Meditation and Mindfulness

Tactical Mindfulness allows me to pick out attributes that I want to develop in my life—like focus, equanimity, or compassion—and intentionally build my meditation practice around them. This helps me move through my life more effectively and compound progress over time.

At one point, Mark memorably summarizes the goal [of meditation] as “happiness dependent on exquisitely and flexibly handling your shit.”

In meditation, goals are about the thoughts, feelings, and situations in life that you’d like to relate to more skillfully.

the most fruitful exercise seems to be when you’re able to rest your awareness in your torso (especially the gut and the heart) and simply stay there. Be with the gut. Be with the heart. Allow whatever wants to happen to happen.

We argue that a denatured mindfulness divorced from

its soteriological context reduces it to a self-help technique that is easily misappropriated for reproducing corporate and

institutional power, employee pacification, and maintenance of toxic organizational cultures.

In a phrase: somatic meditation offers depth. Spending time in the body without agenda or expectation, listening to it, sensing it, letting go of the habit of experiencing it as “it”—there’s something in the experience that builds over time, it grounds you into a firmness of being.

There’s something weird I increasingly encounter on the contemplative path. Which is: if you don’t accidentally fry your brain with meditation, at a certain point, the mind starts to guide you somewhere . The contemplative path reveals itself. And it seems like everyone’s path eventually goes to a similar place, although the trips are different. My... See more

We’re following instructions that weren’t meant for us, weren’t taking our phenomenology into account, weren’t a good fit for the composition of modern western bodyminds.

Mark says the reason you meditate is to take care of your ‘technical debt.’ This is something you have, you just don’t know it maybe. You should probably address it. Once you’ve taken care of your technical debt, it’ll be easier to have a good life, which is what we’re aiming for ultimately.