself. Call it focus, call it absorption. As I commit myself to the activity at hand, I can almost feel the various task-relevant parts of my brain, body, and attention all converge and synchronize. In this way, moment by moment, we secure the world in front of us. Join me as we explore this everyday miracle.

So apparently there is this thing called awareness that we are supposed to be aware of. It sounds ridiculous! But let’s give it a shot anyway. This Monday night, your CHALLENGE (should you choose to accept it) is to very lightly and delicately stay aware of the present moment, for 35 whole minutes, despite the artful shenanigans of yonder mind and yonder world, which will endeavour in their usual charming way to take us up and take us down and take us, frankly, all around.

Many times I’ve heard Shinzen say how we begin with trying to fit meditation into our lives, but over time, a figure ground reversal can happen: our lives become more meditative. In part, that means they become simpler.  Amidst the growing complexity of our entanglements, we find ourselves beginning to appreciate simple things. Things well done. Simple pleasures once overlooked in the momentum of our busy days. This Monday, we slow things down and explore how relaxing our awareness and valuing simplicity can change our experience of meditation.

I enjoy recording meditations in studio, but I prefer doing it live, in the company of actual human beings. There’s an immediacy in these situations that can’t be reproduced. Like this meditation for example, guided in a moving car, with my highly stressed-out pal Dan Harris as meditating subject. This particular technique expands on an earlier meditation, […]

One of the admittedly quite counterintuitive skills we learn in mindfulness is the ability to distinguish between thinking and awareness. To use a classic metaphor from consciousness studies, awareness is like the empty stage. Thinking is one of the actors that trots onto that stage—along with seeing, hearing, feeling etc. When we’re mindful of our thinking, we […]

In early 2017, Dan Harris and I met with Chief Moir of the Tempe Police Department in Arizona. Chief Moir is an early adopter of meditation and mindfulness in policing. She uses the skills herself, all day long. Her job requires her to be totally present with person after person as they file through her […]

“RAIN” is a well-known meditation acronym that stands for Recognize, Accept, Investigate and Non-Identify. It’s a helpful way to explore – and sometimes process – any sensation, thought, or emotion, even the hard ones. I led this practice at a Monday night Consciousness Explorers Club (CEC) meeting in Toronto, sometime in 2017. It ends with […]

“RAIN” is a well-known meditation acronym that stands for Recognize, Accept, Investigate and Non-Identify. It’s a helpful way to explore – and, sometimes, process – any sensation, thought, or emotion. Even hard ones. The practice helps in a couple of ways. First, it boosts our emotional literacy. Instead of being lost inside a big reaction, […]

Psychologists use a version of this meditation to help people with their addictions, including our technology addictions. The idea is the faster we are at noticing our urges, the less likely we will be to helplessly act on them, and thus the more quickly they can pass, allowing us to reset.  It is extremely hard […]

This is a busy person’s meditation. Ten breaths. That’s it. A modest one-minute reset intended to take some of the wind out of the sails of whatever story line you’ve been racing around inside. The idea is simple: wherever you are, in any situation or mental state, count ten long, slow breaths. From the book Meditation […]

You can just sit and do “Nothing,” you know (that is a meditation) or you can choose to do “Something.” Which do you choose? Good choice! The category of Something has much to recommend it, in particular its vast … particularity. The next choice is form. Some options: “Stillness” (the obvious candidate), “Movement,” or “Relational,” “Expressive” (for the artists), or any “Life Activity” for that matter. Which do you choose? This Monday night, we ask: how might a practice address our needs of the moment?

There is some interesting new research emerging from the field of smart-people-in-lab-coats that suggests we have more agency around our emotions than many of us realize. The key isn’t in the suppression; it’s in the reframing. We can choose HOW we want to experience our various tugs and tingles. And if we choose to experience them in an empowering light, it seems they no longer cause us the same kind of suffering.

What actually wants to emerge in each moment, before thinking jumps in? Inquiring minds want to know! As the saying goes, thinking is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Many traditions argue that our actual default conditions – the factory settings, as it were – are wise and caring, but that we cover them up with our maddening stresses and schemes and agendas. In this meditation, we see what emerges when we practice not knowing.

In this first Monday of the month, we’ll set the stage with a classic bit of Hindu Vedanta-inspired self-inquiry. This particular version of the practice comes by way of my colleague Vince Horn, who runs the Buddhist Geeks podcast and offers many excellent courses with his partner Emily Horn over at meditate.io.  Instead of asking “Who am I?”, we make it less personal, and ask “What IS this?” – as in, what is this whole existential boondoggle that we find ourselves running around inside?

This talk and meditation are a distillation of some of my core ideas about what meditation practice is, and how we can find the right practice for each of us: the right attitude, the right object, and even the right balance of stillness and movement / activity. It talks about the core skills of every successful practice and how to make sure they are activated in the meditation itself.