Meditation

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

“We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being… we are here to become more and more ourselves.” ― James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

Chunks of my identity are falling off, month by month. Parts of me that kept track of my social status and my anxieties are relaxing and falling into the void. What’s left, increasingly, is a feeling of complete satisfaction with the way things are. You know that feeling of drinking a glass of water that’s exactly correctly cool on a hot day? Imagi

Getting annoyed with every instance of mind-wandering or sleepiness is like tearing up the garden to get rid of the weeds. Attempting to force attention to remain stable is like trying to make a sapling grow taller by stretching it. Chasing after physical pliancy and meditative joy is like prying open a bud so it will blossom more quickly. Impatien

To develop intentionally directed, stable attention, you must first have a clear understanding of its opposite, spontaneous movements of attention. Attention moves spontaneously in three different ways: scanning, getting captured, and alternating.

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.

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

Awakening from our habitual way of perceiving things requires a profound shift in our intuitive understanding of the nature of reality. Awakening is a cognitive event, the culminating Insight in a series of very special Insights called vipassana. This climax of the progress of Insight only occurs when the mind is in a unique mental state called śam

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