As you progress, you will discover a profound truth: in life, as in meditation, physical pain is unavoidable, but suffering of every kind is entirely optional.

A famous analogy in Zen compares the mind to a pool of water. This is a helpful way to think about the training and goals of meditation. If the water is agitated, churned up by wind and currents, it doesn’t provide a clear reflection nor can we see to the bottom. But as the water calms, the debris that made the pool muddy begins to settle, and the

Interestingly, what you consider the start and end of a breath cycle matters. We automatically tend to regard the beginning as the inhale and the pause after the exhale as the end. However, if you’re thinking about the breath in that way, then that pause becomes the perfect opportunity for your thoughts to wander off, since the mind naturally tends

Increasing the power of consciousness isn’t a mysterious process. It’s a lot like weight training. You simply do exercises where you practice sustaining close attention and strong peripheral awareness at the same time. This is the only way to make consciousness more powerful. The more vivid you can make your attention while still sustaining

As fellow teacher Stephanie Nash is fond of saying, “A good meditation is one you did—the only bad meditation is one you didn’t do.” Take her wise advice to heart.

Stable attention is the ability to intentionally direct and sustain the focus of attention, as well as to control the scope of attention. Intentionally directing and sustaining attention simply means that we learn to choose which object we’re going to attend to, and keep our attention continuously fixed on it. Controlling the scope of attention

It’s important to realize attention and peripheral awareness are two different ways of “knowing” the world. 2 Each has its virtues as well as its shortcomings. Attention singles out some small part of the content of the field of conscious awareness from the rest in order to analyze and interpret it. On the other hand, peripheral awareness is more

Repeating simple tasks with a clear intention can reprogram unconscious mental processes. This can completely transform who you are as a person.

You’ll have to overcome four major obstacles: not enough time, procrastination, reluctance and resistance to practicing, and doubt.