meditation

Before you begin meditating, it’s really helpful to adopt a permissive attitude towards your current state: however I am right now, it is fine. I like reminding myself that I don’t need to do anything to receive sensation—the universe will keep on being the universe, and interesting data will come to me, I don’t have to force anything. This can... See more

Most meditation systems are depth-first : you plunge, deeply, into one area of your mind—by, say, learning how to concentrate on your breath with heroic clarity—and then you take the mental machinery thus developed and try to iron out your life with it. Mark’s is breadth-first : he wants you to mindfully do a whole bunch of different little... See more

And, fundamentally, a critical attitude towards the current situation is detrimental to collectedness—it’s much easier to focus when you accept your current thoughts and emotions. Thus the most powerful meditation prompt I’ve ever heard, from Loch Kelly: “What is here now if there's no problem to solve?”