Posts Tagged ‘meditation’

Cynicism sucks, really… I mean, if you’re always expecting the worst, you can’t ever really be happy, even when things turn out for the best. On the other hand, optimism doesn’t really accomplish anything useful either, since the optimist has little or no reason to effect real change in their life and tends to [...]

Buddhism is certainly the hardest pill to swallow. Everything about us screams out against the middle way, trying always to find some way to make things permanent, satisfying or controllable. We push and pull, trying to make things go our way, never realizing that we are but dust in the wind, tossed about [...]

A perennial favourite, this question.
Last year, I said I wasn’t going to stay at Wat Thai, any Wat Thai, and now here I am in Thailand about to go to a Wat Thai board meeting to talk about starting a meditation department at Wat Thai. See, they bought a piece of property near Wat [...]

From the Pat-Yourself-On-The-Back Dept.
Please let me be excruciatingly clear that I am not trying to pat myself on the back with these posts… honestly, I’m just parroting what I’ve learned from others in these videos, so it’s not much of an ego boost at all. It’s terribly encouraging, though, to get such overwhelmingly positive [...]

Just back from the Mohave Desert, having learned a few new things about deserts in general, or at least this desert in specific. First, it rained for the first five days we were there, shattering any myths I might have held about deserts being dry places… the nearby lake did nothing to reaffirm this [...]

I get a lot of good feedback on the “How To Meditate” videos; that’s why we went so far as to make the DVD set… this one stands out, for some reason, though. Thought I’d share it, with the author’s permission:
Hi, let me first start off by saying that I honestly have never [...]

Talk last night went quite well, I think… listen here:

Four Noble Truths at Grenada Hills Center For Spiritual Living
The center is in Grenada Hills (as if I know where that is…) and here’s their website:
http://www.cslgh.com/
Sounds like they might invite me back; I’d be happy to return, it’s a place with very good energy and nice, [...]

Here it is; the next generation in meditation huts:

http://wanderingdhamma.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/comparing-international-meditation-centers-wat-chom-tong-wat-rampoeng-and-wat-prathat-doi-suthep/
A pretty good, unbiased description of all three Int’l meditation centres in Chiang Mai under Ajaan Tong… having taught at all three, I’d say it’s pretty accurate, though I would question some of the background information like “the technique of Wat Rampoeng is the same as Ajahn Tong had established it before he left. [...]

Insomnia is really one of the easiest things to cure with meditation; the cure is to forget the nonsense that says you must fall asleep. Actually, from a meditation point of view, it would be great if you could stay awake all the time so you could meditate. It is actually quite refreshing [...]