Category: Meditation
These are very personal questions: What is spiritual to you? When and where do you feel spiritual? How do these spiritual feelings get blocked or expanded?
Spiritual practice aims to refine and deepen our understanding of these questions because our intent shapes how we perceive spiritual change. We can carry these questions throughout our lives.
I will focus on three specific spiritual practices: psychological relationships, meditation, and psychedelic plant medicines, including cannabis.
Spiritual practice is about psychological relationships because if our spiritual practice doesn’t improve our relationships with others, what’s the point?
The practice of psychological relationships with others and with one’s inner life is a personal experience with spiritual meaning. This involves experiences of vulnerability, hurt, and confusion that teach us the depth of human love and kindness.
Spiritual practice is not only personal but also objective. We need to look at our minds as they are, our human instincts as they are, and our relationship with the natural world. We are born, go through all the developmental stages, and then die. Life is precious and painful. We cannot change most of life, but we can learn to connect with it gracefully.
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How to Stay Focused: An Everyday Guide to Training the Brain
Developing and maintaining a strong sense of focus can be difficult for many people, as we live in a fast-paced society in which multi-tasking is encouraged or even enforced. Those living with certain mental and physical disorders that cause or contribute to a struggle to focus often have to adopt new approaches for how to…
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How to Clear Your Mind; Finding Your Way
Some ways to clear your mind are healthier than others, some longer lasting. You can clear your mind with a temporary distraction or clear it with a transformative experience. There are ways to calm down that have deeper and more lasting effects. The side effects are more positive. It can be exhausting when the mind…
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Meditation Music and Listening to Silence
Musical sounds can focus the mind/body connection as a door way into deeper meditation. Music, bells, drumming, chanting and other various sounds have been used to enrich the mind, body and spirit for thousands of years. Each person and culture use music in their own way but it is usually for the same basic purpose;…
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Mindfulness and The Order of Interbeing/Tien Hien
Many people long for a spiritual practice that makes sense and is not woo woo or dogmatic. I find that many people have been very disappointed or hurt by conventional religious organizations, but yet want something to put their energy into that has meaning. Generally speaking Buddhism is not a religion but a way of…
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Practicing Mindfulness
The term mindfulness is used in the three major schools of meditation in the East. It is not necessary to go into their perspectives on practicing mindfulness at this time, but a few examples of mindfulness meditation from these three traditions may give you a sense of how to practice mindfulness in everyday situations. The…
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Meditation with Obsessive Thoughts and Feelings
Shunryu Suzuki in “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” wrote: “When you are practicing meditation, do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you…
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Antidepressants vs Meditation: Healing the Symptom and Root Cause of Unhappiness
Antidepressants are the third most prescribed drug in the United States. That is a lot of unhappy people. The medicines help, otherwise there would not be such a demand. 60 Minutes ran an episode that showed 70% of antidepressant use is placebo: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7399362n. Whatever works! Now, meditation has been shown to reduce the same symptoms…
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Meditation and Psychology: The One and the Many
Meditation and psychology have to do with the one and the many. I was teaching a meditation technique to a group of students. They all had a little meditation experience. I asked them to sit in their chairs, feet flat on the floor, shoulders relaxed. I asked them to feel the whole body sitting in…
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Meditation and Psychology, an Overview, Page 1
A Partnership for Evolution Meditation and psychology are a union of opposites. Together they embody a divine marriage, a partnership for evolution. They are opposite in their approach but point to the same awakened potential. Meditation looks into the spirit, universal to all beings. Psychology explores the soul as personal and unique. Meditation says the…
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Meditation, Foreground/Background
The Dalai Lama describes meditation practice as: “Try to remain in the natural state. This is a bit like a river which is flowing quite strongly, in which you cannot see the bed of the river clearly. If there was some way you could put an immediate stop to the flow from the direction the…
