The two main objectives of meditation practice are: Developing stable attention Cultivating powerful mindfulness that optimizes the interaction between attention and awareness.

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

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

when they start to notice the results of your practice. Most importantly, remind yourself that meditation time is your time, which you have set aside for yourself—a time free from the demands of the world. Considering how much meditation will improve your relationships with others, you shouldn’t regard it as selfish. This “personal time” will ultim

Counting your breaths at the start of a sit really helps stabilize your attention. If you’re a novice, you should use this method all the time. Once you have moved through the Four Steps and attention is restricted to the breath at the nose, start silently counting each breath. Your goal will be to follow the sensations continuously for ten consecu

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

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.

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

What we make of our life—the sum total of thoughts, emotions, words, and actions that fill the brief interval between birth and death—is our one great creative masterpiece. The beauty and significance of a life well lived consists not in the works we leave behind, or in what history has to say about us. It comes from the quality of conscious experi