“Welcome to your practice” is a phrase I first heard my meditation teacher use to begin a session and is the same one I often use as well. One reason I like to begin this way is to signal that we are crossing what I see as a sacred threshold between living our lives as [...]
The theme of the month in my online Open Heart Project community, or “sangha,” is “Generosity,” and so, lately I’ve been working with the idea of generosity and how it relates to practicing meditation. In reading up on the subject, I fully discovered for the first time the concept of “non-fear” and how the gift [...]
Pic 1: Whitham Hill Nature Park, Corvallis, OR, 3-3-19 Pic 2: Caughlin Park, Reno, NV, 3-10-19 I don't know about you, but I feel more ready than usual for Spring to spring after the winter of 2018-2019 here on the west coast of the United States where we've broken numerous records for rain- and snowfall. [...]
Anyone who knows me knows I love the Truckee River, 121 miles of dynamic natural beauty connecting Lake Tahoe, a treasure of the Sierra Nevada mountains, to Pyramid Lake, the biggest remnant of the colossal inland sea that once covered most of Nevada. While I could write pages about why I love this river, it [...]
A core activity of Shamatha (or “calm abiding”) meditation is to continuously return the mind’s attention to the breath whenever we notice it has wandered into a thought or stream of thoughts. One common reaction to the awareness that our mind has wandered is to feel we’ve “caught” ourselves not “doing it right.” Feelings of [...]
Given how short and seemingly simple the question "What is meditation?" is, it may seem like there should be a definitive answer. However, a quick web search yields many possibilities: “contemplation, thought, thinking, musing, pondering, consideration, and reflection,” to name a few. The Wikipedia entry for “meditation” defines it as: “…a practice where an individual [...]