One of the great benefits of meditation on sound is that it gradually teaches you to detach from assigning meaning to the various sounds you hear. You learn to listen to what you hear without necessarily responding emotionally to the content. As you grow accustomed to giving bare attention to sound simply as sound, you’ll find yourself able to list

The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, literally means “becoming familiar with,” and Buddhist meditation practice is really about becoming familiar with the nature of your own mind—a bit like getting to know a friend on deeper and deeper levels.

Every strong attachment generates an equally powerful fear that we’ll either fail to get what we want or lose whatever we’ve already gained. This fear, in the language of Buddhism, is known as aversion: a resistance to the inevitable changes that occur as a consequence of the impermanent nature of relative reality.

Compassion takes this capacity to look at another sentient being as equal to oneself even further. Its basic meaning is “feeling with,” a recognition that what you feel, I feel. Anything that hurts you hurts me. Anything that helps you helps me. Compassion, in Buddhist terms, is a complete identification with others and an active readiness to help

One of the most important lessons I learned during my years of formal training was that whenever I blocked the compassion that is a natural quality of my mind, I inevitably found myself feeling small, vulnerable, and afraid.

Aversion reinforces neuronal patterns that generate a mental construct of yourself as limited, weak, and incomplete. Because anything that might undermine the independence of this mentally constructed “self” is perceived as a threat, you unconsciously expend an enormous amount of energy on the lookout for potential dangers. Adrenaline rips through

now I encourage you to practice. Assume whatever physical posture is most comfortable for you and just allow your mind to rest for a few moments in a very relaxed, loose state. Then choose something to look at and just rest your gaze on it, noticing its shape or its color. You don’t have to stare intently—if you need to blink, just blink. In fact,

At the same time, it would be absurd to deny that we live in a world where things appear, change, and disappear in space and time. People come and go; tables break and chip; someone drinks a glass of water, and the water is gone. In Buddhist terms, this level of endlessly changing experience is known as relative reality—relative, that is, compared

Just as I want happiness, all beings want happiness. Just as I wish to avoid suffering, all beings wish to avoid suffering. I am just one person, while the number of other beings is infinite. The well-being of this infinite number is more important than that of one. And as you allow these thoughts to roll around in your mind, you’ll actually begin