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

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.

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

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 mea

Begin with shorter meditations. I suggest 15 or 20 minutes each day for the first week or two. Then, increase the length of your sessions in five-minute increments weekly or every few days until you reach 45 minutes. Use a meditation timer rather than looking at a clock, and train yourself not to look at the timer. Just listen for the bell. Some pe

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.

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

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

The way attention and peripheral awareness work together is a lot like the relationship between visual focus and peripheral vision. Try fixing your eyes on an external object. You will notice that, as you focus on the object, your peripheral vision takes in other information elsewhere in your field of vision. You can compare that with your experien

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