Meditation

Shinzen has this simple formula he will often display while teaching:

Pain x Resistance = Suffering

Pain x Equanimity = Purification

Purification is maybe a big idea, but you can think of it as the undoing of what keeps us closed off to a more expansive and connected state of being or awareness. When we open to pain and allow it to move through us uno

Deconstructive meditation, specifically, makes you realize that your mind is fundamentally changeable, composed of transient phenomena. All mental states are just assemblages of whirling particles, pixels briefly flickering on a screen. Nothing is “at the heart of it,” no one sensation is crucial. Your opinions, your beliefs, narratives about your

When you have cultivated mindfulness, life becomes richer, more vivid, more satisfying, and you don’t take everything that happens so personally. Attention plays a more appropriate role within the greater context of a broad and powerful awareness. You’re fully present, happier, and at ease, because you’re not so easily caught up in the stories and

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

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 path of Buddhism is often called The Middle Way, as it’s midway between indulging in sense desires and renouncing them. The Buddha essentially said you can eat and feel good, but if you want to be liberated from suffering you can’t be attached to eating and feeling good.

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

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.

As the saying goes, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. If you can simply stay present with whatever is arising in awareness—whether it’s a first dart or a second one—without reacting further, then you will break the chain of suffering right there.