The Mind Illuminated - A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science

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

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 h

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.

The most effective way to overcome both procrastination and reluctance and resistance to practicing is to just do it. Nothing works as quickly or effectively as diligence. The simple act of consistently sitting down and placing your attention on the meditation object, day after day, is the essential first step from which everything else in the Ten

While useful, the lists of goals, obstacles, skills, and mastery provided above can obscure just how simple the underlying process really is: intentions lead to mental actions, and repeated mental actions become mental habits. This simple formula is at the heart of every Stage.

The condition in which the mind “stands back” to observe its own state and activities is called metacognitive introspective awareness. 13 Attention, on the other hand, can’t observe activities of the mind because its movements and abstracting of information from awareness are activities of the mind. In other words, we can’t attend to attention. Whe

Getting annoyed with every instance of mind-wandering or sleepiness is like tearing up the garden to get rid of the weeds. Attempting to force attention to remain stable is like trying to make a sapling grow taller by stretching it. Chasing after physical pliancy and meditative joy is like prying open a bud so it will blossom more quickly. Impatien

S = P x R. The amount of suffering you experience is equal to the actual pain multiplied by the mind’s resistance to that pain.

Whenever we refer to the “breath” as the meditation object, we actually mean the sensations produced by breathing, not some visualization or idea of the breath going in and out. When I direct you to observe the “breath” in the chest or abdomen, I mean the sensations of movement, pressure, and touch occurring there as you breathe in and out. When I